Before the messenger disappeared in the pre-dawn darkness of Mar. 3, 1836, the hollow-eyed colonel whispered, “Every morning at daybreak, I will fire a cannon as a sign that we still hold the fort, but when the cannon is heard no more, its silence will tell the Alamo has fallen.”
The man William Barret Travis entrusted with his final appeal was by Anglo-American standards a longtime resident of Tex…
