nowing they were going to well-nigh certain death, made their
way into the fort, raising its garrison to 180.

Santa Anna demanded unconditional surrender, and Travis answered with a
cannon-shot; whereat, on the morning of the sixth of March, the Mexican
army stormed the fort from all sides, swarmed in through breaches and
over the walls, which the Texans were too few to man, and a desperate
hand-to-hand conflict followed. To and fro between the shattered walls
the fight reeled, each tall Texan the centre of a group of foes,
fighting with a wild and desperate courage; but the odds were too great,
and one by one they fell, thrust through with bayonets or riddled by
bullets. Colonel Travis fell, and so did Bowie, sick and weak from a
wasting disease, but rising from his bed, and dying fighting with his
great knife red with the blood of his foes. At last a single man stood
at bay. It was Davy Crockett.

Wounded in a dozen places, ringed about by the bodies of the men he had
slain, he stood facing his foes, his back against a wall, knife in hand,
daring them to come on. No one dared to run in upon that old lion. So
they held him there with their lances, while, the musketeers loaded
their carbines and shot him down. Not a man of the garrison was left
alive, but each of them had avenged himself four times over, for the
Mexican loss was over five hundred. So ended one of the most heroic
events in American history. "Thermopylae had its messengers of death; The
Alamo had none."

* * * * *

One more era remains to be recorded, that in which the United States
confirmed its hold upon the Pacific coast, and here again the story is
that of the lives of three men--Marcus Whitman, John Augustus Sutter,
and John Charles Fremont. It was Whitman who brought home to the Nation
the value of Oregon by a spectacular ride from ocean to ocean; it was
Sutter who led the way for an American invasion of California, and who
gave impetus to that invasion by the discovery of gold; and it was
Fremont who led the revolution there against the Mexicans, and who
secured the country's independence.

The explorations of Lewis and Clark, early in the century, had made the
country along the Columbia river known to the East in a dim way, but it
was so distant and so inaccessible that it excited little interest. Just
before the second war with England, John Jacob Astor had attempted to
carry out a far-reaching plan for the de