THE FALL OFTHE ALAMO ~ page 16
number of corps at the expense of their fullness. I saw all the corps composing the said army when it retreated from Texas to Matamoras after the campaign of 1836, and from the size of those which had not been in action, as well as from the remaining bulk of those which had suffered, after allowing for probable loss, I am convinced that their average strength when they entered Texas was short of 500 men each, and that the smaller of the two amounts I have assigned to the aggregate is most likely to be true.
This estimate applies especially to the six battalions of infantry which formed the assaulting force of the Alamo. They may possibly have numbered 3,000 men, but from the best information and inference I have been able to gather, I believe that their aggregate did not exceed and may have fallen short of 2,500. Santa Ana's invariable practice was to exaggerate his force before an action, by way of threat, and to underrate it after, whether to excuse defeat or magnify victory; and in accordance with this trickery, in his report of the taking of the Alamo, he sets down his storming force at 1,400, his loss of 60 killed and 300 wounded, and the number of the garrison all told and all killed at 600. Where the slaughter was wrought by good fire arms in good hands at close quarters there would hardly be such disparity between the number of killed and wounded. The probability is that he struck off an even thousand from the round numbers of the assaulters and a hundred or two from the number of his killed; while he made out as big a butchery of rebels as Mexican credulity, would swallow. If we correct his falsification on this assumption, he had in the assault 2,400, and lost in killed and wounded 460 or 560. Anselmo Borgara, a Mexican, who first reported the fall of the Alamo to General Houston, at Gonzalez, having left San Antonio the evening after it occurred, stated that the assaulting force amounted to 2,300 men, of whom 52I were killed and as many wounded. He had probably found means of ascertaining with approximate correctness the number of infantry at San Antonio; but his report of the loss has evidently acquired its bulk by the process of doubling. Neither Mexican troops nor any others are apt to take forts with a loss of more than two-fifths of their number. He had probably heard of 521 as the total of killed and wounded, and then converted the whole into the former and supposed an equal amount of the latter. The odd numbers attached to the hundreds, and the limits which probability would assign to a large loss, favor the belief that he had heard the result of an actual count of the whole deficit. This analysis of falsehood may not be a very sure way of finding out truth, but it is not without value when it