When Santa Anna and his army had arrived and surrounded the flimsy Spanish convent-fort, he called on Colonel Travis to surrender. The American answer was a cannon-shot. Then the Mexicans raised a red flag as a signal that “no quarter” would be given; that is, that no American could expect anything but death at their hands. Then the battle began. The walls of the Alamo were not strong, for the convent was not built for a fort. Yet it took that great Mexican army eleven days to capture it. Among the Americans were thirteen backwoods hunters like David Crockett and Colonel James Bowie, the inventor of the famous Bowie knife then much used in frontier fighting. Bowie was ill, but he fought like a hero, as did each of the others, to sell his life as dearly as possible. On the last day Colonel Travis offered to let the few men who were left go out with a white flag and ask the Mexicans to spare their lives, but not a man would go. At last the walls of their frail fortress were battered down and four thousand Mexicans came rushing in. They found Crockett with only five men left--their backs to the wall fighting to the bitter end. It is said that Crockett was the last to fall. When beset by too many Mexicans to reload and fire “Betsy,” he took his gun by the barrel and clubbed several Mexicans to death before they shot him down. The Alamo fell on the 6th of March, 1836. When they found the journal Davy Crockett had kept during the fight, they read his last words in it, written late the night before: “March 5. Pop, pop, pop! Bom, bom, bom!--throughout the day. No time for memorandums now. Go ahead! Liberty and independence forever!” FAMOUS INVENTORS HOW ELI WHITNEY MADE COTTON KING Eli Whitney began to make things when he was a small boy. He was called a genius because he was so ingenious. But he was not satisfied with doing things with his hands. He had a strong desire to make the most of his mind. So he went to Yale College and studied philosophy. One day the professor said he could not show a certain method to the class because the machine he kept for the purpose was broken. He could not teach that lesson until a new apparatus could be brought from England or France. But the ingenious student looked at the machine, and said, “Let me fix it.” The professor thought it could do no harm to let him try. Eli made the fine machine work just as well as it did when it was new. One of the bravest officers in the Revolutionary War, which ended a few years before this time, was General Nathanael Greene. After the war General Greene lived on a beautiful estate near Savannah, Georgia, and died there. When young Whitney finished his college course, he was engaged to teach a school in Savannah; but when he went down there he found that the school was not what he expected. So he acted as tutor in the family of General Greene’s widow.