When looking at the events occurring down around Fannin and Goliad that would lead up to the Goliad Massacre, it is surprising how large a role the local Tejano vaqueros played in the fighting and skirmishing on both sides.
In fact, from a pop Texas history standpoint, its surprising that there were that many Texas vaqueros out there at all. Away from the piney woods and the rapidly growing Anglo settlements in East Texas, Texas was still a vast and sparsely populated place. Its no accident that Santa Anna's force would have to cover 600 miles or more of mostly wilderness just to get to San Antonio. In the teeth of repeated raids from the still-powerful Indian tribes in the region one finds this stubborn and widespread vaquero culture; tough and highly mobile men who's equestrian skills and intimate knowledge of the country were valuable to both sides.
Given the catastrophes visited upon them after the 1813 Texas revolution, it would be understandable if all these people, like most of the inhabitants of San Antonio de Bexar, had just stayed out of it, but they didn't. Likewise the heavy-handed anti-Mexican sentiments of the majority of the the arriving American volunteers, in addition to the tendency of the Texian forces, of necessity, to merely approrpriate what they needed in terms of foodstuffs and supplies, should have been sufficuent to alienate most Texanos.
Most all Tejanos that took part were republican in sentiment, like General Urrea himself. But like Urrea most, even if they came down on the Texian side, wanted Texas to remain part of Mexico, albeit under a restored Constitution of 1824.
Prominent on the Texian was one Placido Benavides, still in his twenties and the scion of a prominent Tejano family from Victoria, AKA "the Texas Paul Revere" due to the active role he would play in alerting the settlements to the approach of Urrea's force.
After most Texians had deserted the Matamoras Expedition under Johnson and Grant (the same guys who had stripped the Alamo of most of its supplies) leaving them with a force of only 70 men, Placido Benavides may have supplied as many as fifty local vaqueros to that force, such that most of the casualties subsequently suffered on the Texian side in the Matamoras campaign were likely vaqueros.
Prominent on the Mexican side was one Carlos de la Garza, likewise in his late twenties. Garza and his force of forty vaqueros would prove to be of great assistance to Urrea in the upcoming campaign.
And here's a puzzling thing: Its not really surprising that the Benavides family in and around Victoria would end up being dispossessed, after the victory at San Jacinto the Victoria area quickly gained the reputation of being a lawless and rowdy enclave, filling rapidly with the less reputable American immigrants. Placido Benavides himself had evacuated his family to Louisiana at the approach of the Mexican army, and died there in 1837, of causes unknown to history.
Carlos de la Garza however, after San Jacinto, returned to his rancho on the San Antonio River near Refugio. Despite his known active service on the Mexican side, somehow he kept his property, even becoming well thought of with a reputation as an Indian fighter, and in the subsequent Mexican invasion of 1842 his ranch became a place of refuge for both English- and Spanish-speaking alike.
Birdwatcher
