I suppose all us Texans should be grateful that it was the likes of a Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna running the Centralist invasion of '36 and not a General Jose de Urrea.
At that time Matamoras, near the mouth of the Rio Grande on the Mexican side, was the largest city in the region, at 12,000 souls at least three times the size of San Antonio, then the largest city in Texas proper.
In January of '36, Grant and Johnson were busy recruiting volunteers in San Antonio and stripping the Alamo and later Goliad of most of the available stores in preparation for a Federalist strike against Matamoras. Travelling ahead of his forces Urrea, anticipating exactly such a strike, arrived in Matamoras to confer with Federalist elements in that city.
Of Federalist sympathies himself, Urrea was first a soldier in service to Mexico, and Santa Anna was at that time his president (although a short two years later he himself would actually be fighting against Santa Anna). When meeting the Matamoras area Federalists, Urrea correctly predicted that the present Federalist revolt in Texas, under American leadership as it already was, would soon morph into a full-blown separatist war of independence and that in an independent Texas, Mexicans would become a despised minority in what had been their own land. By this means Urrea deterred any local uprising in sympathy with the Texians.
North of Matamoras and the river lay 150 miles of not much at all, open desolate country between the Rio Grande (AKA the Rio Bravo in Mexico) and the Nueces River, a lawless area that would become known as the Nueces Strip.
The closest Texian community, barely worthy of that name, was a collection of wattle and daub houses situated on the lower Nueces River just north of present-day Corpus Christi.This was San Patricio, "Saint Patrick", a mixed community of Irish and Tejano Catholics founded ten years earlier. Even the Irish in San Patricio lived inside wattle and daub walls under thatched roofs, the area lacking in building materials beyond brush, grass and mud.
San Patricio itself had been settled adjacent to an old Spanish-era fort guarding a ford of the Nueces, Fort Lipantitlan, this fort and its two cannon having been taken by a small Texian force out of Goliad the previous November.
Forty miles north and east again, across more mostly empty country, lay the more substantial community of Refugio on the Mission River, by that time a predominantly Irish Catholic settlement surrounding the old Nuestra Senora del Refugio (Our Lady of Refuge) Mission. Twenty miles north of Refugio on the San Antonio River was the fortified La Bahia Mission at Goliad.
In early February, James Fannin had arrived in Refugio with a small force intending to join the Matamoras Expedition, but opted instead to occupy the fortified La Bahia Mission at Goliad.
By the end of February Grant and Johnson had moved the scant Federalist force remaining to them to San Patricio where they were gathering horses needed to cross the Nueces Strip to strike at Matamoras.
Urrea struck first.
Birdwatcher
