For the better part of a week Urrea remained at San Patricio while up north the siege of the Alamo ground into its second week. I need to get that Ried "Secret War for Texas" book as it seems he reports on Urrea's movements in depth.
As best one can gather, the Grant-Johnson Matamoras Expedition was specifically targeted because they had been fellow Federalist conspirators, and alive could implicate Urrea and his associates to the Centralists then in power.
Urrea's problem was Grant was somewhere off to the south on those sparsely populated plains. Clearly during this time Urrea had his allied Tejanos out looking, his efficient use of these locals as his eyes and ears accounting in a large part for his success through the Goliad campaign.
What also seems clear is that the Mexican army forces under Urrea were good at what they did, one can imagine he was probably popular with his men.
March 1st, Grant's party is reported to be at a rancho or camp on San Fernando Creek about 35 miles south of San Patrico. The surprising thing to me being that there WAS a permanent campsite or ranch way out there in 1836. Clearly it was common for the Tejano ranching community to have some sort of arrangement or truce with the local Indian tribes, including the Comanches, else such an isolated eandeavor could have been easily wiped out.
As to what Grant was doing out there, we are told he was attempting to coordinate with Federalist forces around Matamoras, an endeavor which seemingly at that point amounted to a trap. Also Grant was collecting more horses, to add to the 100 already collected at San Patricio.
Possibly this was a fund raising endeavor, the Texian participants under Grant and Johnson are reported to have been reduced to rags by that point, and there was an active ongoing horse and stock trade going on between South Texas/Northern Mexico and the United States settlements to the north and south (an endeavor in which Deaf Smith for one had been engaged for years).
As to the state of Grant's Tejano allies under Placido Benavides one cannot be sure, living where and how they did, their standard of what constituted "ragged" while working might have been lower than the Texians, although we do know that the Tejano vaqueros were famously stylish dressers when in town for fandangos and such.
One thing interesting is that nobody brags on the firearms these vaqueros were armed with. This despite the fact that they lived and worked in such hazardous surroundings. A few old escopetas, essentially flintlock smoothbore carbines, is all one hears about. Josiah Gregg, in his accounts of the Santa Fe Trail during this same era, reports that the New Mexican Hispanics on his crews, in addition to already being familiar with the Plains clear to Missouri, were proficient as Indians with the bow. Seems like this would happen in Texas too but I have found no mention.
Birdwatcher
