After the Fall of the Alamo, the Texian Army, such as it was, consisted of about 350 men under James Fannin at Goliad. Sadly, James Fannin, tho no one who saw him under fire questioned his courage, was the wrong guy in the wrong place. His fatal flaw was his inability to take a personal initiative.
By comparison William Barret Travis had been originally authorized in the fall of '35 by then acting Govenor Smith to raise a company of 200 cavalry and take it to Bexar. Travis is able to raise only 30 men, but takes his modest company to Bexar anyway.
Once in Bexar he takes the initiative, vies for command, and actively prepares for the Mexican onslaught. Meanwhile the very man and the organization that had given him his command, James Smith and the Consultation of 1835, had dissolved in disarray.
So when Travis is writing his famous letters, he cannot be sure to whom he should even address them. But he acts anyway, on his own hook.
Down in Goliad, Fannin has ten times the men Travis had brought with him but one gets the impression he was always looking for others to tell him what to do, could not function in the rowdy near-anarchy environment of Texas at that time.
His one attempt to relieve the Alamo in late February had been farcical, tragicomic; first he decides by committee if they should even go. By then it should have been obvious that hitching up mismatched, untrained oxen to the few decrepit carts they had on hand was not going to work. Then the next morning he decides, again by committee, to abandon the attempt and return to the mission.
In the days leading up to his catastrophe, while Urrea drew steadily closer, Fannin sent out impassioned pleas for instructions, yet when those urgent instructions came he chose to follow them at his own leisure.
Given the semi-autonomous nature of his men, perhaps it is a bit much to blame all of this on Fannin. He wasn't the only one present at Goliad who harbored a scathing contempt for the abilities of Mexican army, which contempt, despite the bloody fall at the Alamo, would last up until they were surrounded by Urrea's army near Coleto Creek.
Birdwatcher
