One thing that surprises is the size of the communities back then.
600 people at isolated San Patricio, and 1,000 people at Goliad, that latter mostly Tejanos as one does not hear of colonists settling there in numbers.
I have some sense of this; in Africa I lived in a village of 2,000 people, and the next village two miles away had 1,000 people, adobe constuction ("mud-walled") though the roofs were for the most part ancient corrugated tin rather than thatch. Me and a buddy too walked 70 miles on foot across a (then) roadless plain, coming across isolated camps and huts and a small village along the way.
My sense of it is, before independence there was no border region between Mexico and Texas, just more of Mexico continuing north, San Patricio was just the next sizeable town north of Matamoras is all, located on the next river 150 miles to the north. In the absence of a border there was little incentive for smuggling, no refuge for outlaws on either side, ergo less lawlessness.
Indians were a constant, and the possibility of death at their hands probably the greatest hazard faced by those working stock. But communities were growing anyway, and I read somewhere of just one of the leading Irish immigrants at San Patricio claiming ownership of 1,200 cattle before the war broke out, an unimaginable fortune for a regular guy in Ireland.
From which we might infer too that it wouldn't take long before these immigrants and especially their children were developing some serious cowboy skills. In any given year South Texas runs from bountiful on the one hand, to desert on the other depending on the rains. It must have been a wet span of years just then because cows in the area seem common as dirt. The 400+ militia at Goliad were fed, but were eating only beef, no flour,no cornmeal, no beans.
A town or village of 1,000 people would be smaller than you might expect. Mostly children. Figure more like five to ten people per household, houses inside town running closer together and much smaller than they are today.
But still, the volunteers at Goliad had forcibly occupied the town, taken the best dwellings for their own use and bragged upon the fact. Stored foodstuffs and blankets had been taken, people driven out and some women violated. A wave of 1,000 embittered refugees scattered into the surrounding countryside, seriously taxing the resources of friends and relatives in the area ranchos who are indundated with these people..
No wonder Fannin was left blind in a hostile region.
OK, he gets the news of Urrea's victories at San Patrico and Agua Dulce, 60 miles to his southwest, from a handful of ragged survivors of those events. Excusable that he tarried maybe on account of he had more men on hand than those forces reported for Urrea. But then on March 8th he learns the Alamo has fallen and that Santa Anna has at least five times as many men as his own force of 400.
What most at Goliad seems to have been expecting at that point is that Santa Anna was now going to come south and join with Urrea to move against them. It does not seem to have occurred to them that Urrea would have enough of an army on his own so as to render such a move unnecessary. Perhaps the lack of any such movement on Santa Anna's part added to their own false sense of security.
Fannin did have the means to evacuate, after losing all his oxen in the brief attempt to go to the aid of the Alamo at the end of February (easy to imagine those oxen were driven off rather than "strayed" at that first night's camp), John Linn at Victoria had forwarded most of the oxen in that area, twenty teams, to Fannin at Goliad. Sending said oxen a leap of faith and a move of desperation on Linn's part, as it left the Texian refugees gathering at Victoria bereft of most of their own draft animals. Linn was likely expecting to get them back shortly.
For his own part, Fannin at this point becomes the master of wrong moves and incorrect decisions.
On March 10th, two days after learning of the Fall of the Alamo, he dispatches half or more of his available oxen and wagons on what had to have been expected to be at least a five or six day rescue mission to Refugio, accompanied by only 28 men.
Birdwatcher
