Not everybody pouring into Texas to fight was nice people, this applies here because the alleged misdeeds committed by Captain Amos B. King and his men upon the local Tejano population at Refugio affected the subsequent course of events.
Point of interest as to how bad some individuals could get; somewhere in the mix among the Americans at Goliad was the future infamous scalphunter, thief and murderer John Glanton. Can't find much on how this "free scout" for Fannin, just sixteen years old at the time, escaped the massacre but a year earlier in Tennessee, at age fifteen, he was already a wanted man.
https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fgl02On March 10th, four days after the Fall of the Alamo, and eight days after the ambush of Grant at Agua Dulce, a local Texian settler named Lewis Ayers arrived at Goliad requesting help. One account refers to Ayers as the "notorious Lewis Ayers" but I can find no record of wrongdoing on his part. On the contrary, he had previously been elected by the Irish at San Patricio to be their representative at the Consultation of '35. Whatever his nature, Ayers wold survive all this, leave Texas after the revolution, and spend his remaining thirty years back in Alabama.
Twenty-five miles south of Goliad was a small settlement called Refugio which like Goliad, lay on the road from Copano Bay to San Antonio. The only building of any consequence there was a stone mission church, the last built in Texas just forty year earlier, at the very end of the Spanish mission period. This mission had been built to minister to the fierce, tall, fish oil-smeared and cannibalistic Karankawas of the Texas Gulf Coast, who otherwise seem to have horrified everyone they encountered . Their mission at Refugio had not prospered. Urrea in his account called Refugio a notably poverty-stricken place, the church being the only defensible building.
Amon B. King and his 28 Paducah Volunteers had arrived in Texas from Kentucky the previous December, more to the point they had been sent by ship to Copano Bay and then assigned for two months to garrison the Mission Church at Refugio. For a group of young men who had come a long way in search of adventure and fortune (King himself was just twenty-nine) posting to BFE Refugio had to have been a tedious assignment to say the least.
It seems probable that it also allowed them to become familiar with the local residents, on account of King's subsequent actions at the Battle of Refugio do seem to have been of a personal nature as opposed to fighting a bunch of strangers.
Likely King's familiarity with Refugio, and possible prior acquaintance with Ayers, was why King left or was sent from the mission fort at Goliad to go and evacuate an undetermined number of American families stranded at Refugio amid marauding vaqueros and Karankawas allied to the Tejano leader Carlos de la Garza, who was operating in advance of and in cooperation with Urrea's main force.
Most of the Irish and American residents of Refugio had reportedly already fled northeast forty miles to Victoria, the largest town in the area. I wonder though if there was some unknown back-story behind Ayers and King taking most of Fannin's wagons, just to evacuate a few remaining families while leaving Fannin without transport.
It is true that at that point, the 400 men at Goliad had been expecting to hold the place and were even then actively preparing for a siege. It is also true that the degree to which Fannin actively commanded anything himself is in doubt. It may have been that if King and his men had decided to take those wagons, Fannin may have had little choice but to go along with it.
It sounds crazy now in hindsight to have dispatched possibly as many as eleven slow ox-drawn wagons on a lengthy expedition, guarded by just twenty-eight men. Evidence of just how little intel as to the regional situation Fannin's command had at that point.
On their arrival at Refugio two days later, King's men found themselves opposed by eighty or ninety of del la Garza's vaqueros and took refuge in the mission church, sending a messenger back to Goliad to request reinforcements.
Birdwatcher
