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Got rained out of running around with the grandchild this past Sunday, so on the spur of the moment decided to hit the road instead.

Refugio, the site of the last mission built in Texas, it was aimed at the Karankawas. And just to get away from whole-cloth generalizations some of them apparently did get away from oil-smeared cannibalism, enough to fight in concert with Carlos de la Guerra's vaqueros at least.

Turns out Refugio, perhaps the first relatively mosquito-free reliably dry land adjacent to the coast, had long been a campsite of the Copanes, the local branch of the Karankawas, for whom Copano Bay is named.

The mission at Refugio, Nuestra Senora de Refugio, had been built in 1795, a full ten years or more after the five missions at San Antonio had all been secularized and the mission era had ended. Apparently it was a good-faith effort by idealists to evangelize a bunch of benighted savages, it had been in operation with but small success until 1830, and a small settlement had sprang up around it before Independence would make the area a lawless Borderland.

Again, this is an approximate image of how it looked when occupied by the newly-arrived Irish.



I cannot tell the orientation of that model, nor where the river lay. The mission river was clearly close by, running in a NW to SE direction at that point. If the top of that model is taken as north, the river would have lay to the left, and the present four-lane highway cross over the former cemetery space enclosed by the wall. This makes sense in that the long building to the left of the church proper would have been the structure behind which the Mexican soldados took shelter from the concentrated rifle fire of the Georgia Battalion.

Fortunately for those trying to reconstruct events, the mission church was rebuilt some twenty years after the fact. Like San Patricio, Refugio was mostly abandoned by the 1840's as being too unsafe for settlement, and again because of the lawlessness on both sides of the Border.

As an example on the Texian side I'll give Mabry ("Mustang") Gray. Mabry Gray seems the sort who might have become an outlaw biker had he been alive today. One of his noted stunts, repeated a number of times over the years, was to light a powder trail to a 25 pound keg of powder, run with it and then throw it into the air, where it would explode. I dunno how he contrived to survive that but it gives insight as to the character of the man.

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fgr24

Just 19 when he fought at San Jacinto, in his twenties Gray became a Ranger Captain operating out of Corpus Christi. When the bullets were flying, he sounds like exactly the kind of guy you'd want on your side. But when they weren't, murder and common thievery weren't off the table. His most infamous deed being the murder of several Tejano traders outside of San Patricio in 1842, these men having been tied together in a bundle before being shot.

Gray's party had approached the trader's camp in apparent friendship, "getting the drop" on them once in place. The motive for this nefarious act being to steal their goods.

The incident is especially notable because one of the victims IIRC was a son or nephew of Placido Benavides, and like Benavides had actively fought on the Texian side during the war.

Well, the rain falls on both the just and the unjust as they say, and so did cholera in those years. Perhaps an ignominious end for such a noted hell-raiser, but a microbe felled Gray in Mexico in '48 when he was thirty-one years old and just reaching his prime.

At Refugio, IIRC the original reconstruction attempt by the Catholics was a sizeable stone chapel using the original stones in 1868. This structure was later felled by a hurricane.

Today, the mission site at Refugio might likely look about like Lipantitlan except that in 1908 the local residents erected a fine church on the foundation of the old, which still stands today, marking the exact spot for posterity.

It has been a commonality for significant locations in Texian history to be mostly erased by development. Observe the busy four-lane highway running just feet away from the church's front door. The river lies in the background.



In this photo taken from the other side of the church the river lies maybe 70 - 100 yards away across the parking lot on the other side of those trees, the highway bridge crossing just south of that point. This would have been the space where the surprised Texians were attempting to bring in barrels of water when the gunfire commenced.



Birdwatcher