By Ayer's account, the fifteen men at Refugio not spared from execution endured a hellish night before being marched out again and shot. Urrea and presumably those officers who might have saved them had already left the scene, hastening north towards Goliad. There were no enlightened officers, no foreign nationals, nor compassionate mistresses of the officers left to save them.
Still present at Refugio were the more than 70 Mexican dead and grievously wounded. Worse, there had been no victory, the Americans in the mission church had slipped clean away during the night following the fight.
One thing apparent in the accounts from both sides too are the grievances of the local Tejano population against those Americans that had come to fight in the war, freshly arrived from wherever they had come from in the United States.
There had previously been a community of a couple of hundred Tejanos at Refugio, a thousand or more at Goliad. These people were dispossessed, plundered, burned out, in a some cases assaulted, ravished and even killed. The village at Refugio, such as it was, had been torched by Ward and King before the fight.
The few prior Anglo settlers and their families captured at Refugio, even Ayers who had been demonstrably bearing arms, were spared. As at San Patricio, these people had a prior amicable history with their Tejano neighbors, not so the American volunteers (One notable exception among the settlers was a man who's name has been written as Sajer, of German extraction, who was shot for the crime of having shot and killed a prominent Tejano. This man's remains might have been the sixteenth skeleton recovered from the mass grave at Refugio).
So, as would shortly true at Goliad, there was among the local population a perception that the executions were a form of justice. Whether this was true or not, not everyone who witnessed or participated in these killings felt that they were committing murder.
Birdwatcher
