Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire After the Fall of the Alamo

Just a quick addition to move this thread along.

Here's a pic of the presidio at Goliad, La Bahia, fading light, last shots of a long day, photo enhanced to an artificial brightness....



The chapel would be where the Texian prisoners were packed in like sardines during the days between the battle and their execution. This walled compound was never a mission per se, but a military base located at the point where the road from Mexico proper via Matamoras and the road from Copano Bay both crossed the San Antonio River.

It was the loss of this post that would ultimately defeat General Cos 100 miles north of there in December of '35 at the Alamo, once Goliad fell to the Texians his lines of supply and communication were severed.

The mission proper lay across the river, a mostly unfortified church compound, said church still well-preserved today. Indeed San Antonio had been originally founded that way, with a separate fortification for the troops stationed there , but in San Antonio the fact that there came to be five missions scattered along twelve miles of river meant that the missions themselves also served as defensible strong points, and after secularization of the missions in the 1780's the adjacent walled compound of the San Antonio de Valero Mission became the place where the Alamo de Parras mounted cavalry outfit, sent north from Mexico, was stationed rather than the original presidio. No trace of the presidio remains, but over the sequent decades the old Valero mission compound came to be referred to simply as El Alamo after the unit stationed there.

Of Goliad in April of '36, When you look at the totality of events going into it, Fannin's defeat near Coleto Creek has an awful air of inevitability about it, the trap was already laid by the 17th. No way Fannin and his 250 men could slip out undetected. Some chance maybe if they had been issued 50 rounds per man and two days' rations and then forced-marched through the night, about like a Urrea might have done, but Fannin had no clue he was even in peril.

In fairness to Fannin, it seems no one man was really in charge at Goliad, which was the norm among the Texian forces at that time. At the Alamo Travis had been lucky in a sense that Bowie became incapacitated at the start by a severe illness and that immediately thereafter the arrival of Santa Anna had provided an overwhelming imminent threat to stifle opposition. Even so, as the line in the sand legend illustrates, Travis did not enjoy unquestioned obedience, but like Fannin could only rule by consensus.

One gets the impression that, at Goliad, why Fannin was able to occupy the position he did, such as it was, was because he was an actual employee of the New Orleans merchants and whoever their contacts were back in the 'States who were bankrolling the whole operation.

Birdwatcher