By the time Fannin dispatched at third of his force under Ward to Refugio on March 12th 1836, his 400 men had been occupying the walled compound at Goliad for more than a month. Many of these restless bands of adventurers, in search of land and glory, had seen no action at all since leaving home five months earlier beyond alienating and making refugees of the 1,000 Tejano residents of the Goliad community.
A supply ship sent from their sponsors in New Orleans had run aground and foundered. The men had run short of necessities, many being obliged to crudely fashion replacement clothing from tent canvas. Surviving letters and journals indicate there was no coffee or flour for most of that time, the garrison subsisting solely on boiled beef. This was considered a hardship, nobody on either side back then seems to have valued Texas longhorn cattle for their meat.
Morale was flagging, it was noted by with resentment by several that this garrison, a first line of defense against the expected route of invasion, consisted almost entirely of Americans recently arrived from the United States. Precious few of the 30,000 resident Americans previously living in Texas turned out in their own defense.
As was true of the Alamo, little understanding of the sort of war they were fighting was evident among the people present. Defending Goliad did make some sort of strategic sense in that it was at least located at a crossroads and a river crossing. As was also true of the Alamo however, a defender's reach extended only as far as their cannon could hit in the midst of this vast country, and after Santa Anna flanked them with an army of 5,000 at San Antonio de Bexar, trying to hold Goliad made no strategic sense at all.
Still, during that most of that month, even after news had arrived of the Fall of the Alamo, the prevailing mindset was to hold Goliad at all costs. Towards that end Fannin renamed the place Fort Defiance, holding it as a rallying point for the reinforcements and supplies expected to arrive from the coast and/or Victoria.
One gets the sense that affecting Fannin's thinking too was the considerable amount of weaponry he had been entrusted with by his employers.
In addition to some light field pieces he had brought with him to Goliad more than 600 muskets, or about 6,000 pounds of small arms, all drawn there by ox cart. Originally intended to arm the anticipated volunteers who would carry the war to Mexico, this was easily the largest store of arms in Texas, and indeed, beyond the few hundred nearly unserviceable surplus Brown Bess muskets left by Cos upon his negotiated withdrawal from the Alamo, it was the ONLY store of weapons of any consequence in Texas.
Hindsight is 20/20, we know now how things turned out, but at the time that store of weaponry would have been deemed by anyone to be absolutely critical to the Texian cause, but as it turned out trying to haul all this stuff away upon his withdrawal from Goliad would act as a ball and chain, effectively fixing Fannin's force in place out on the open prairie in front the likkes of a Urrea.
Adding to the problem was a general perception among the American volunteers from the top down that they could whip any number of Mexicans. Coming from where they did, with absolutely no prior experience with the sheer scale of Texas at its unfamiliar landscape, this attitude persisted to an amazing degree right up until the very end, even after Santa Anna had stormed the Alamo.
So during that month, the force was kept busy improving the fortifications. John Sowers-Brooks, the former Marine and Travis' indefatigable Senior Non-com, devised and built a volley fire apparatus wherein one man could fire several of those extra muskets at one time. Also a sort of armored causeway was constructed, at least 100 yards long between the fort and the San Antonio River, in recognition of the fact that had a siege actually occurred the fort could have been easily cut off from water. Unlike at the Alamo, there were no acequias or wells providing water to the high ground upon which the fort stood.
While all of this was occurring, having few mounted scouts and with the whole area swarming with mounted vaqueros allied to the other side, the command was left virtually blind with respect to developments on their front. The seeds of the upcoming catastrophe had thus been sown.
Birdwatcher
