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Tks all, and I'll say it again, I never knew there was so much interesting history involved with the Goliad Campaign.

Holy Kshizzle! John Crittenden Duval

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fdu33

DUVAL, JOHN CRITTENDEN (1816–1897). John Crittenden (John C., Texas John) Duval, writer, son of Nancy (Hynes) and William Pope Duval, was born at Bardstown, Kentucky, on March 14, 1816, and grew up in Tallahassee after his father was appointed to a federal judgeship in what was then Florida Territory. Duval returned to Bardstown in 1831 with his mother to continue his education at St. Joseph College.

Going to St Joseph College saved his life; he learned Spanish there, and so being able to converse with his captors at Goliad, became someone somebody wanted to save. His older brother Burr was not so fortunate, Captain of their Kentucky Mustangs rifle company, he was shot with the rest.

Just to backtrack a couple of posts to where Spahn, in Duval's same rifle company, recounts their almost killing their own scouts early that morning.....

We were very near shooting at them. One of our guns snapped; and if it had gone off, we should certainly have killed nearly every man, for we all had our triggers sprung and our rifles cocked.

"Trigger sprung and rifles cocked"....... he was probably referring to double set triggers,as seen on my own replica 1810-30's era longrifle....





(The "hammer" that holds the flint was called the cock back then, from its resemblance to a chicken, this is where the term to "cock the gun" comes from. In the photo the gun is at half-cock, "going off half-cocked" was always very bad, still is. Sharpening a worn flint was called "skinning", being so cheap you wouldn't even buy new flints made you a "skinflint".)

Anyway, in action you cock the gun, but do not set the hair trigger in front until ready to shoot, setting the hair trigger is done by pulling the second trigger in back.

These locks were expensive and complicated in that age when everything was hand-made, and the sights of course were fixed. Longest hits ever recorded with rifles like these were made by Seminole Indians at the Battle of Ouithlacootchie at the beginning of the Seminole Wars (December of 1835). The Seminoles and Black Seminoles were scoring hits at 400 yards, the very capable General in command of the US force at the scene, one Edmund P. Gaines (worth a google of himself alone), found these extreme ranges so remarkable he included it in his report to the War Department.

Round balls have a rainbow trajectory. Now even with a 200 yard shot against a man in the open, not considered all that hard at the time, with fixed sights you were aiming way over his head and to his left or right depending on the wind ("holding into the wind").

The natural tendency is to think that since they were not actually aiming at what they were shooting at and just estimating anyway, what did it really matter where they aimed?

It mattered enough that they put expensive hair triggers on these rifles, the target triggers of their day, and just like today precision shooting was generally done prone or from a rest wherever possible, controlling one's breathing and carefully squeezing off shots just like it still is today.

More from Duval later, but here's more on his remarkable career after Goliad....

Not long afterwards he entered the University of Virginia to study engineering. He returned to Texas by 1840 and became a land surveyor. In 1845 he was, alongside William A. A. (Bigfoot) Wallace, a member of John C. (Jack) Hays's company of Texas Rangers.

By 1845 there were more than 100,000 Americans in Texas, almost nobody became a Texas Ranger if they didn't have to, especially not one of Jack Hays's Texas Rangers. If Jack Hays ever had 100 Texians on call (or 0.1% of the general population) that was alot. Most of Hays's rangers were exceptional men, a few were psychopaths, but they all faced an occupation where the annual mortality rate approached 50%, that, the company you kept and the cost of the equipment being why so few cared to do it. John Crittenden Duval did it.

War breaks out again when he was 47 years old.....

Duval did not favor secession, but he joined the Confederate Army as a private, declining a commission. He was a captain by the war's end.

All of that plus this....

He liked to be out in wilderness places, to loiter and to read, write, and recollect. His writings justify his being called the first Texas man of letters..... He died in Fort Worth on January 15, 1897.

Clearly, this is one guy we are all sorry we missed.

Birdwatcher