So, on March 19th, thirteen days after the fall of the Alamo, Fannin and approximately 250 men were heading east across slightly rolling terrain maybe eight miles east of the presido at Goliad. Today we would call it live oak savannah; tall grass with isolated mottes (stands or patches) of fire-resistant live oak, strips of woodland and dense underbrush along any watercourses.
The time was early afternoon, maybe one o'clock. They had left Goliad maybe five hours previously and had lost at least an hour, perhaps two, in hauling their nine field pieces and wagons across the San Antonio River just one mile below the presidio.
This puts them in the ballpark of maybe a two mile per-hour pace once on dry land which doesn't seem bad at all considering they were on unimproved dirt the whole time, presumably following some sort of track or wagon-path. How many carts or wagons they had is unknown except that it wasn't very many and that their load consisted of five to six hundred muskets and a considerable store of ammunition and powder. They had expected to be on this road to Victoria for three or four days.
The weak link was the oxen. Eight miles in half a day seems a pretty good distance to have pushed oxen pulling heavy loads even under the very best of circumstances (Ward's feat the previous week of moving several unladen ox carts the 25 miles from Goliad to Refugio in the space of just twelve hours seems phenomenal in context). Fannin's oxen for whatever reason were fractious and hard to handle and by the usual livestock management standards of the day plainly needed a break.
The road brought them to a patch of good grass out on a stretch of open prairie. They could see for at least two miles in every direction, four or five miles to their rear from whence any pursuit would most likely come. Fannin called a halt, over the objections of the more cautious of his men.
Working against them was a pervasive contempt of Mexicans and Tejanos in general. That and the fact that they were collectively loaded for bear; nine field pieces and six hundred extra muskets plus plenty of powder and ammunition.
Urrea's cavalry, eighty mounted men travelling in a column, were first sighted about four miles away, I'm guessing twenty to thirty minutes away if they had been following the same road. Urrea himself was most likely leading them. We know that they didn't approach by a direct path but took a circuitous route, all the while cutting off access to the closest timber. Easy to imagine that Urrea had received excellent intelligence from his Tejano and Indian allies as to the exact disposition of the Texians at their resting place.
Following hard on the heels of the cavalry, relatively speaking, was a force of 250 Mexican infantry. Must be I'm biased too; it seems counter-intuitive to state the words "Mexican Army" and "efficiency" in the same sentence, but it must be said that Urrea was able to get these men to accomplish prodigies.
They had been in the field for more than two months by that time during which they had marched several hundred miles. These particular soldiers were some of the same 500 soldados who on the night of the 17th had camped three miles above Goliad, having just hustled yet another hundred miles down from San Antonio.
Now it may be that the Mexican rank and file for whatever reason were especially good at travelling long distances on foot, but it doesn't seem that even the best trained and led European or American troops could have exceeded their accomplishments on the march. In battle too they weren't at all shabby, their three-to-one losses when storming the Alamo at point-blank range, against defenders equipped with extra loaded muskets close at hand, was pretty much exactly what conventional military wisdom would predict.
On this occasion the infantry deployed so swiftly around Fannin that they may have very well been double-timing the whole eight miles from Goliad, heavy Brown Bess muskets and gear notwithstanding. We get from Urrea that their morale was high and that they were anxious to close with the Texians at last. Almost certainly these were not the actual troops that had stormed the Alamo, so this would be their first combat in Texas and their first fight against Americans.
Morale was likewise reported to have been high on the Texian side. Ehrenberg states that news of the Mexican cavalry was greeted with hurrahs. It was obvious to everyone that it would be far better to have the cover of timber plus a proximity to water. Doubtless time was lost getting the difficult oxen back in harness, but at that point no sense of urgency seems to have permeated most of the command. In the event, they were all surprised at how fast the Mexican army deployed.
Coleto Creek itself was at least two miles away, half that distance some way off of the road, lay a smaller patch of timber, as the Mexican army closed in this became the Texian's objective.
The Americans had formed themselves into a mobile square or oblong as they moved, ready to repulse cavalry, the speed of their movement limited by their oxen. At that fateful moment in time, not too far from cover, the wagon or cart hauling the ammunition broke down.
It is a reflection of his command situation that Fannin could not merely order ammunition to be unloaded and hustled onward on the backs of his 250 men, but rather paused to call a council to decide what to do. It was decided that the best course was to unload what they could and take it with them.
Under most circumstances they probably would have made it despite everything, but as we have already seen Urrea was no ordinary opponent.
Birdwatcher
