A one ounce rifle ball. That would be 16 gauge. IIRC that rifle would be about .65 caliber.
Good catch Sir
, I overlooked that detail. A pity we don't get a better description of the whole event. Capt. Duval was making snap shots with fixed sights at what amounts to brief pop-up targets maybe 70 yards away, using a heavy rifle rested upon a wagon. One wonders if he had a spotter or spotters.
He lost a finger off of his right hand to a ball in the act of hitting his final target. At that point his right hand would have been wrapped around the wrist of the stock, index finger on the trigger. Possibly both shooters fired at the same moment.
We get from Shackelford's account that grapeshot fired into the grass finally scattered these Indian sharpshooters.
One detail not yet touched upon here is the fate of Albert Horton and his approximately thirty Mobile Greys, a cavalry company which had been sent ahead to verify the route was clear, in this case to Coleto Creek, no more than two to five miles in advance of Fannin's main force.
It is hard to know how much to censure Horton's company for failing to detect the hundreds of vaqueros and Indians that must have been in the general area at that point. After all even Fannin, travelling with 250 men and a slow-moving train of ox carts, had left a fort that morning which was presumably under constant surveillance and yet was able to amass as much as a five mile or two hour lead over Urrea and his much faster force, not being caught and surrounded until early afternoon.
In later life Horton suffered much censure from the simple-minded for not having perished along with the rest of Fannin's command. In his own defense, Horton reportedly claimed that Fannin had already surrendered by the time he returned from the scouting mission which sounds a tad spurious. For that to happen he would have had to have been essentially absent overnight, far enough away in advance not to have heard the Fannin's artillery and heavy barrage of small arms fire.
Urrea too reported contact with a small number of Texian cavalry at the outset, most of which fled the area. This might well have been Horton. Another possibility is these mounted men were "free scouts" of the likes of a John Glanton of whose movements during this campaign we know little about.
The short version of all this is that Horton and his company left the scene, for whatever reason, and ultimately ended up in Victoria, fifteen miles down the road. From a military standpoint, this made perfect sense.
One constant in this Second Texas Revolution was that the belief that large numbers of American reinforcements were on their way. Plus there was the expectation that those 30,000 Americans already residing in Texas when the war broke out in the fall of '35 would at some point rise to their own defense.
Both assumptions were true to some extent. Almost all of Fannin's original 500 man army originally collected at Goliad were volunteers who had just arrived from the US proper to fight. Even at the Alamo, the majority of the defenders who died there met that description. Resident Texians would turn out in greater numbers once the Mexican Army started advancing east towards where the great majority of Texians actually resided but of course this happened too late to save either Travis or Fannin.
From accounts, the expectation of many in Fannin's command at the time of the battle had been that there would be as many as 500 volunteers in Victoria available to come to their rescue.
Of course Horton found no such force waiting in Victoria. The nearest concentration of volunteers in the field at that point was the 300 men waiting for Fannin to join them at Gonzales, 50 miles to the North.
So, Horton and most of his men survived Goliad to fight again at San Jacinto. The controversy surrounding that survival, such as it was, would not ruin Albert Horton. He was a wealthy man and just thirty nine at the time. Six years later he would take to the field again during the Mexican invasion of '42.
Through his plantation holdings Horton became one of the wealthiest men in Texas, living just long enough to experience financial ruin at the close of the War of Secession. To me it is significant too that, notwithstanding his considerable means, only two of his six children survived that childhood. Historians don't often talk much about such things but back then infectious diseases very often made no distinction between the rich and the poor, catastrophe could visit anyone at any time. This seems important to me in trying to understand the mindset and motivations of these people.
Anyways, not every Texian on a horse made their escape from Goliad. According to Urrea more than a few, including possibly some from Horton's command, returned to join Fannin's embattled force. I dunno that this was solely due to heroism in every case as Urrea suggests. At the start of the fight, with the prairie already swarming with Mexicans, Tejanos and Indians, Fannin's heavily-armed formation may have looked like the safest place to be.
http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/goliadurrea.htmThe enemy's cavalry, which was small in number, had escaped the moment we overtook them, thanks to their good horses. There were some who, choosing the fate of their brave companions, dismounted and abandoned their horses. I took advantage of this to replace the worst mounts of our dragoons.Birdwatcher
