I thought it would be interesting to follow up what happened AFTER the Alamo....

From Hardin Texian Iliad: A military history of the Texas Revolution (1995)

...Santa Anna was, for the moment, content to dally in Bexar. Although many of his subordinates urged him to follow up the victory with a swift drive against the American settlements. His excellency refused to budge. He seemed to believe that once the settlers heard of the Alamo slaughter, they would trample over each other fleeing the country. He was not entirely mistaken.

This trampling to escape is known in popular Texas history as the "Runaway Scrape". To understand WHY this panicked reaction occurred it helps to be familiar with the First Texas War of Independence. On that occasion in August of 1813, nearly a thousand prisoners, two thirds most likely Americans, were slaughtered by Spanish/Mexican troops under General Juaquin Arredondo after the Battle of the Medina River. This execution was followed up by the execution of more than 300 family members of the rebels in San Antonio and by the systematic rape of likely more than 200 women and girls of the town.

A detachment of Arredondo's force then moved up the Camino Real to Nacodoches, putting all to the torch and executing more than 100 men and youths in Nacodoches itself. It worked, on that occasion approximately 15,000 Americans are believed to have fled Texas.

In Arredondo's force was a young Officer, nineteen year-old Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, learning how it was done.

Near the end of March, Santa Anna and his staff departed Bexar, the town for which his army had paid so dearly.

So Santa Anna lingered in Bexar for at least two weeks after the Fall.

Seems like part of this must have been a desire to rest and re-equip his men. I haven't seen it mentioned before but marching his 3,000 men, cannons and a baggage train between 600 and 700 miles through mostly uninhabited country must have been no mean feat. A study of his logistics would be interesting reading. Seems like just keeping those men fed and in shoes during that nine-week journey would be a serious challenge.

OTOH, Urrea's force, coming up more directly South to invest Goliad, must have travelled nearly as far, and they remained active throughout the whole campaign.

One factor influencing the decisions of the 42 year-old Santa Anna was probably young Melchora Iniega Barrera. Melchora was the 17 year-old daughter of a widowed mother, well-to-do by local standards, and her remarkable beauty was alluded to prior to Santa Anna's arrival by one of the Texians in town.

http://alamostudies.proboards.com/thread/60

To gain access to her, Santa Anna had one of his officers dress up as a priest, "married" Melchora and shortly thereafter moved into her house. Presumably he bedded her for the better part of a month before his departure.

When he left he sent her (some accounts say he sent her mom too) to his estates in Mexico, where she bore his child (IIRC some accounts estimate that Santa Anna would father 41 children in his lifetime, eleven of whom he acknowledged and three of whom were legitimate.

Birdwatcher

Steve Hardin is a hell of a guy! We had a little thing at Round Top several years ago. Had a heck of a time in the tavern that evening. Steve was there. My bud and I showed up as Creek Scouts. That was the morning the space shuttle decided to come apart over east Texas and Louisiana.

Ya I seen Mr Hardin speak at a symposium in San Antonio a couple of years back, I was favorably impressed. He did mention all the ire his thoroughly objective and in some ways irreverent work had drawn down upon his head from certain elements here in Texas.

Back to Hardin...

Things are changing in Texas, probably not for the better. Among visitors to the Alamo, even from Texas, its almost always a few of the older guys who are well informed about ANY take on Texas history and have strong opinions on it, anyone else in the crowd and you could claim that Sam Houston was a rank coward who slept with sheep and they wouldn't care or take it personal.

Not so with the older guys of whom I speak. Probably ain't anyone in the story of Texas who draws more wildly divergent strong opinions than Sam Houston: Put him on a pedestal or despise the man, ain't too many in between.

I will say that a probable majority of those who actually had contact with him during the events of 1835/36 spoke ill of him the rest of their lives, and it seems that most of those present at the victory at San Jacinto were OK with leaving a critically wounded Houston on the field, sitting against a tree, and were emphatic in stating that Houston was not responsible for that victory.

Indisputably though, Sam Houston DID play a major part in shaping the events that led up to that victory, whether the eventual outcome was a mere fluke or a result of uncommon foresight on Houston's part is open to interpretation.

As to WHY Houston was so disliked, this from Hardin on the conniving and manipulative character of the man. Here's Houston, at 43 just a year older than Santa Anna, on his way to Gonzales, March 6 through the 11th of '36, to take command of Texian forces in the field. The Alamo had just fallen.

Although Houston had pledged to exert all "mortal power" to save the Alamo garrison, he did not strain his horse on the ride from Washington-on-the-Brazos to Gonzales. It took Houston five days to complete a journey that should have required, at most, two. The Alamo, of course, had already fallen but Houston could not have been aware of that intelligence.

At a time when Texians were wrought with anxiety over the fate of Travis and his men, their commander in chief dawdled. Why did Houston take so long? Texian settler W.W. Thompson, who spoke with him at Burnham's Crossing on the Colorado River, provided a possible answer.

...Houston lingered at Burnham's "all night & all that day and all night again." When Thompson sought the general's opinion concerning the siege of the Alamo, Houston "swore that he believed it to be a damned lies, & that all those reports from Travis and Fannin were lies, for there were no Mexican forces there and that he believed it was only electioneering schemes on Travis & Fannin to sustain their own popularity."

In life I have observed that what we assume are the motives of others sheds a lot of light on our own personality.

Houston's subsequent acclaim came from those who had taken no personal part in the events of '35/'36. Houston was President Andrew Jackson's man in Texas, and when the wounded and critically ill Houston arrived in New Orleans on the deck of a steamer after San Jacinto, he was acclaimed the hero of Texas independence by both the popular press and by the Jackson Administration.

Recall that few of the 30,000 Americans already living in Texas by then had taken any part in the fighting (other than fleeing during the Runaway Scrape) and that a flood of immigration into Texas commenced soon after. Houston's subsequent political support came from among these people.

Birdwatcher

"Santa Anna had one of his officers dress up as a priest" . A hundred years later H.L. Hunt used that trick to "marry" several of his wives.

I've read a little about the deadly Blue Norther storm that hit the Mexicans enroute to the San Antonio. It severely frostbit a bunch of them, especially since many of the soldiers were barefooted. Quite possibly they needed time to heal before leaving San Antonio.

Very interesting. I'm going to look for that book. I grew up in Texas and lived there most of my life, and have read several books about early Texas history and never had heard of the First Texas War of Independence of 1813. I didn't think there were that many anglos living in Texas then.

Thanks Mike!

AKA the Gutierrez-Magee Expedition.....

1811, the winds of revolt against Spain are sweeping through Mexico. 1812-13 two Tejanos travel to Washington to ask for help. 1813 one thousand American volunteers arrive in Texas, join with 500 local Tejanos, found the Green Flag Republic (Magee was Irish).

Things go well at first, 400 Royalists killed in a battle on Alazan Creek about one and a half miles West of the Alamo, another 300 on the Salado about five miles southeast. Dissent arises, no one is clearly in charge, some Americans go home, some Tejanos cut the throat of the captive former Spanish Governor of Texas, further alienating many of the Americans still there.

Then Arredondo approaches from the south, a bloodbath ensues....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Medina

The Spanish army continued to press, killing many of the fleeing soldiers. Most of the remainder were captured and then in a portent of the future Texas War of Independence were summarily executed.

Fewer than 100 out of 1,400 soldiers on the Republican side survived, while the Royalists lost only 55 men. The remains of the Republican troops were left to rot and not buried until 1822 when José Félix Trespalacios, the first governor of Coahuila y Tejas under the newly established United Mexican States, ordered a detachment of soldiers to gather their bones and bury them honorably under an oak tree that grew on the battlefield.

Locating exactly where south of town this catastrophically bloody event occurred is one of the Holy Grails of local Historians.

It is not mentioned at all in the popular version of Texas History, it doesn't fit the desired narrative. Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar for one, Houston's great political rival in the Republic of Texas, did refer to it in his writings as a major cause of the Runaway Scrape.

The account provided by Texas A&M is THE best source I have found on this whole deal....

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/Spain2.htm

Santa Anna was there for all that, then 23 years later he comes back and wipes everybody out who has taken cover behind substandard fortifications at the Alamo, and then he has another 340 Americans captured in battle executed at Goliad.

Mass flight ensues.

Understandable that he would think defeating the remaining Texians after that would be a slam-dunk.

Before even leaving Mexico he had informed the British Ambassador that he was prepared to march all the way to Washington DC if he had to. Dunno if he was serious, but it does indicate a mindset.

Birdwatcher

Birdie, I was wanting to pick your brain over some of the myths and controversies in Alamo history.
As I said in the chronology, I don't believe in the Louis Rose story, and I highly doubt the "Line In The Sand", although I would allow that Travis probably leveled with his men when he realized help wasn't coming.
I was wondering how you and your fellow Alamo historians felt about this, and th story of Crockett's capture and execution.
I while back I read "Alamo Traces" by Thomas Lindley (IIRC). Lindley is very critical of both Zuber ( Rose), and the De La Pena diaries (Crockett). Any thoughts or comments?
7mm

I'll confess, its hard to keep straight in memory on who said what, there's gotta be at least four different books out there debating all of this.

It is entirely possible that the French veteran Louis Rose was at the Alamo, and that he slipped out prior to the fall. The highly improbable account of Rose's tortuous journey to the settlements is probably a result of embellishment by Zuber(??) forty years after the fact.



I find the line in the sand entirely believable, although not necessarily a way of resolving who was determined to die in place. IIRC Ben Milam had used an exactly similar tactic the previous December when calling for volunteers to attack General Cos in San Antonio, the subsequent intense five-day street fight through the city resulting in Cos being bottled up inside the Alamo and his subsequent negotiated withdrawal. Stepping over a line was a clear and unambiguous act, and a vote difficult to deny or retract later.

Around 200 men trapped inside the Alamo, from widely different backgrounds and with different motives, there must have been a whole lot of dissent as the prospects of rescue grew dim. I find the accounts of the Mexican officers De la Pena and Filosoa entirely believable; that Travis was seeking SOME way out on behalf of them all, either a negotiated surrender under terms or a breakout.

Recall the wall was actually breached by that point and food supplies were dwindling, to say nothing about what conditions inside that three-acre compound containing 200 people or more for going on two weeks must have gotten like.

I find it entirely believable that Santa Ann, as De la Pena states, intentionally launched his assault when he did out of concern the Alamo defenders really would surrender, so as to have his victory.

In the same way he suddenly jumps into motion again at the end of March, in response to his rival and future enemy Urrea accumulating a string of victories in the Goliad campaign.



I can state with absolute certainty that I dunno. I do tend to agree with this guy, that is Crockett if was among those handful offered clemency by Carrilon at the end who were then shortly thereafter executed on the word of Santa Anna, Santa Anna himself would have bragged on it.

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/adp/archives/delapena/lind_crisp/lind.html


Other than that, Joe, Travis's slave, whose accounts shortly from shortly after the battle witnesses say SOUNDED credible, places Crockett's corpse among the dead in battle.

JMHO,
Birdwatcher

Sam Houston on Texas....

"All new states are invested, more or less, by a class of noisy, second-rate men who are always in favor of rash and extreme measures, but Texas was absolutely overrun by such men."

Things are so chaotic leading up to the Alamo its hard to know where to begin.

1834, Presidente Santa Anna and his cronies dismiss the Mexican Constitution of 1824, instead appointing representatives on behalf of the Mexican States. Unrest breaks out all over Mexico, actual revolts in Oaxaca, Zazatecas and Tejas. If you were for the Central Government and Santa Ann you were a Centralista. If you are for the Constitution of 1824 you were a Federalista, and the Federalist flag was a Mexican flag with "1824" printed on it.

1835, Santa Anna sends his own brother-in-law, one General Martin Perfecto de Cos, to distant San Antonio with a force to affirm Centralist control of Texas.

1835 too, Americans in Texas, more than 35,000 by that date, elect 98 representatives to the Consultation of 1835 to be held in San Felipe (now just a wide spot on the highway on the Brazos River west of Houston just east of present-day Sealy TX).

Events get in the way, in October 1835 100 lancers are sent from San Antonio to recover a cannon belonging to the Mexican government from the hands of the people of Gonzales, who are almost to a man Federalists, or actual revolutionaries. Some blood is shed, this action giving rise to the now-iconic "COME AND TAKE IT" flag, the lancers are driven off, now its a shooting war.

The Texian Army, a volunteer outfit, spontaneously forms in Gonzales and elects as its leaders two capable men; Ed Burleson and John Henry Moore, the character of these two men is best summed up by the fact that, while avoiding politics, they both would later take a prominent role in the defense of the Texas Republic as Ranger Captains. The Texian Army goes on to occupy La Bahia Mission at Goliad, and elects the idealistic and dedicated Stephen F. Austin as its Commander in Chief.

They then march on San Antonio to begin the Siege of Bexar, prominent in this force are Jim Bowie, James Fannin and William Barret Travis, this is four months before the Siege of the Alamo.

At this point the war is about restoring the Constitution of 1824. The Texian Army is marching against Cos under the 1824 flag. Americans start pouring in to join the fight, promised grants of land in return by the Consultation. OF COURSE people are talking independence. Enter Sam Houston. Back in San Felipe, Houston is prominent among those not wanting a Declaration of Independence just yet, fearing such would alienate all those prominent Texians who had already accepted Mexican Citizenship. The Consultation then KICKS OUT those members outspoken for Independence.

Houston travels to Bexar to visit the troops besieging Cos in San Antonio to try and get the elected delegates, including Travis, Fannin and Bowie, to return with him to San Felipe and the Consultation, only Bowie does. Bowie had led the initial skirmish against Cos at Mission Concepcion, just south of San Antonio, but misses the five-day, hard-fought Battle of Bexar wherein Cos is bottled up inside the Alamo.

Dang, I was trying to keep this simple.....

.....December 1835, Cos is kicked out of San Antonio with his flags, men, their muskets, and a single cannon, leaving the Alamo well-equipped with military stores. Now there are no Mexican troops left in Texas, many of the assembled Texians in San Antonio go home. Three hundred Texians remain, headquartered at the Alamo.

The Former Mexican Governor of Coahuila y Tejas goes before the Consultation at San Felipe and suggests a Federalist strike against Matamoras just across the Rio Grande. Most of the Consultation agree, it is intended that the forces still present at the Alamo will make this attack.

Sam Houston is appointed head of the Texian Army.

Among those men in San Antonio is one Dr. James Grant, 42 years old, a Scottish Physician, formerly of the British East India Company who, until the rise of Santa Anna, owned considerable property in Coahuila, Mexico. Also present is Frank Johnson, 37 years old, originally from Virginia, he had partnered with Grant in their Coahuila endeavors.

Grant and Johnson recruit volunteers from the 300 men at the Alamo. In January of 1836, six weeks before the siege of the Alamo, a force of two hundred men set out from San Antonio to attack Matamoras under the 1824 Mexican flag. These men strip the Alamo of most of its military supplies, leaving a ragged (literally) force of around 100 men at the Alamo under James Neil. One gets the impression that many of those left behind at the Alamo stayed simply because they were too ragged and ill-equipped to join in.

Meanwhile, back at San Felipe, further dissent rises in the Consultation. The appointed Consultation Govenor Henry Smith denounces Grant's Matamoras expedition as madness. Smith is then impeached by the Consultation and replaced by James W. Robinson.

(Ya know, many prominent Texians, from Travis on down, had checkered pasts but Robinson, a lawyer from Illinois via Arkansas, had previously abandoned his wife and five kids. Now THAT'S cold.)

Confusion reigns, such that a frustrated James Neil in command at the Alamo, not knowing who to write to to request help, writes to both Smith and Robinson. Smith, shortly before his impeachment, sends Travis to assume command at the Alamo.

In January of 1836, the month before the start of the siege at the Alamo, the largest force of Texians in Texas is those 200 men with Grant and Johnson, heading south, preparing to attack Matamoras. A total of four separate commanders, Houston, Fannin, Grant and Johnson, are all named in quick succession by the Consultation as commanders of that force.

Houston, who supports the Matamoras Expedition so long as he gets to head it, joins the force at Goliad on January 11th. Johnson, Grant and their men do not recognize his authority.

Houston then spreads dissent, correctly observing that a force of only 200 might have little chance against the 12,000 residents of Matamoras. Most of the men desert the column, leaving Grant and Johnson with only 70 men.

Houston, who had intended to appoint Bowie as a leader of the Matamoras Expedition, instead sends him to San Antonio with orders to abandon the Alamo and to salvage such cannon as he can. Bowie, accompanied in San Antonio by a small force owing their allegiance mostly to himself, is convinced by Neil to help defend the Alamo instead.

Houston at this point in time travels to East Texas to make a non-aggression pact with the Texas Cherokees, I suspect he also touched base with US General Edmund P. Gaines, just across the border in Louisiana, who had been sent with an army by Andy Jackson to "maintain stability" (perhaps as many as 200 of Gaines' force would end up fighting alongside the Texians at San Jacinto, still in uniform and carrying their issue 1816 Springfields).

Shortly thereafter, by the end of January, in San Felipe the Consultation collapsed under the weight of its own internal divisions, the delegates abandon the proceedings. Texas would be without any sort of organized government until the Convention of 1836 was convened on March 1st at Washington on the Brazos.

During this month of February, Santa Anna invests San Antonio and the Alamo defenders from the west while Urrea, with another 3,000 men, crosses the Rio Grande from the south, heading for Goliad.

Birdwatcher

Thanks Mike. As a 6th generation Texan, I always enjoy learning more about the Alamo, and related history.

What's the scoop on tearing down all those old buildings across the street from the Alamo and enlarging the hallowed ground? It would really be cool to see what archeologists would find under all that concrete.

" It would really be cool to see what archeologists would find under all that concrete"

For starters Neal. Probably 250 years of accumulated garbage. Which can be cool.
As stated earlier young son was project manager on the excavation over along the water ditch for the Alamo that ran thru Hemisfair plaza. It was used as a garbage pit for years by City. The most common item found was street pavers used as backfill.

The Master Plan for the plaza is supposed to be announced this summer, as it is right now, the State controls the Alamo and those buildings, the city still runs the plaza between the two on the original Alamo footprint. Red McCombs and others were recruited some months ago to raise funds.

Absent that master plan, not much besides rumors and hearsay is available to us outside the loop.

1) There was talk of turning the 1920's-era post office, still Federal property, that sits over where the north wall was into a museum, it appears this idea has been tabled and will not happen .

2) The buildings you refer that cover the west wall all date from the 1880's, and have some intrinsic value of their own. Plus Ripley's and the other businesses there have long-term leases that would have to be bought out. The business owners have said buying them out would not be cheap.

For a while the city was making noises about condemning these buildings due to failing foundations but that was months ago, not much heard since.

The latest talk is that the available space in these buildings would be used to house an interim Alamo museum.

3) The good news is that probably at least 80% of the original Alamo footprint is not covered by buildings. Right now state control (Land Office) ends at the curb in front of the Alamo, the state also owning those buildings you refer to across the street.

The talk is that the state would gain control of the whole plaza, including the street out front. The plaza and the church would then become a single entity. The present raised garden beds and the associated trees and grass on the plaza would be removed to restore the original flat, open footprint. The entrance way and parts of the south wall, including the rooms where Bowie died, would be reconstructed. The 1930's Alamo Cenotaph on the plaza would be relocated.

The folks who might know on-site are obviously not at liberty to openly discuss these things until official pronunciations are made.

The annual battle reenactment, if it continues at all, would probably be relocated to an adjacent park a few blocks away. I will say that, though it is enormous fun for those of us in it and a huge draw for spectators, it is at best a sort of crude pantomime of the original and arguably should not take place on the ground where 400 people died violently and another 400 were mortally wounded in the space of ninety minutes on the morning of March 6th, 1836.

What I do hope continues is the solemn Dawn Volley, fired in the semidarkness in front of the church on March 6th, about the time the mission was overrun. Fired by both Soldado and Texian reenactors using period-correct weapons and attended by a quiet and respectful crowd of the sort that is willing to get up way-early to attend.

Getting to participate in that volley was what got me started in reenacting in the first place.

Birdwatcher

When looking at the events occurring down around Fannin and Goliad that would lead up to the Goliad Massacre, it is surprising how large a role the local Tejano vaqueros played in the fighting and skirmishing on both sides.

In fact, from a pop Texas history standpoint, its surprising that there were that many Texas vaqueros out there at all. Away from the piney woods and the rapidly growing Anglo settlements in East Texas, Texas was still a vast and sparsely populated place. Its no accident that Santa Anna's force would have to cover 600 miles or more of mostly wilderness just to get to San Antonio. In the teeth of repeated raids from the still-powerful Indian tribes in the region one finds this stubborn and widespread vaquero culture; tough and highly mobile men who's equestrian skills and intimate knowledge of the country were valuable to both sides.

Given the catastrophes visited upon them after the 1813 Texas revolution, it would be understandable if all these people, like most of the inhabitants of San Antonio de Bexar, had just stayed out of it, but they didn't. Likewise the heavy-handed anti-Mexican sentiments of the majority of the the arriving American volunteers, in addition to the tendency of the Texian forces, of necessity, to merely approrpriate what they needed in terms of foodstuffs and supplies, should have been sufficuent to alienate most Texanos.

Most all Tejanos that took part were republican in sentiment, like General Urrea himself. But like Urrea most, even if they came down on the Texian side, wanted Texas to remain part of Mexico, albeit under a restored Constitution of 1824.

Prominent on the Texian was one Placido Benavides, still in his twenties and the scion of a prominent Tejano family from Victoria, AKA "the Texas Paul Revere" due to the active role he would play in alerting the settlements to the approach of Urrea's force.

After most Texians had deserted the Matamoras Expedition under Johnson and Grant (the same guys who had stripped the Alamo of most of its supplies) leaving them with a force of only 70 men, Placido Benavides may have supplied as many as fifty local vaqueros to that force, such that most of the casualties subsequently suffered on the Texian side in the Matamoras campaign were likely vaqueros.

Prominent on the Mexican side was one Carlos de la Garza, likewise in his late twenties. Garza and his force of forty vaqueros would prove to be of great assistance to Urrea in the upcoming campaign.

And here's a puzzling thing: Its not really surprising that the Benavides family in and around Victoria would end up being dispossessed, after the victory at San Jacinto the Victoria area quickly gained the reputation of being a lawless and rowdy enclave, filling rapidly with the less reputable American immigrants. Placido Benavides himself had evacuated his family to Louisiana at the approach of the Mexican army, and died there in 1837, of causes unknown to history.

Carlos de la Garza however, after San Jacinto, returned to his rancho on the San Antonio River near Refugio. Despite his known active service on the Mexican side, somehow he kept his property, even becoming well thought of with a reputation as an Indian fighter, and in the subsequent Mexican invasion of 1842 his ranch became a place of refuge for both English- and Spanish-speaking alike.

Birdwatcher

I suppose all us Texans should be grateful that it was the likes of a Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna running the Centralist invasion of '36 and not a General Jose de Urrea.

At that time Matamoras, near the mouth of the Rio Grande on the Mexican side, was the largest city in the region, at 12,000 souls at least three times the size of San Antonio, then the largest city in Texas proper.

In January of '36, Grant and Johnson were busy recruiting volunteers in San Antonio and stripping the Alamo and later Goliad of most of the available stores in preparation for a Federalist strike against Matamoras. Travelling ahead of his forces Urrea, anticipating exactly such a strike, arrived in Matamoras to confer with Federalist elements in that city.

Of Federalist sympathies himself, Urrea was first a soldier in service to Mexico, and Santa Anna was at that time his president (although a short two years later he himself would actually be fighting against Santa Anna). When meeting the Matamoras area Federalists, Urrea correctly predicted that the present Federalist revolt in Texas, under American leadership as it already was, would soon morph into a full-blown separatist war of independence and that in an independent Texas, Mexicans would become a despised minority in what had been their own land. By this means Urrea deterred any local uprising in sympathy with the Texians.

North of Matamoras and the river lay 150 miles of not much at all, open desolate country between the Rio Grande (AKA the Rio Bravo in Mexico) and the Nueces River, a lawless area that would become known as the Nueces Strip.

The closest Texian community, barely worthy of that name, was a collection of wattle and daub houses situated on the lower Nueces River just north of present-day Corpus Christi.This was San Patricio, "Saint Patrick", a mixed community of Irish and Tejano Catholics founded ten years earlier. Even the Irish in San Patricio lived inside wattle and daub walls under thatched roofs, the area lacking in building materials beyond brush, grass and mud.

San Patricio itself had been settled adjacent to an old Spanish-era fort guarding a ford of the Nueces, Fort Lipantitlan, this fort and its two cannon having been taken by a small Texian force out of Goliad the previous November.

Forty miles north and east again, across more mostly empty country, lay the more substantial community of Refugio on the Mission River, by that time a predominantly Irish Catholic settlement surrounding the old Nuestra Senora del Refugio (Our Lady of Refuge) Mission. Twenty miles north of Refugio on the San Antonio River was the fortified La Bahia Mission at Goliad.

In early February, James Fannin had arrived in Refugio with a small force intending to join the Matamoras Expedition, but opted instead to occupy the fortified La Bahia Mission at Goliad.

By the end of February Grant and Johnson had moved the scant Federalist force remaining to them to San Patricio where they were gathering horses needed to cross the Nueces Strip to strike at Matamoras.

Urrea struck first.

Birdwatcher

One thing that must have frustrated those Tejanos allied to the Texians was a tendency among the Texians to disregard information provided to them by Tejanos simply because they were Tejanos. This happened before the Alamo and it would happen again at Goliad.

You're a Texian, stationed with a small force at the edge of what amounts to an unknown ocean of grass, knowing there's enemies out there somewhere headed your way, yet you disregard the information provided by the very people who routinely traversed those plains. Only way to figure it is that most Texians had just recently arrived, either from East Texas or the United States proper, and did not know enough to distinguish one Tejano from another.

Throughout the campaign, the Spanish-speakers did not make that error, no better illustration of this than the efficient way Urrea overwhelmed the small force of Texians and Tejanos at San Patricio.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_San_Patricio

Understandably, the Tejanos were of divided loyalties in this fight, and of all the White people in Texas, as a group the Irish Catholics were the ones most likely to come down on the side of their fellow Catholics, especially given the fact that these Irish had lived around their Tejano neighbors a whole lot longer than they had been around Americans. Although this was not yet officially a war of independence, there were more than a few folks in San Patricio whose sympathies lay with Mexico.

Urrea crossed the Rio Grande at Matamoras some time between the 13th and 17th of February, at the same time that Santa Anna was crossing at the ford at Piedras Negras, 300 miles upstream. By that time Grant and Johnsons' small force at San Patricio apparently consisted mostly of Federalist-allied Tejanos, if any of these people were aware of Urrea's exact location, Grant and Johnson were not made aware of it.

The night of February 27th was one of frigid temperatures and driving rain, so much so that the Texians posted no sentries. Of the two leaders only Johnson was present in San Patrico, Grant and a party of vaqueros were off out on the plains somewhere to the southwest. Johnson and thirty men were quartered in three houses in San Patricio with another twelve men assigned to watch the horse herd at a rancho four miles downriver.

Moving at night under such difficult conditions must have been apalling (six of Urrea's men got separated and died of exposure), and certainly required the active participation of local guides or else one would become hopelessly lost in the pitch-black conditions.

Urrea's force of 200 men arrived out of the freezing rain and wind in the small hours of the morning, surprise was complete. Forewarned, the loyalists in town had kept lanterns lit in their windows to declare what side they were on, the fact that this could happen without Johnson's men becoming aware of what was afoot indicating that Johnson's force had likely more than worn out their welcome by this point.

Johnson himself was one of six men that managed to escape, at this point he separated himself from the war and would live for another thirty-eight years, after many travels finally passing in Central Mexico at eighty-five years of age. Grant would not get that chance.

Birdwatcher

Your point about being grateful Urrea wasn't in charge of all forces is spot on. Patton-esque maneuvering.

Thanks for posting this stuff Birdy.

One guy of interest here is James Grant, what on earth is a Scottish physician and former British East India Company guy doing in the middle of all of this?

Turns out one of his descendants wrote a book claiming that all along Grant was working for the British.....

http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Russell-Spencer-Series-Southwest/dp/1585445657

Entirely believable given the influence the Brits, as the unchallenged major world power at the time, wielded inside Mexico.

Worth a look, especially at $5 used, if nothing else for the detailed descriptions of the actions of Grant and Johnson in the Matamoras campaign and the fights at San Patricio and Agua Dulce.

Birdwatcher

It would be entirely consistent with British actions throughout the world in the 19th Century where adventurers operated with at least the tacit support of the British government in pursuing this scheme or that. For that matter, our own government did it quite a bit in Central and South America as well.

OK, so every time that I see the title of this thread, the Royal Guardsmen jump into my head and want to add "... in the clear, blue skies over Mexico ..."

Cool post. Thanks Again Birdwatcher and all others for the History lesson

In trying to iron out all the myriad confusion of events, I'm learning as I go. With all the conflicting egos and interests, developments on the Texian side amounted to a cluster F of gigantic proportions No wonder many actual residents on the scene were reluctant to get involved.

Of the strategic considerations from the Mexican side, Hardin has this to say of the Alamo....

Purveyors of popular culture claim that the thirteen-day siege [of the Alamo] bought the time that Texas desperately needed to prepare its defenses.... works of fiction pretend that Sam Houston used the time to train an army...

What "army" there was consisted of Fannin's force at Goliad and a few other contingents in the surrounding area. Being volunteers, they exercised their customary right to elect their officers; they had not taken an oath to Texas. There is simply no evidence to support the notion that the sacrifice of the Alamo garrison allowed Houston to raise and train an army.

The delay did, on the other hand, allow the creation of a revolutionary government and the drafting of a constitution....

If Santa Anna had struck the settlements immediately, he might have easily driven the Texians across the Sabine River as he had intended. Even with the delay, he came closer to succeeding than is apparent.

Santa Anna helped make the defenders' loss worthwhile by chucking his best troops against the Alamo and allowing them to be decimated....

Perhaps most important, the slaughter of the Alamo defenders finally awakened the Texians to their perilous situation.... The fate of the defenders and Santa Anna's threats gave Texians a will to fight that they had previously lacked...

...and of broader strategic considerations....

Given the strategic importance of the coast, which was obvious to both sides, Santa Anna's earlier drive against Bexar [San Antonio] was a wasteful digression....

San Antonio stood on the extreme edge of the western frontier. Santa Anna could have kept his army intact and driven up the coastal prairies along the same route that Urrea took. Once Goliad had fallen, Santa Anna could have sent a column to Gonzales... such a movement would have severed the Alamo lines of communication with the Texian settlements at little cost, thereby isolating the rebel garrison...

Urrea had, however, already [by San Jacinto] given Santa Anna a strategic advantage, his rapid advance up the Texas coast had deprived the rebels of every port except Galveston. Without support from the United States, the revolt would ultimately fail....

Men and materials could still make their way via the land route across the Sabine River, but that would take much longer.

For my own part I believe that due to political considerations Santa Anna HAD to go against San Antonio, then the largest city in Texas. What he never anticipated was that the Alamo defenders would sell their lives so dearly. It is not surprising he would feel that way, given his participation in the one-sided slaughter of hundreds of American adventurers during and after the Battle of the Medina River twenty three years earlier, the last time he had been in Texas.

So important was San Antonio symbolically, that six years later in 1842, in order to satisfy Mexican honor in the eyes of the public he would send in ANOTHER Mexican army to take San Antonio, without even beginning to address the issues of coastal ports and Texas settlements further east.

Of course this second invasion failed, and two weeks later as the Texians were finally able to muster a sufficient response, General Woll was obliged to give up San Antonio and retreat back across the Rio Grande.

Birdwatcher

For the better part of a week Urrea remained at San Patricio while up north the siege of the Alamo ground into its second week. I need to get that Ried "Secret War for Texas" book as it seems he reports on Urrea's movements in depth.

As best one can gather, the Grant-Johnson Matamoras Expedition was specifically targeted because they had been fellow Federalist conspirators, and alive could implicate Urrea and his associates to the Centralists then in power.

Urrea's problem was Grant was somewhere off to the south on those sparsely populated plains. Clearly during this time Urrea had his allied Tejanos out looking, his efficient use of these locals as his eyes and ears accounting in a large part for his success through the Goliad campaign.

What also seems clear is that the Mexican army forces under Urrea were good at what they did, one can imagine he was probably popular with his men.

March 1st, Grant's party is reported to be at a rancho or camp on San Fernando Creek about 35 miles south of San Patrico. The surprising thing to me being that there WAS a permanent campsite or ranch way out there in 1836. Clearly it was common for the Tejano ranching community to have some sort of arrangement or truce with the local Indian tribes, including the Comanches, else such an isolated eandeavor could have been easily wiped out.

As to what Grant was doing out there, we are told he was attempting to coordinate with Federalist forces around Matamoras, an endeavor which seemingly at that point amounted to a trap. Also Grant was collecting more horses, to add to the 100 already collected at San Patricio.

Possibly this was a fund raising endeavor, the Texian participants under Grant and Johnson are reported to have been reduced to rags by that point, and there was an active ongoing horse and stock trade going on between South Texas/Northern Mexico and the United States settlements to the north and south (an endeavor in which Deaf Smith for one had been engaged for years).

As to the state of Grant's Tejano allies under Placido Benavides one cannot be sure, living where and how they did, their standard of what constituted "ragged" while working might have been lower than the Texians, although we do know that the Tejano vaqueros were famously stylish dressers when in town for fandangos and such.

One thing interesting is that nobody brags on the firearms these vaqueros were armed with. This despite the fact that they lived and worked in such hazardous surroundings. A few old escopetas, essentially flintlock smoothbore carbines, is all one hears about. Josiah Gregg, in his accounts of the Santa Fe Trail during this same era, reports that the New Mexican Hispanics on his crews, in addition to already being familiar with the Plains clear to Missouri, were proficient as Indians with the bow. Seems like this would happen in Texas too but I have found no mention.

Birdwatcher

Hardin calls Urrea the best general on either side in the Second Texas War of Independence, how Urrea handled the "Battle" of Agua Dulce Creek illustrates that perfectly.

But to digress a little, it is interesting to think on how good Urrea's intelligence was at this point compared to Grant's, notwithstanding the fact that Grant's small force was likely 2/3 Tejano.

Three days after fully half of Grant's force had been killed or captured in Grant's home base at San Patricio, Grant and Benavides seem blissfully unaware of that fact that a) a Mexican force of more than 200 soldiers had left Matamoras at all and b) had wiped out Johnson's half of their group. By way of contrast, within a few days Urrea knew exactly where Grant was.

Upon receipt of what we would call "actionable intel", on the night of March 1st Urrea hustled 70 infantry and 80 lancers on an all-night march to beat Grant and Benavides to a ford on Agua Dulce Creek, 26 miles south of San Patricio. Not only did they beat Grant to the ford but these 150 presumably weary men pulled off what amounts to the perfect ambush of 53 mounted men, most of these same mounted men being experienced vaqueros presumably accustomed to operating in a hostile environment ie. not easily ambushed.

The Mexican forces were using Brit milsurp equipment left over from the Napoleonic Wars. While the Texians had a well-earned reputation for accurate rifle fire, not much talked about is the Baker rifle in the hands of the Mexicans. The Baker was a sort of thematic predecessor to the US Mississippi rifle of the 1840's in that it was a military-looking weapon that was also a perfectly good rifle. First issued in 1809, earlier versions were the same caliber as the Brown Bess (.75), later versions had a smaller but still large .65 cal bore. Prominent Texian leader Ben Milam for one had been shot in the head and killed by a Mexican sniper armed with a Baker during the Battle of Bexar back in December.

Urrea reported killing 43 of Grant and Benavides' men, most of whom were hit in the opening volley, the lancers then spreading out to engage the few survivors. Given the effectiveness of that first fire, it does seem probable that at least some of Urrea's force were carrying Bakers.

Further evidence of how well the trap was sprung, Placido Benavides, James Grant and one Reuben Brown, riding a half mile ahead of the main force, had been allowed to pass through the trap. Brown had his horse shot out from underneath him but, with the aid of Grant, got on the horse of another Texian who had just been shot off his own, Grant shooting a charging Mexican officer in the process.

A six-mile horse race ensues, which is a long way to flog a horse. Grant, a Scot and a former East India Company guy, was apparently also a warrior. They were surrounded and brought to bay, Brown received a lance in the arm, Grant then shot and killed that lancer, again saving Brown's life, before being run through by multiple lances himself.

Placido Benavides, mounted on the best horse of anyone at the scene, escaped to warn the Texians at Goliad.

Brown picked up a lance intending to go down fighting, but was lassoed and beaten to unconsciousness.

When the trap was sprung, six Texians had jumped off of their horses and ran for cover in a collection of houses (?? again, way out there in the boonies?) near the ford. Apparently no one had much enthusiasm for ferreting out individual Texians on foot armed with rifles because five of these men escaped, only to fall three weeks later at Goliad.

Six other Texians, including Brown, were captured and brought back to San Patricio for questioning, and later imprisoned back at Matamoras.

Brown, twenty-six at the time, went on to become one of the survivors of all this. He had arrived four months earlier with a group of men from his native Georgia to fight for Texas, had missed the Battle of Bexar but was present at the Alamo when Grant and Johnson were recruiting for their expedition.

While imprisoned at Matamoras, somehow he got word of his plight to his family back in Georgia, his family then hiring "a local Irishman" (perhaps the same guy who had sent word on Brown's behalf) to spring him from prison in 1837.

Brown must have come from a family of considerable means; after travelling back east, he returned to Texas the following year bringing no less than twenty-four slaves and established a plantation on the lower Brazos River. In his mid-fifties when the War Between the States broke out, he was one of the handful of original Texians that also served in that war, raising a Confederate cavalry battalion that saw service in Texas and Louisiana.

He survived that war also, by another twenty-nine years, finally passing at his home on the Texas Coast in 1894, aged eighty-five.

Birdwatcher

Thinly time I visited the Alamo I was at first appalled to find it just across a busy city street from some commercial stores and enterprises. This seemed almost a desecration. But then I noticed that someone had placed a single yellow rose at the base of a tree just outside the entrance to the Alamo. I thought that this must indeed be a sacred and holy place. I still think that.

Sunday March 6th, after participating in the memorial dawn volley I was sitting out on the Alamo Plaza with some friends. Two college students from a local (and expensive) private university approached me, a guy and a girl, the guy running the camera the girl asking the questions. Plainly they were the scions of "White privilege" as they would have probably put it, and plainly by appearance were of a "progressive" political slant, the guy even sporting them fake, glued-together dreadlocks such White kids sometimes do.

So she approaches a middle-aged White reenactor (me) and sort of with a smirk asks me why I am there, obviously already having drawn her own conclusions. To her credit she was a little taken aback when I replied that I was there because 180 years ago that very morning, in the space of just ninety minutes 800 people had died or were mortally wounded in the same area where we were sitting, all of them fighting for their respective countries and, in the case of the Alamo defenders, also fighting for their freedom.

Over the next few hours they made the rounds of the reenactors, Anglo, Hispanic and the one Black reenactor present. Plainly they didn't get the answers they had been looking for, since the local reenactor crowd of all shades here is overwhelmingly Conservative by politics.

Some time later she came back by me again, again to her credit apparently starting to look at things in a different light. But still this time the questions were along the lines of wasn't Santa Anna looking to drive the American (ie. White) settlers out of what was then Mexico?

I pointed out that Mexican society itself was highly stratified at the time (and still is) with a small, wealthy elite of mostly European extraction (ie. White folks) running the show. I then referred her to the First Texas Rebellion of 1813 wherein Arredondo (and a young Santa Anna) had committed atrocities upon the local Tejano population on a scale far eclipsing anything the Texians ever did.

At this point dreadlocks guy with the camera became irritated and told her they had to leave.

Ha! I'll bet right there I coulda quoted more Bob Marley at him, word for word, then even he knew. I just wish I woulda thought to do that at that moment

Birdwatcher

Meanwhile, over in East Texas....

As the Consultation of 1835 and the interim Texas Government, pushing for the restoration of the Mexican Constitution while remaining part of Mexico as it did, fell apart in January of '36, those expelled from that contentious gathering for favoring full independence were already setting up voting for delegates to attend the Convention of 1836 wherein the Republic of Texas would be created.

Widespread voting to appoint delegates commenced on February 1st, 1836. Of course, since folks were basically making all this up as they went along, the election of these delegates was fraught with difficulty. In particular, volunteers who had only just arrived from the States to fight and even some guys actually leaving Texas insisted on electing and sending their own delegates, much to the chagrin of those Texians already established here.

Another bone of contention was whether Tejanos would be allowed to vote. In some areas they could, in others not. IIRC as it turned out three Tejano delegates signed the Declaration of Texas Independence. Fifty-nine delegates would eventually show up at the brand new hall in the still-forming village of Washington-on-the-Brazos where for seventeen days they would essentially camp out given the lack of lodging in the area.

The election of delegates began on February 1st, the Convention itself convened on March 1st, 1836, by which time forty-eight delegates were present. Despite the Spartan nature of the surroundings, the miserably cold and wet weather, the garrulous nature of the gathering, and the apparently large quantities of alcohol consumed by many, things proceeded with remarkable speed.

A Declaration of Independence was drawn up and issued in just 48 hours, independence being formally declared on March 3rd, incredible in that age of laborious pen and ink. Clearly the author, George Childress, had drawn up the document in advance. Of course both this Declaration and the new Constitution issued two weeks later drew freely on the US originals.

The new government would be in exile almost as soon as the ink was dry on the constitution, fleeing to Galveston Island ahead of Santa Anna's advance, but the government would stick anyway, unchallenged. It looked like America, and was the form of government almost everyone pouring into Texas wanted.

Nobody since then seems to have bragged on these two new Texian documents much, the way they did on events like the Alamo and San Jacinto. One thing is they weren't exactly politically correct, even by old-time standards.

I always get slammed on these threads for daring to suggest slavery was important to the South, but at that time in Texas, plantation agriculture was by common perception about the only game in town when it came to accumulating a fortune, and most of the delegates were men who either already were of the planter class or who held that aspiration. The new Texas Constitution reflected the values and interests of those delegates, plantation agriculture was based upon the concept of an enslaved work force.

In the new constitution Texas citizenship was barred for anyone of "Indian or African ancestry" (IIRC as it was in the United States proper at that time). Not only could one not free one's slaves without specific permission from the Texas Congress, it required a similar Act of Congress before a free Black was even allowed to MOVE here. How well either of these provisions were actually observed during the nine years of the Texas Republic was likely another matter entirely.

Then as now, Hispanics occupied a sort of racial and ethnic gray area. Despite opposition from some delegates, they were extended citizenship and the right to vote. In one of the last acts of the brand new government before it pulled up stakes and fled, Tejanos, like White residents, were subject to a military draft, loss of Texas citizenship being a consequence of refusal. However this subscription act specified that Hispanics would serve in separate units.

Of course all of this occurred before the practically miraculous turnaround at the Battle of San Jacinto, I am not aware that this military draft was ever put into place.

Birdwatcher

A surprising number of Texians present at the Convention of '36 passed on before their time....

Some prominent examples, in alphabetical order....

Stephen F. Austin: Deservedly remembered as "The Father of Texas". Died of pneumonia, December 1836. Age 43.

Samuel Price Carson: Delegate at the Convention of 1836. Secretary of State of the Republic of Texas. Died of an illness in Arkansas in 1838. Age 40.

George Childress: Delegate at the Convention of 1836. The author of the Texas Declaration of Independence. Six years later, possibly despondent over his third failed attempt to start his own law practice, Childress fatally disemboweled himself with a Bowie knife Age 37.

James Collingsworth: Delegate at the Convention of 1836. First Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Texas. Leapt to his death from a steamboat in Galveston Bay. Thought to have been a suicide, 1838. Age 32.

Bailey Hardemann: Delegate at the Convention of 1836. Secretary of the Treasury of the Republic of Texas. Dies of a fever September 1836. Age 41.

Robert Potter: Delegate at the Convention of 1836. The poster child of dysfunctional Texians. Back in North Carolina Potter hog-tied and castrated two men he suspected of fooling around with his first wife, one of these two men being his wife's cousin. Later expelled from North Carolina legislature for cheating at cards.

Gets divorced and heads to Texas. Elected delegate to the Convention of 1836. Shot and killed by a mob during the Regulator-Moderator Feud of East Texas, 1842. Upon his death his third and then-current wife discovers he was still married to his second. Age 42.

David Thomas: Delegate at the Convention of 1836. Principal author, Constitution of the Republic of Texas. Fatally hit in the leg by a musket ball during the Runaway Scrape. Age 44.

William H. Wharton: Delegate at the Convention of 1836. Minister to the United States, Republic of Texas Senator. Accidentally shot himself in 1839 while dismounting from a horse. Age 37.

Lorenzo de Zavala: Delegate at the Convention of 1836. Interim Vice President of the Republic of Texas. In November of '36 his rowboat overturned in Buffalo Bayou, as a result he came down with a fatal case of pneumonia. Age 48.


Birdwatcher

So, of those men there, which one was technically never even a resident of Texas?

Sounds like a trick question.

But it does bring up another point.

According to their Constitution one couldn't even THINK about running to be the President of the Republic of Texas if you weren't already a resident.....


.....for at least two years.


Kept all those upstart immigrants at bay.


But to answer your question I would guess Austin. I'm not sure he was ever present at the Convention, and I'm thinking may have actually died in New Orleans while on a diplomatic mission, hence may not have set foot in Texas since independence was declared on March 3rd of that year. [Nope, Austin was back in Texas by August, ran for President but Houston won in a landslide.]


Birdwatcher

Some guys just seem to have a knack for living, no other way to explain it.

Case in point Herman Ehrenberg....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Ehrenberg#cite_note-crisp423-41

Born in Prussia, arrives in New York in 1834, by 1835 he's in New Orleans, 19 years old.

In New Orleans he meets Adolphus Stern, the German Jew who raised and financed the New Orleans Greys, the militia company prominent in Texian history.

With the Greys, Ehrenberg fought in the December '35 Battle of Bexar and then joined the Matamoras Expedition under Grant and Johnson, leaving that expedition to serve under Fannin at Goliad. After the Battle of Coleto Creek wherein Fannin and his men surrendered, Ehrenberg refuses an offer of clemency as a foreign national and is marched out with the rest of Fannin's command to be shot outside of Goliad.

Ehrenberg is one of a handful who escaped that massacre (which survivors also included, oddly enough, a Welsh labor activist who would later escape execution/transporation in England and then return as a fugitive to fight in the Mexican War).

Starving and lost, Ehrenberg cons Urrea so that he can find refuge with the Mexican Army until slipping away after San Jacinto. Whereupon he returns to Germany to get a college education.

Returns to the US in 1844, travels to Oregon with a wagon train, takes ship for Hawaii and there finds work as a surveyor. During this time he gets into sailing in a big way and operates a schooner bringing in goods from the mainland.

1846 he returns to California to fight in the Mexican War, 1854 he gets shipwrecked on an island off the Pacific Coast of Mexico, he and his companions sail to the mainland on a makeshift raft they had made.

Gets involved in mining in Arizona, lays out the future city of Yuma, spends the last three years of his eventful life as Indian Agent to the Mohaves.

Murdered along the road by robbers one day in 1866 at age fifty.

A life well lived.

Birdwatcher

Love the bulk of what you're writing here, Mike, and really appreciate the effort that goes into it.

however,...this:



...is complete horsechit.

and the "Hispanic" folks I spent the evening with would agree with me.

They'd just say that they're Americans.

Proof read your mostly solid work, and have an extra long look at personal ethnocentric leanings.

screwed up would not be to strong a grade for the one above.

GTC

Cross,

What? After all my posts here you are seriously suggesting I'm saying the people on my street ain't Americans?

Every day at work I gotta deal with the "ethnicity" boxes of "White" and "White Not-Hispanic", these in a separate pair of boxes above the usual "race" boxes of "White" "Black" "Asian/Pacific Islander" "American Indian" and "Other". Some places have "Hispanic" marked under "Race", most do not.

Most every Hispanic family around here swears up and down they had a Spanish grandfather/great grandfather, and are proud of it. In fact schools around here gotta go back and check WHAT their kids checked on the boxes for purposes of accurate reporting. Yet drop many of these exact same people on an Indian reservation and you'd be hard-pressed to tell 'em apart from the locals.

Ya, so for all practical and legal purposes, Hispanics fall into an ethnic and racial gray area, and most of that comes from them.

The Republic of Texas as founded was all about race, as a determinant of eligibility for citizenship among other things, and if it was eventually decided, after considerable debate, that Hispanics could vote and be citizens, it was decreed that when they served, it was to be in segregated units.

In 1836 former Spanish and Mexican diplomat Lorenzo De Zavala was chosen as Interim Vice President of the Republic of Texas at the '36 Convention by the rest of that crew. He had married a definitely White society woman, the well-to-do Emily West of New York City. (NOT to be confused with the OTHER Emily West/Morgan probably in Santa Anna's tent at San Jacinto). Whatever fine line it was, De Zavala was on the "White" side of it, and seems to have fit in seamlessly amid the Planter class, at least right up until his untimely demise.

Juan Seguin bled for Texas, and he was the same guy who thought to come back months later and reverentially gather what was left of the charred bones of the Alamo defenders to give them a Christian burial. However, whatever the line was he apparently fell on the wrong side of it and had a rough time, starting when we evacuated his family to Nacodoches where they were identified as "Mexicans" by the locals and treated accordingly. So much so that after independence he was eventually driven out of San Antonio.

Birdwatcher

Last Saturday, after reading all of the posts about the Alamo, I had something to do on the west side of Houston that fell through. So, I drove up to Washington on the Brazos and toured the museum. Just something to do since I was already in the neighborhood. I may drive out to Goliad sometime soon. I've been to the San Jacinto monument and battleground so many times I can't count, and walked past the Alamo once.

Samuel Price Carson. Upon formalization of the boundaries his home was actually in Miller County, Arkansas.

Arkansas actually claimed most of what would become Bowie, Cass, Fannin and several other counties a Miller County, Arkansas. The area was in dispute all the way up until Texas entered the union as a state. At one point Arkansas even made it a misdemeanor for its citizens to hold elected office in both Arkansas and the Republic of Texas.

But in any case Carson's home was still in Arkansas even after the boundaries were formalized and it can be said that he never actually was a resident of Texas.

March 2nd, 1836, James Grant falls under Mexican lances at Agua Dulce. March 3rd, 1836, 200 miles to the northeast, Independence is declared at Washington-on-the-Brazos. The leading Federalist on the Texian side been killed and his Matamoras Expedition wiped out. It was now a War of Independence.

100 miles to the north, the Alamo fell on March 6th. Over the next five days a sort of hiatus with respect to the Mexican Army occurs, at least with regards to offensive operations. Meanwhile five more Mexican generals and their troops and artillery join Santa Anna in San Antonio, and south of Goliad General Jose de Urrea's forces swell from 500 to 1,500 effectives.

The Tejano irregulars were active during that time. Loyalist vaquero Carlos de la Garza advanced against Refugio with as many as 100 men and plunders the town amid its terrified inhabitants. The fear among the American settlers in and around Refugio was that if they stayed, capture by the Mexican Army was inevitable, but if they attempted to flee they would have to run a gauntlet of Loyalist Tejanos along the road.

In context it becomes understandable why Placido Benavides actually took his family and left Texas for Louisiana. Benavides' Tejano band of followers had been decimated in the ambush at Augua Dulce, his enemy and former neighbor Carlos de la Garza now had the upper hand.

Birdwatcher

Usually the last weekend of March is the high point of the Texian reenactor's calendar, the three-day camp within the walls of the La Bahia Mission. Notwithstanding the occasion is the anniversary of the tragic Massacre at Goliad, many fine musicians attend and period grown-up beverages are consumed around the campfires (or at least grown-up beverages in period receptacles).

Within the walls of the Mission everything is pre-1840.





Smoke and cannons, musketry and cavalry skirmishes on Saturday. Solemn remembrance Sunday morning.

You might find it worth a look, dunno yet if I'll be there or covering at the Alamo (where they'll be short-handed on account of this event).

Anyhow, this year its moved back a week until the weekend of April 2nd, to avoid conflict with Easter weekend.

Birdwatcher

Of coarse, that's the next weekend I'll be on call.

San Jacinto reenactment, April 17th, on the battlefield.

It does have horses and cannon, and a good turnout.

But by the second half of April it runs too warm, humid and buggy around there to be our favorite occasion.

After the Fall of the Alamo, the Texian Army, such as it was, consisted of about 350 men under James Fannin at Goliad. Sadly, James Fannin, tho no one who saw him under fire questioned his courage, was the wrong guy in the wrong place. His fatal flaw was his inability to take a personal initiative.

By comparison William Barret Travis had been originally authorized in the fall of '35 by then acting Govenor Smith to raise a company of 200 cavalry and take it to Bexar. Travis is able to raise only 30 men, but takes his modest company to Bexar anyway.

Once in Bexar he takes the initiative, vies for command, and actively prepares for the Mexican onslaught. Meanwhile the very man and the organization that had given him his command, James Smith and the Consultation of 1835, had dissolved in disarray.

So when Travis is writing his famous letters, he cannot be sure to whom he should even address them. But he acts anyway, on his own hook.

Down in Goliad, Fannin has ten times the men Travis had brought with him but one gets the impression he was always looking for others to tell him what to do, could not function in the rowdy near-anarchy environment of Texas at that time.

His one attempt to relieve the Alamo in late February had been farcical, tragicomic; first he decides by committee if they should even go. By then it should have been obvious that hitching up mismatched, untrained oxen to the few decrepit carts they had on hand was not going to work. Then the next morning he decides, again by committee, to abandon the attempt and return to the mission.

In the days leading up to his catastrophe, while Urrea drew steadily closer, Fannin sent out impassioned pleas for instructions, yet when those urgent instructions came he chose to follow them at his own leisure.

Given the semi-autonomous nature of his men, perhaps it is a bit much to blame all of this on Fannin. He wasn't the only one present at Goliad who harbored a scathing contempt for the abilities of Mexican army, which contempt, despite the bloody fall at the Alamo, would last up until they were surrounded by Urrea's army near Coleto Creek.

Birdwatcher

Where is Texas? I jokes.

You don't suppose the several day siege at Alamo and subsiquent losses had anything to do with the delay? Tho poon IS a powerful incentive to egomaniacs, and heck, everyone.

Mike, don't put words in my mouth,....I SUGGESTED that you PROOF READ your chit,...prior to hitting submit.

That's ALL I said,...and if I were you I'd be saying thanks.

New arrivals that haven't read "all your posts" won't read it the way old compadres do.

GTC

Thanks Greg.

Anyways, Lorenzo De Zavala might have been selected as interim Vice President because he WAS different.

Somewhat overlooked in the main flow of events is the remarkable career of the guy they chose as Interim President; David G. Burnet.

Originally from a well-to-do family in New Jersey, by the time he was 24 years of age Burnet had fought in revolutions against Spain in Chile and Venezuela alongside Simon Bolivar.

(Simon Bolivar is another guy we forget about now, he was quite famous in his day. One of the most unexpected things I found on my 2014 bicycle expedition, in Salamanca on the Seneca Indian Reservation in Western New York State, was a nineteeth century monument to Simon Bolivar. Gotta be a story behind that.)

He returns in 1812 and moves to join his brothers in the then-recently settled city of Cincinatti OH. Of the three brothers, David is the prodigal. His one brother stays put and becomes a Senator, the other mayor, David moves to Natchitoches LA and sets up a mercantile business. There he develops tuberculosis and heads for Texas seeking a better climate.

In what seems like one of the great misguided acts of generosity of all time, a band of Comanches finds the ailing Burnet on the Colorado and take him in. He lived with them for two years, no word on how many subsequently died of tuberculosis although that disease would take an enormous toll among all the western tribes in the coming decades. While he was with them, by hos own account he prevailed upon them to peaceably return several Mexican captives to their families

His health restored, Burnet returns to Cincinatti to practice law but is back in Texas and settles in Austin's colony in 1826, age 38, travels to Mexico with De Zavala the following year and receives a grant but cannot recruit enough settlers back in Ohio to follow through.

He gets married to a New Jersey girl at age 43, and returns to Texas in 1830, this time with a steam engine to operate a sawmill, sets up shop on the San Jacinto River in the area of present-day Houston. He loses the land the mill sits on because of his refusal to convert to Catholicism, but is able to become a Judge at San Felipe.

Judge Burnet was not an elected delegate, but stopped in at the Convention of 1836 after it was underway on his way to join the Alamo defenders. The contentious delegates are trying to pick an interim President for the new republic. Sam Houston is off in East Texas ostensibly meeting with the Cherokees, Stephen F. Austin I believe was in New Orleans, Judge Burnet, who arrives on the scene and is not part of any opposing faction, gets elected.

Among his first actions was to prevail upon the Convention to remain at Washington on the Brazos to finish the process of creating the Republic instead of fleeing northeast to Nacodoches as many had wanted to do when word of the Fall of the Alamo came. Instead the Texas government would move to Harrisburg adjacent to the coast opposite Galveston Island eleven days later.

It was this move that drew Santa Anna down there the following month far ahead of his main force, as it turned out setting the stage for San Jacinto. As it was, Burnet's subsequent escape from Harrisburg was so close that it was he and his wife among others that were in that famous rowboat within rifle shot when the lancers under then Col. Juan Nepomucino Almonte arrived on the shore to apprehend them.

To protect the others as best he could, Burnet stood up separately in the boat to draw their fire. For his own part Almonte, who is credited by some with saving Susanna Dickinson at the Alamo, refused to open fire as there were women in the boat. Almonte survived San Jacinto, ironically in part because he commanded the men least inclined to flee in disorder when the unexpected Texian attack came, and so was still alive when order was being restored later in the battle. He surrendered to Texas Secretary of War Thomas J. Rusk, pretty much Second in Command after Houston.

Worth noting that David Burnet despised and distrusted Sam Houston from the outset and the two men would remain bitter political and personal enemies their entire lives.

Birdwatcher

A quick addendum, Almonte is worthy of further mention re: the intricacies of Mexican society at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Almonte#Early_life

He was the son of a well-to-do Mexican Catholic priest and a Mexican Indian woman. Educated in New Orleans he was fluently bilingual and understood and, one gathers, admired Americans.

He returned to Mexico after his politically active father was executed for treason against Spain. After Mexican Independence came in 1821, Almonte had traveled to London as part of a diplomatic delegation.

Despite his Republican roots, Almonte was a life-long Centralist, believing an authoritarian state was the only way Mexico would transcend its eternally divided nature. This to the point that he was one of the principal actors twenty five years later in supporting the actual French invasion and take-over of Mexico in the 1860's by Napoleon the Third of France and the short-lived ('64-'67) coronation and reign of Austrian Archduke Maxilian Ferdinand in Mexico.

This coronation would prove ultimately fatal to Archduke/Emperor Maximilian, who was shot for his trouble. Almonte himself died in 1869, in exile in France, aged 66.

Birdwatcher

What time does that start on Saturday, Mike?

You participating this year?

Ya prob'ly.

The posted schedule is a little vague, I'm recalling the first battle reenactment is around 10amand another after lunch.

http://www.texasarmy.org/events''

Birdwatcher

That, and waiting for the supply trains to catch up, they were coming in from several hundred miles away. But the indications are too that Santa Anna was vastly overconfident. None of his generals seemed to have shared that attitude, but then as far as I know none of them had been in Texas for the way one-sided wins of 1813 with Arredondo like Santa Anna had been. Witnessing the defeat and slaugter of many hundreds of Americans with but light losses on his own side likely skewed his outlook on things. The bloody cost of taking the Alamo doesn't seem to have phased him any.

At this point I was gonna go into the various US militia units that ended up at Goliad under Fannin but that's gonna take a bit of prep. Turns out Copano Bay (adjacent to present-day Rockport) was a major port of entry at that time and most of these militia units arrived from New Orleans by ships. Goliad, sixty miles inland, was the nearest major fortified post, so its natural that many American volunteers ended up there in the path of Urrea's expedition.

Meanwhile, there's a legendary figure in Texas history; Francita Alavez, the Angel of Goliad, a young and attractive Mexican woman, nineteen or twenty at the time, and the mistress of a Mexican officer serving with Urrea. The best known story is of her intervening to save the lives of several men from the slaughter at Goliad.

Turns out she first appears in that light three weeks earlier after Agua Dulce, where Reuben Brown credited her with saving him from Execution.

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/goliadframe.htm

"Urrea * said that I would have to be executed according to Santa Anna's orders... was... taken out to be shot, but was spared through the intervention of a priest, and a Mexican lady named Alvarez.... I was then marched with other prisoners to Matamoros."

On that horrible day at Goliad, after she had already intervened to save the lives of many....

"During the time of the massacre she stood in the street, her hair floating, speaking wildly, and abusing the Mexican officers, especially Portilla. She appeared almost frantic.".... Among those at Goliad who were saved by her intervention was Benjamin Franklin Hughes, Captain Horton's young orderly, then a lad of fifteen years. [He was born in Jefferson County, Kentucky, September 8, 1820] Hughes, in his old age, wrote an account of his experiences which is preserved among the Philip C. Tucker Papers in the Library of the University of Texas.

Urrea by that time had moved further east to Victoria, pursuing his campaign. After the slaughter Francita's consort, one Captain Telesforo Alavéz, followed him there bringing Francita with him....

"She afterward showed much attention and kindness to the surviving prisoners [at Goliad], frequently sending messages and supplies of provisions to them from Victoria."

One of those who successfully fled the Goliad Massacre was Issac Hamilton. Wounded grievously in both legs, he was reluctantly abandoned to his fate by three fellow escapees, but somehow recovered enough to make it to Victoria, only to be recaptured by Mexican troops and sentenced to be shot. Enter the Angel of Goliad again....

"From this place I was hauled on a cart some fifteen miles, when I was put upon a poor horse . . . until we arrived at Victoria. At this place I was courtmartialed and order to be shot, which fate I escaped by the intercession of two Mexican Ladies."

And of Miller's captive Tennesseans at Copano Bay (more about them later.....)

When she arrived at Copano with her husband, who was one of Urrea's officers, Miller and his men had just been taken prisoners; they were tightly bound with cord so as to completely check the circulation of blood in their arms, and in this state (way) had been left several hours when she saw them.

Her heart was touched at the sight, and she immediately caused the cords to be removed, and refreshments to be given them. She treated them with great kindness, and when on the morning of the massacre, she learned that the prisoners were to be shot, she so effectually pleaded with Col. Garey (sic) (whose humane feelings revolted at the barbarous order) that, with great personal responsibility to himself and at great hazard at (in) thus going counter to the orders of the then all-powerful Santa Anna, he resolved to save all that he could; and a few of us in consequence, were left to tell of that bloody day.

Most of those who escaped execution were eventually imprisoned in Matamoras, Sna. Alavez again....

After her return to Matamoros, she was unwearied in her attention to the unfortunate Americans confined there. She went on to the City of Mexico with her husband (who there abandoned her.) She returned to Matamoros without any funds for her support; but she found many warm friends among those who had heard of and witnessed her extraordinary exertion in relieving the Texas (Texan) prisoners.

Who she really was and where she came from are mysteries, somewhere in the interior of Mexico apparently. But in contrast to the hot seventeen year-old Santa Anna was at that time bedding in San Antonio, whoever she was Francita Alavez also spoke English.

What happened after that is not known for sure, she disappears from mainstream history.

I prefer the King Ranch version although said ranch would not appear until 1853, seventeen years later. In this version Francita and her children became Kinenos; part of the that community of vaqueros living and working on the King Ranch where their descendants still live today. And I prefer to think that Richard King knew who she was, and treated her accordingly.

"she died on the King Ranch and is buried there in an unmarked grave .... Old Captain King and Mrs. King knew and respected her identity."

All told, Francita may have saved the lives of as many as eighty men, and to be able to pull off what she did, she was likely pretty hot herself.

There's a modest monument to her memory, a statue put up in more recent times, outside the mission at Goliad.

http://porterbriggs.com/the-angel-of-goliad/

Bidrwatcher

Very interesting reading, Mike. Thanks.

Ya, and that last remarkable in that there are no less than six separate eye-witness accounts of Sna. Alavez saving lives in five separate times and locations. The total at Goliad alone may be as high as eighty men or more. She must have been an absolute pistol in her day.

Another remarkable person on the scene, one John Sowers Brooks of Staunton, Va.

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/goliadframe.htm

Twenty-two years old at the time, came to Texas after a stint in the United States Marine Corps. Turns out the mindset ain't changed much over the last 180 years

From a letter to his sister, sent from Goliad, March 4th, 1836.

I am a soldier of fortune; and all the premonitions of my child hood early told me that I should be one. My profession, perhaps for life, be it short or long, will be that of arms. It is the only pursuit in which I could feel a throb of interest; and the cause in which I now exercise it, renders it still dearer, and more ennobling to me. It is the course of Liberty, of the oppressed against the Tyrant, of the free man against the bigoted slave, and, what recommends it more strongly to me, of the weak against the strong. If I fall, let me fall---It is one of the chances of the game I play-a casualty to which every soldier is liable.


Sadly, Mr. Sowers, grievously wounded in battle, would be shot along with the rest on Palm Sunday, March 27th, 1836. A good man lost among many.

Birdwatcher

Birdwatcher

What do think about the Henry Warnell Alamo survivor story?

I think individuals slipping out of the Alamo before or during the battle is entirely possible,and somewhere else I mentioned a newspaper account out of Missouri two weeks later speaking of a wounded Alamo survivor travelling back east with his brother.

During the fight itself, possibly as many as 100 Alamo defenders could have been killed OUTSIDE the walls, 50 who took cover in a ditch to the west as mentioned in a Mexican officer's account, and those we know bailed from the long barracks and livestock pens on the east side making a break to escape.

Bailing from the mission compound as 1,000+ soldados poured in through the opened gate on the north wall would be the logical thing to do, those that jumped west would just run into the Mexican camps and even more soldados than they were fleeing, those that fled east were heading for open country and escape, IF they could get past a couple of hundred lancers.

Birdwatcher

Just a few more years and the alamo wouldn't have fallen.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/two-sams-and-their-six-shooter/

Here's another thing....

...did Santa Anna WANT the defenders to slip out of the Alamo?

...we don't know how many defenders died at the Alamo because people were still getting IN after the siege began, notwithstanding a couple of thousand Mexican troops in town by then. Could have been about 160 active defenders, could have been a bit shy of 250, depending on who's after-action report you read.

IOW the Mexican dragnet, if there was one, was remarkably porous.

Jose Antonio Navarro was a lifelong Bexar resident, one of three Tejanos who actually signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, and one of those few Tejanos who successfully weathered the advent of large-scale American immigration into Texas in the following decades.

Navarro was in Washington-on-the-Brazos during the siege, but presumably on his return on would hear the local Tejanos' take on the events at the Alamo to a degree most Anglo observers might not.

Ten years later, in 1846, Navarro was quoted by Josiah Gregg of "Commerce of the Prairies" fame....

http://www.kancoll.org/books/gregg/

Not long after my arrival in San Antonio de Bexar I visited Don Jose Antonio Navarro..... He instanced, in particular, the affair at the Alamo, where 180 odd men undertook to defend it against several thousand. He asserted that Santa Anna at all times left the eastern side of the fortification free, in hopes the Texans would escape - preferring to let them go in peace to a victory over them which he knew would be costly

With all due respect to Don Navarro (IF he was quoted correctly), it would make sense for Santa Anna to have them try to escape so as to make killing or executing them far easier than it turned out to be.

Santa Anna was still waiting at Bexar for his the rest of his force to complete that arduous 600-mile trek to San Antonio anyway, no loss to him really in pausing to besiege.

IF the Alamo defenders had tried to make a break for it, they could potentially have been caught and surrounded in open country, exactly as happened two weeks later to twice as many Americans trapped by half as many Mexicans on the open prairie outside of Goliad.

Yet, on March 4th, tho the Alamo defenders are low on food and ammunition, and even tho the north wall has already been breached by just the light Mexican field-pieces on hand and with heavier cannon due to arrive the very next week, Santa Anna shocks his generals by suddenly calling for a meeting to plan an assault for March 6th.

Why? Maybe because 120 miles to the south at San Patricio and Agua Dulce, his potential rival and political enemy Urrea has just won two near-brilliant strikes on the American invaders and their Tejano allies.

Sounds plausible, only thing is AFAIK we don't have written corroboration from those Mexican officers on the scene the way we do for other Alamo occurrences.

Birdwatcher

Perhaps, but perhaps not.

While 180-250 guys with Colt's revolvers coulda made a big difference defending the Alamo that morning, the problem with handguns "winning the West" is that, after a couple of initial minor skirmishes with naive Comanches, the six-shooter had almost NO effect on casualty rates.

The problem was getting close enough to an Indian to hit one with a rifle, let alone a handgun. And Ranger Captain RIP Ford hisself, who would know better than almost anyone, put the revolver on a merely equal footing with the bow and arrow when it came to mounted combat. He did most of his own fighting with rifles.

The way you won fights out on the plains is you got within rifle range of your enemy, got off your horse, took careful aim and shot the other guy off of HIS horse. First ones to do this in a big way were the Delawares and other tribes from back east, who whupped everybody when they arrived on the plains ahead of the advancing Frontier.

Anyways, in practical terms it weren't until the advent of the '51 Colt Navy in the mid fifties that revolvers became cheap, durable and portable enough that most folks could afford one.

Birdwatcher

While they weren't fighting comanche at the alamo, but lined up mesicans, I think the walker would have done a bang up job.

The Colt Walker holds a powder charge of 60 grains in each chamber, more than twice what a typical black powder revolver holds.

Medical officer John "Rip" Ford took a special interest in the Walkers when they arrived at Veracruz. He obtained two examples for himself and is the primary source for information about their performance during the war and afterward. His observation that the revolver would carry as far and strike with the same or greater force than the .54 caliber Mississippi Rifle seems to have been based on a single observation of a Mexican soldier hit at a distance of well over one hundred yards. The Walker, unlike most succeeding martial pistols and revolvers, was a practical weapon out to about 100 yards.

and that isn't taking into consideration their resale value


http://www.gunsinternational.com/gu...-walker-1847-c9865-.cfm?gun_id=100577235

Yep, I've read Ford's memoirs a number of times, remarkable reading And later on in that very same collected writings he goes on in depth about the revolver versus the bow and arrow.

People made all sorts of claims back then before they had chronographs and could calculate ft pounds.

I dunno that a five-pound hand-held revolver has ever been a "practical weapon out to 100 yards" as we understand the term today.

Samuel Walker had every reason to want a hand cannon on account of he had been run through with a Comanche lance and just about died from it three years earlier.

Colt did refine 'em with his subsequent Colt Dragoons, but Jeff Davis in the '50's, gave the ground-breaking 2nd US Cavalry ("AKA Jeff Davis's Own") the then brand-new .36 Colt Navies and Minie-rifled .58 cal. carbines when he coulda just as easily given 'em .44 Dragoons.

Once metallurgy improvements allowed Colt Navy-sized .44's by 1860, Walker-sized revolvers were pretty much out the window.

Birdwatcher

Since you started this thread, I dug out my copy of "Texas Illiad" again. In it, Hardin mentions several times that the Mexican black powder was horrible. Very undependable, and slow burning, resulting in very low velocity. After the battle of Concepcion, the Texans salvaged the lead but dumped the powder out of the cartridges.
Where was Santa Anna getting his powder? Was it supplied by England as well as most of the weapons?
7mm

Turns out England had produced more than 1.6 million Brown Bess muskets between 1804 and 1815 for the Napoleonic Wars, so it no wonder that they showed up all over the world in the following decades. I dunno that it was Santa Anna per se who purchased the weapons used on the Texas campaign or a prior regime.

Black powder of course seems a more fragile commodity than guns, I have no idea as to global powder production in those years. Black powder was ground in mills.

The Spanish word for "mill" is "molino", one of the bloodiest battles in the Mexican War would be fought over the Molino del Rey (King's Mill) armaments production complex outside of Mexico City. Part of this blew up in a massive explosion at the close of the fight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Molino_del_Rey

Working in a powder mill at any time in the candle and lantern era had to be a risky proposition but even then-remote San Antonio may have been making at least some of its own powder. A tall powder mill famously stood on a hill (Powder House Hill) in an open area some distance east of town overlooking the Alamo and turns up in the background of a number of period paintings, I do not know much about it but it had to have been of Spanish/Mexican origin.

Long way of saying that I believe the Mexicans were using home grown powder but in the absence of production figures I dunno.

Birdwatcher

One of the confusing things about the Second Texas War of Independence is trying to keep track of the militia companies from the 'States.

Local guard and militia companies were popular social organizations back in the United States in that era and a number were raised, primarily in the South, to go fight in Texas. Although originally local in origin, membership in these militias was fluid and it was common for additional recruits from other states to be incorporated en-route. Likewise, once in Texas, individual members or whole platoons might switch to becoming part of another militia. Even so, for the most part these men expected to elect and serve under their own officers. The significance of all of this is that these organizations could hugely complicate the chain of command for guys like Fannin.

One thing the presence of these militias illustrates too is that the Second Texas War of Independence was largely a privately-funded venture, these militia companies initially being armed, dressed and equipped by wealthy individuals or consortiums of the same. The motive of these financial backers was to make a risky but potentially lucrative investment, the motives of the actual volunteers were a mixture of adventure, idealism, simple employment, and for the prospect of generous land grants if victorious.

Two of the militias; the Alabama Red Rovers and the Georgia Battalion of Permanent Volunteers, were also supplied by their home state arsenals. Uniforms varies from the US Army-like attire (complete with dress version) of the New Orleans Greys through the red but otherwise civilian-looking attire of the Alabama Red Rovers to outfits like the Kentucky Mustangs for whom no uniform is recorded at all (members of all four of these militias would be present at Goliad).

Once in Texas, supplies from their financial backers could become sporadic or non-existent and most of these militias were reduced to being "nearly naked and in rags" within a few months of arrival.

The best-remembered of these militia companies today is the New Orleans Greys, remembered because several died at the Alamo and because their now-famous banner taken from there was triumphantly siezed by Santa Anna and sent to Mexico City as proof that he was indeed fighting pirates ie. non-citizens looking to take over Texas.



The New Orleans Greys (to distinguish them from the Mobile Greys, the and the San Antonio Greys, likewise present at Goliad) were financed by a wealthy German Jewish immigrant to American and Texas, one Adolphus Stern. Two companies were formed amid pomp, ceremony and celebration in New Orleans in October of 1835.

One company (54 volunters issued with Springfield Muskets) traveled by steamboat upriver to Arkansas and entered Texas by an overland route, their famous banner being given to them by the ladies of a Texian community en-route. The other company, 68 volunteers issued with rifles and accompanied by a now-famous 18 pounder cannon, took ship for the Texas Coast. The eventual fates of just 51 of these 122 men are known.

Both companies converged on San Antonio in time to take part in the December battle wherein the Centralist force under General Cos was driven inside the Alamo, besieged, and finally allowed to return to Mexico proper.

In January the company split, most of both companies joining the Matamoras Expedition of Johnson and Grant. At least 23 remained behind at the Alamo with the iconic banner and would die there. Possibly all of those who traveled south to Goliad with Grant and Johnson quit the expedition at Houston's urging at Goliad, 21 of these men later died in the Goliad Massacre.

As many as 50 of the New Orleans Greys had left Goliad before that final battle and massacre to join the volunteers staging at Gonzales in order to relieve the Alamo defenders, but arrived too late and so escaped death at both locales. At least seven of these men, still in their signature uniforms, are known to have fought at San Jacinto.

Birdwatcher

One of the most famous icons of the Alamo is the eighteen-pounder cannon, mounted at the south west corner of the compound facing towards what was then the town. This was the cannon used by Travis at the start of the siege to defy calls to negotiate or surrender.

John Wayne did a pretty good job of depicting it in his 1960 version...



...except that the wooden mock-up he used wasn't nearly big enough. The real one, as depicted by fiberglass-with-steel-barrel-liner replica in the 2004 Billy-Bob Thornton version, was awesome....





(Tho I cannot find a good image without people in it).

The Alamo cannon arrived at the coast at Veslaco (due South of present-day Houston) with that company of the New Orleans Greys but had been left there when it was discovered no ammunition had been sent. Leaving it there was probably an easy decision as it was enormously heavy.

For point of reference, a brass 12-pounder Napoleon, pretty much the standard Civil War field ordinance, weighed 1,200 pounds and that was just the tube. Cannon, carriage, limber (two-wheeled carriage that pulled the cannon) and ammunition in said limber collectively weighed about 4,000 lbs.

The Alamo cannon was made of iron. I cannot find the point of origin but most likely it had been a naval cannon, if so just the tube alone weighed in excess of 4,000 lbs.

Prob'ly much naivete at the time thinking such a massive piece of ordnance belonged in an isolated stone-and-adobe mission not physically defending anything in particular.

Twenty New Orleans Greys were detached to go back and get the cannon from Veslaco and haul it 200 miles to the Alamo, said crew growing to 75 participants en-route.

I can find nothing describing this epic task, nor anything about how many of those 75 men stayed on to defend the Alamo. I do think that it must have been a considerable relief to those 75 men when the Alamo came finally into sight from the higher ground to the east wherein the road from that direction entered the town.

What happened to this cannon is a mystery. When the Mexican army withdrew from San Antonio after San Jacinto they spiked and knocked the trunions (mounting points) off of those cannon among the 19 active Alamo cannon they left behind to render them useless. These were left on the ground or rolled into the ditches. No word on whether the 18 pounder met that fate although it seems a certainty.

For 47 years beginning in 1870 what was almost certainly this cannon was on display at San Pedro Springs Park about three miles from the Alamo, that park in that era being a prominent social and entertainment center. That cannon was removed in 1917, nobody knows where it went, possibly it was melted down as scrap.

Birdwatcher

Thanks for this

That cannon was removed in 1917, nobody knows where it went, possibly it was melted down as scrap.

What I'd always heard too! Remember that 1917 was the beginning of scrap metal drives for the War to end all wars here in the states!

Someone needed their ass kicked for that.

You are welcome Sir, and writing this helps me get this convoluted series of events somewhat in context. One thing becomes apparent; we all remember the Alamo, for good reason, but perhaps most of the attention back then leading up to that siege was focused upon the fortified mission at Goliad, where most of the Texian army, such as it was, was quartered.

If San Antonio was, geographically speaking, way out in left field, Goliad at least sat on the road between the important harbor of Copano Bay and the interior and the intersecting shortest overland route between Mexico and the East Texas settlements. Indeed, from survivors' accounts, it was those very strategic considerations which influenced the men at Goliad to fatally delay as long as they did.

Things moved fast in this Second Texas War of Independence, such that while at the end of 1835 the Federalists, those who wanted to remain part of Mexico, dominated the political discussion and ran the provisional government at San Felipe, by February of '36 that provisional government had collapsed and the war had become a war of independence.

Phillip Dimmit was a Texian military commander who played a major role in these months around Goliad, and is gonna be the topic of my next post. As an long-time resident of Texas who had married into the Tejano community, Dimmit began as a staunch Federalist, even being credited with designing the 1824 Mexican Flag that was the first official flag of the rebellion.

By December of 1835 however, he had become committed to independence to a degree that he was one of the principal movers if not THE prime mover behind the mostly forgotten Goliad Declaration of Independence, December 20th, 1835.

Reading it, one is impressed by how well-informed and erudite the authors were about the then-current events (almost like they read the same books we do today ), also the wording gives clear insight into their motives and mindset.

A few excerpts

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/consultations5.htm

Solemnly impressed with a sense of the danger of the crisis to which recent and remote events have conducted the public affairs of their country, the undersigned prefer this method of laying before their fellow-citizens, a brief retrospect of the light in which they regard both the present and the past, and of frankly declaring for themselves, the policy and the uncompromising course which they have resolved to pursue for the future.....

They have seen their camp thronged, but too frequently, with those who were more anxious to be served by, than to serve their country--with men more desirous of being honored with command that capable of commanding.

They have seen the busy aspirants for office running from the field to the council ball, and from this back to the camp, seeking emolument and not service, and swarming like hungry flies around the body politic.....

The North and East of Mexico will now become the stronghold of centralism. Thence it can sally in whatever direction its arch deviser may prefer to employ its weapons. The counter-revolution in the interior once smothered, the whole fury of the contest will be poured on Texas. She is principally populated with North-Americans. To expel these from its territory, and parcel it out among the instruments of its wrath, will combine the motive and the means for consummating the scheme of the President Dictator.

Already, we are denounced, proscribed, outlawed, and exiled from the country. Our lands, peaceably and lawfully acquired, are solemnly pronounced the proper subject of indiscriminate forfeiture, and our estates of confiscation. The laws and guarantees under which we entered the country as colonists, tempted the unbroken silence, sought the dangers of the wilderness, braved the prowling Indian, erected our numerous improvements, and opened and subdued the earth to cultivation, are either abrogated or repealed, and now trampled under the hoofs of the usurper's cavalry.

And with regard to the Tejanos...

We have indulged sympathy, too, for the condition of many whom, we vainly flattered ourselves, were opposed, in common with their adopted brethren, to the extension of military domination over the domain of Texas. But the siege of Bexar has dissolved the illusion. Nearly all their physical force was in the line of the enemy and armed with rifles. Seventy days occupation of the fortress of Goliad has also abundantly demonstrated the general diffusion among the Creole population of a like attachment to the institutions of their ancient tyrants.

Intellectually enthralled, and strangers to the blessings of regulated liberty, the only philanthropic service which we can ever force on their acceptance, is that of example. In doing this, we need not expect or even hope for their co-operation.

It belongs to the North-Americans of Texas to set this bright, this cheering, this all-subduing example.

Although I will observe this overlooks how completely catastrophic the First Texas Revolution, likewise American-dominated, had proven for the Tejanos in 1813, in which fight most had come out for independence. Also apparent by 1835 was the fact that, from a Tejano perspective, Americans were swamping Texas. Already by 1835 Anglos (settled mostly in east Texas) outnumbered Tejanos nearly five to one. A great many Tejanos and even General Urrea were by sympathy Federalist, but could read the writing on the wall.


On a different note, it is interesting to see reference made to Tejanos armed with rifles.

And, further along, it turns out politics ain't changed much....

The foregoing, we are fully aware, is a blunt, and in some respects, a humiliating, but a faithful picture. However much we may wish, or however much we may be interested, or feel disposed to deceive our enemy, let us carefully guard against deceiving ourselves.

We are in more danger from this---from his insinuating, secret, silent, and unseen influence in our councils, both in the field and in the cabinet, and from the use of his silver and gold, than from his numbers, his organization, or the concentration of his power in a single arm.

The gold of Philip purchased what his arms could not subdue---the liberties of Greece. Our enemy, too, holds this weapon. Look well to this, people of Texas, in the exercise of suffrage. Look to it, Counselors, your appointments to office. Integrity is a precious jewel.

Dimmit was essentially maneuvered out of command for his trouble, and why this first declaration was set aside for a second two months later probably had at least a little to do with those busy aspirants for office running from the field to the council ball, and from this back to the camp, seeking emolument and not service, and swarming like hungry flies around the body politic.

Birdwatcher

Think about it? A symbolism thing. Sacrifice and using something with a past history. Like this piece was used to fight Santa Anna! Now we are going to do our part and it will help
Defeat the Kaiser!!!

Hard to imagine now but the Alamo was almost removed entirely around the turn of the century, at the behest of local business interests who wanted to develop the real estate. That it was not we can mostly thank Adina de Zavala, granddaughter of the original interim Vice President. Then a wealthy society matron, Clara Driscoll, also stepped in. For better or worse their Daughters of the Republic organization would run the Alamo shrine for more than a century.

Hard to imagine now, but it took a while for the Alamo to catch on to the iconic status it has today (the Disney series Davy Crockett helped immeasurably in that regard).

At present, its still a huge tourist draw, but in 1917 not so much, ergo not WORTH as much to the bean counters.

No telling what that 4,000 pound hunk of iron sitting out in that park looked like after 47 years exposed to the weather, the bore possibly full of accumulated trash. Plus there's still six (??) original cannon, still broken and much pitted and eroded despite our modern restoration abilities, on the Alamo grounds. They don't look like much and most visitors walk right on by.



San Pedro Park at the times, with its picturesque springs and cypress-shaded clear pool, was probably a bigger draw, and was remodeled/redeveloped several times to modernize it over the years. I'm guessing there was a faction in city council at the time only too happy to see that cannon sacrificed for a worthy cause.

Birdwatcher

Up until a few years ago there was a Bronze 12 pounder Napoleon in (I believe) Milam park. It had been restored pretty nicely best I remember. But I don't know its whereabouts either.

While we're on the subject of cannons, I ran across some interesting things regarding the artillery tubes in Gettysburg.
It's pretty well known that the only gun now on the field that fought in the battle is a 3" Rifle, No. 233, near the Buford Monument. This gun, part of Hall's Battery, is credited as the first Federal cannon fired in the battle.
Turns out, most of the guns brought in to mark the field by the park service, were placed in the 1890s. Back then, records were kept of which gun was a veteran of the war, and at that time, over 100 of them cold be accurately placed in the position they fought. The NPS had over 4000 documents on the guns at the turn of the century.
Unfortunately, the records were lost, and as other Battlefields were being preserved, the guns were moved around to God knows where! Many were moved to other parks or other spots on the battlefield. Many others were melted and re-cast as monuments or tablets marking the field.
George Newton's book "Silent Sentinals", is a very interesting read if you're interested in the guns used in the battle.
7mm

Thanks you for all your work writing this up. It's been an interesting read and am looking forward to future contributions.

Birdy,

There is some research on the Mexican Powder stuff. It's just been over 35 years since I read it. Only thing I remember was it was domestic and very low quality. I had a reenacting acquaintance who was also the NMLRA rep in texas back in the70's. Deceased now. But he had several kegs of powder that the Republic of Texas purchased in the early 1840's. They came out of Galveston. And were of US mfg.

You Sir too are welcome, truth is I'm learning as I go along.

Anyways....

One class of Texians I find especially interesting are those who came early (relatively speaking), ahead of the main swell of settlement, and made their living among the Tejanos, becoming fluent in Spanish and often taking Tejano wives.

These guys either arrived with or soon accumulated property and often married into (or attempted to marry into in the case of William Kerr) prominent Tejano families rather than marrying more ordinary anonymous Tejano women.

Phillip Dimmitt, Joseph Linn and William Kerr, all merchants/entepreneurs in the Victoria/Refugio/Goliad area, fall into this category. So too one could place James Bowie, although Bowie's aspirations never seem to have fallen into the merely mercantile. Deaf Smith was in a category all by himself; he married the widowed daughter of his vaquero business partner, raised her two daughters and she bore him four more children of his own. And as for marrying more ordinary Tejanos, we know that at least two defenders of the Alamo had married local girls, their father getting them out on the eve of the final assault.

But... here of Phillip Dimmitt.....

Dimmitt arrived in San Antonio de Bexar in 1823, twelve years ahead of the war. We do not know where he had learned Spanish, or from whence his capital to set up shop came, but shortly thereafter, still in his early twenties, he contracted to supply the needs of those soldiers stationed at the Alamo, said supplies presumably contracted from the United States (which flood of goods into Bexar oughtta interest somebody academic). He married a well-bred local Tejana and commenced to start a family.

As far as we know it was a case of hard work and honest dealings coming out ahead; the industrious Dimmitt rapidly expanded his business, by the outbreak of war he operated stores at Guadalupe Victoria (AKA Victoria), Goliad and also what was then an important point of entry; Dimmitt's Landing on the shore of Lavaca Bay (twenty miles due south of Victoria). Dimmitt was well thought of by those recently arrived colonists whom he served as well as with the original Tejano community. His prestige among and ability to work with the Tejanos served him well when it came to staying informed of developments on the Mexican side of the upcoming war.

Like most of the established Texians, Dimmitt started out a Federalist. He first appears in the war advocating the interception of arriving Centralist General Martin Perfecto de Cos and an anticipated $50,000 in Mexican funds either upon arrival at Copano Bay or during his passage inland to take command in San Antonio. That opportunity was missed but Dimmitt, taking up arms, joined an October expedition of 125 men that overwhelmed the Mexican garrison at La Bahia Mission in Goliad, thereby cutting Cos's lines of communication with the coast. Dimmitt assumed command of the fortification, $10,000 worth of captured supplies and a number of cannon were sent north to support the Texian siege of Cos at San Antonio.

At this point, the internal divisions among the Texians become apparent.

Against Austin's order, Dimmitt took the common-sense step of sending a small force to take Fort Lipantitlan at San Patricio on the Nueces River, essentially the entry point to what was then Texas and the closest fortification to Mexico proper. This was done, but then the commander of that small force dispatched by Dimmitt, one Ira Westover, communicated directly with Austin, going over Dimmitt's head.

By December, Dimmitt had become committed to Texas independence and was officially removed from command by the still-Federalist Austin for his trouble, his force at Goliad protested this order and remained loyal to Dimmitt. Dimmitt and a band of companions fought in in the Battle of Bexar at San Antonio that same month and then returned to Goliad where the pro-independence Dimmitt resumed de-facto command.

In January of '36 the pro-Federalist Matamoras Expedition under Grant and Johnson arrived at Goliad, along with the still-Federalist Sam Houston. It is most likely at this point that Dimmitt dispatched those twenty New Orleans Greys to recover the cannon left on the coast at Velasco.

Under pressure from Grant and Johnson and the then pro-Federalist-interim government, Dimmitt relinquished command, whereupon James Fannin took charge at Goliad. Dimmitt and thirty companions then returned to San Antonio to join the Alamo garrison.

By chance, Dimmit had been dispatched by Travis on a scouting mission towards the south when Santa Anna arrived from the west. After several days waiting from outside the town, when it became obvious the occupation was long-term and that a major invasion was underway, Dimmitt returned to Victoria with his family both to settle his affairs and to recruit more volunteers.

At that point the war moved so quickly Dimmitt was a step behind.

He narrowly missed joining Houston at Gonzales with a force of twenty volunteers, Houston having evacuated ahead of the advancing Mexican army. Then Dimmitt returned to Victoria and used his available resources to evacuate his neighbors just ahead of Urrea's advance. Again using his considerable resources and talents, Dimmitt arrived at San Jacinto with reinforcements and critical supplies just one day after that battle.

Dimmitt's eventual demise was unfortunate. By 1840 he was engaged in operating a trading post on the Nueces. A rival, one Henry Kinney, operated a competing post fifteen miles downriver at what is now Corpus Christi. At that time the Nueces was the de-facto Border adjacent to the notorious Nueces Strip, and the usual smuggling with the collusion of both sides prevailed. Dimmitt was captured in a punitive raid by Mexican forces that left Kinney's post suspiciously intact.

In Mexico, Dimmitt was a wanted man on account of his prior activities in the war and was removed to the interior. Expecting execution and otherwise despairing of ever gaining his freedom, he is said to have purposely taken an overdose of opium.

He was survived by his wife and two sons, Antonio Alamo Dimmitt and Texas Philip Dimmitt.

Birdwatcher

Holy Kshizzle! How did THOSE get by unfired? Between Indian raids, the Mexican War and the War Between the States one would think powder woulda been in demand.

Birdwatcher

Probably the same way they occasionally find 80 year old ordnance stored away in some half forgotten bunker on this or that post or former post. It got put there and was forgotten about. Some supply sergeant squirreled it away in case it was ever needed and it never was.

Louisiana is still dealing with disposing of 6 million pounds of artillery propellant store out in the open at Camp Minden.

Turns out there was a number of Kerrs in Texas, the William Kerr I mentioned above was actually the business partner of the Kerr I had intended to refer to, Peter Kerr, and neither should be confused with one James Kerr, allegedly "the ugliest man in Texas"...

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/dewitt&kerr2.htm

...tho surely we got 'Fire members could give him a run for his money.

Sadly too, one eighteen year-old Joseph Kerr died defending the Alamo. No degree of blood relationship attends to these four Kerrs. The ugly one is to whom Kerrville TX refers.

Peter Kerr is one of them guys you wish you could sit down and talk with. Originally from Pennsylvania, Peter Kerr arrived in Texas aged twenty-nine years of age and established a mercantile business in Victoria amid the Martin De Leon grant, the only predominantly Mexican colony in Texas.

At one point he was contracted to marry a pretty senorita from a good family but lost everything to an Indian Raid, the father of the bride subsequently refusing permission to marry. The next time Kerr returned to Texas he brung a still, but accounts say somehow it sailed from New Orleans without him.

Martin De Leon is worthy of mention, Criollo aristocracy from Mexico, tall, gentlemanly and dynamic. Sadly "Capitan Muchas Vacas" perished of cholera in 1833, his six sons however all supported at least the Federalist Revolution, sheltering Texian refugees during the war, including the family of John Linn.

In 1835, as war clouds were gathering, Peter Kerr, Fernando De Leon and Jose Maria Jesus Carbajal drove a large herd of horses 500 miles to New Orleans. This "beef trail" between Texas and New Orleans is mostly forgotten today but actually had been long established by 1835. As early as the 1780's San Antonio-area Vaqueros were driving cattle down it to provision the Spanish garrisons at New Orleans. This tradition would continue through the Republic of Texas era with increasing Anglo participation, switching easily to the well-known drives north to Kansas after the Civil War.

The $35,000 in proceeds (!) from this drive were used to purchase supplies and munitions for the Texian war effort.

Unfortunately it weren't always that easy to be a Tejano, or to closely associate with the same around the droves of Americans arriving to fight in Texas (not all these volunteers were nice folks, Susannah Dickinson herself had been brought by her husband Almeron to the Alamo for safety after she had been roughed up and her house plundered in Gonzales by some of those people).

Peter Kerr was the guy who first brought the news of the Massacre at Goliad to Houston at Gonzales, but was arrested on suspicion of associating with the enemy by Houston for his trouble, tho' later after his release he became Houston's interpreter after San Jacinto.

Nothwithstanding their good works, the De Leons were later driven out. Ironically it turns out Fernando De Leon and Martin Benavides evacuated their families to Louisiana not only for fear of Urrea, but for fear of the arriving Americans.

Peter Kerr went on to be Justice of the Peace in Travis County (Austin) and a major rancher/land owner/speculator in the Texas Hill Country, founding the town of Burnett. Apparently he never married and left his fortune upon his death in '61 to a nephew with the stipulation that land be set aside for a Peter Kerr University.

Didn't happen, the ingrate challenged the will, the town of Burnett ended up with just two acres for a schoolhouse.

Birdwatcher

I believe this is the case. It made the rounds befor Gary ended up with it. What I find hard is it made it thru the Isaacs' Storm of 1900!!!

"Slave owner, slave dealer, slave hunter", or so one recent author dismisses James Walker Fannin Jr., the ill-starred commander at Goliad. But that is a description that would apply to many men in that time and place, including Jim Bowie, whom history recalls in an entirely different light.

The thing that impresses about all these prominent Texas guys is the degree to which they made something from nothing, early in life.

Phillip Dimmitt arrives in Texas in his early twenties, yet by the next decade his landing and warehouse is a major port of entry into Texas and he's a major figure in Texas. John Linn did him one better. About of the same age, Linn founded an entire town on the coast, Linnville. While Dimmitt was able to supply the Texians after San Jacinto with supplies and men, Linn actually beat him to it, sending his own personal merchant ship likewise loaded with volunteers and supplies.

And to put 'em in context, it wasn't everybody in Texas succeeded like that, there were 30,000 Americans in Texas by then, regular folks, the salt of the earth, almost all of whom lived and died in modest anonymity.

But, whatever his failings, Fannin became one of the famous few, likewise at an early age. Furthermore, Fannin's fortune was derived largely from the illegal smuggling of slaves into Texas and the United States, mostly from Cuba.

Whatever else it may have been, one imagines that the illegal slave trade was hardly for the indecisive or faint of heart. A harsh business all around, and like most illegal businesses prone to attract the participation of dangerous people.

For a while Jim Bowie made his living smuggling slaves, and no one is surprised that a famously deadly brawler like himself would make a living that way. Yet Bowie's fortune, when he died, was proven to be largely illusory, he wasn't nearly as wealthy as he had claimed to be. One has to wonder how history would remember Bowie, if at all, if he had not died at the Alamo (despite his best efforts to extricate that garrison after the siege began).

It does seem a certainty that Fannin would be celebrated as a hero had he chosen to die defending the La Bahia Mission instead of likewise attempting to extricate his force, tho one wonders if a general as capable as Urrea would bother to actually assault the place rather than starving it out and/or making it redundant by maneuver.

Whatever his qualities, unlike Bowie, Fannin DID accumulate wealth, or at least capital, establishing a plantation on the coast at Veslaco in '34 and continuing to broker slaves, both legally and illegally. By the time the war broke out Fannin was just thirty-one years old, and already a man of means.

In his younger days he had famously dropped out after two years at West Point, tho it is difficult to determine if that was to any degree a failure on his part. It is significant that this exposure to the military and the military chain of command would be regarded as rendering him as especially qualified to command in Texas.

After dropping out of West Point in '21 he returned home to Georgia, over the next eight years he married, had two daughters, led the local Temperance Society, established a mercantile business and....
....began to build his fortune in the business of smuggling in slaves.

Just a year after his arrival in Texas, Fannin was a vocal and active supporter of Texian rights and interests. He was present when the shooting started over the cannon at Gonzales in October of '35, and was assigned with Bowie by Houston to assess the conditions and fort at San Antonio. He was present with Bowie at the opening fight at Mission Concepcion later that same month wherein first blood was drawn on the Mexican force there under General Cos. He would later perform a reconnaissance/interdiction mission alongside Travis.

Fannin himself at that point in time clamored for command, wishing to be a general at "a point of danger". He does seem to have had an ingratiating quality, successfully advancing his command status amid so many men vying for the same. Houston thought well of him, so did the members of the Consultation of 1835. If Travis or Bowie, who had served with him, thought ill of him that does not emerge in any correspondence.

Fannin originally had arrived in Goliad in February of '36 in appointed head of the newly-arrived Georgia Battalion of volunteers. At the time his orders had been to join the Matamoras Expedition. On arrival, seeing the situation, he chose instead to remain with the Texian forces at Goliad.

During this interval the body that had appointed him, the Consultation of 1835, was falling apart in dissent. Somehow, amid the warring egos of Dimmitt, Houston, Grant and Johnson, Fannin emerges as the nominal commander at Goliad, heading the largest Texian Army then in existence, and regarded by some in authority back in East Texas as the Commander-in-Chief of all Texian forces.

Likely, had not catastrophe intervened, by the common consent of both Fannin and those disgruntled volunteers serving under him, his tenure as commander would have been brief. Just weeks after taking command, Fannin, the same guy who had aspired to be a general, was begging to be relieved on the grounds that he was singularly unsuited to the task. Likewise surviving correspondence from his men indicate they felt Fannin was poorly qualified for the post he held.

The one guy on the scene who did write well of Travis was that dynamic ex-Marine quoted earlier, John Sowers-Brooks, who worked tirelessly and selflessly as Fannin's de-facto Senior Non-com at Goliad preparing the defenses and forming a fighting unit out of the disparate militiamen present, but Sowers-Brooks comes across as such a generous-hearted and can-do kind of guy he might have been hard-pressed before he publicly criticized anybody, much less his commanding officer.

Birdwatcher

You mentioned Linnville. Here's one that happened right around the corner from the place here!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Plum_Creek

Indeed, and Linnville never came back after that blow, tho John Linn himself went on to prosper, being in the right place at the right time twenty years later when railroads were coming in big.

I am sometimes accused of being politically correct, I prefer to look at it as looking at the whole picture. All sources seem to agree that the blunder Felix Huston made at Plum Creek was to dismount his force so as to form a static line of battle, as if the Comanches and Kiowas would assault their line like cavalry.

The experienced Indian fighters present were dismayed and one, Ed Burleson, had had the foresight to invite Chief Placido and his thirty Tonkawas.

The BEST source for all things Texian I have found is Stephen L. Moore's excellent "Savage Frontier" series, difficult reads precisely because they are filled with such detail.

http://www.amazon.com/Savage-Frontier-Volume-Riflemen-1835-1837/dp/1574412353

The Tonkawas are most often consigned to mere footnotes in the history books, but Ed Burleson and later Texas Ranger Captain RIP Ford reported quite differently.

At that time preying upon Comanches was what the Tonks pretty much did for a living. Moore has it that after running 25 miles on foot overnight to join in the fighting, Placido and his men inflicted most of the Comanche casualties and took possession of ALL the captured horses, plus creeped everybody out later that night by barbecuing one of the Comanche dead.

Birdwatcher

The Tonkawas struck me as being primarily opportunistic since they did serve the Texians well in fighting Comanches, but Wilbarger mentions raids on the settlements by Tonks that were blamed on other tribes.

They were not well treated at their reservation here in Young County, and weren't well received by the other tribes when they were removed to Oklahoma.

I reckon if you eat a feller, it's not a good idea to settle next to his kinfolk.

Tonks borrowed a big wash kettle from "Puss" Webber and cooked one of their captives in it there on Webber's Prairie per Smithwick

Being the opportunists, they would thrash pecans in the bottoms here for the settlers by cutting down the whole tree.

The thing is about Tonkawas is that there were never vary many, and after the Comanches arrived they lived entirely within the reach of Comanche war parties, yet more'n thirty years after Plum Creek there they still were; guiding Ranald Mackenzie's cavalry down on the last free Comanches.

RIP Ford recruited a 100 Tonkawas of the Brazos Reservation in 1860 to go with his rangers against Buffalo Hump's Comanches in the Wichita Mountains. Notwithstanding their grizzly reputation he called 'em superior men with an encyclopedic knowledge of Western geography. Point of trivia; it was a Tonkawa armed with a .54 cal. Mississippi Rifle that dismounted to shoot the famous Comanche Iron Jacket off his horse in his shirt of Spanish mail.

After that Comanche/Kiowa sundance in the summer of '74, Quanah Parker had wanted to go against the Tonkawas but was outvoted, and they ended up going against Adobe Walls instead.

Birdwatcher

Nothing to add to this fine piece , but I want to read all of it later. So I must make a comment to return .

Excellent thread I've enjoyed this immensely. My gratitude towards you Birdy

In case folks ain't caught on yet, a simply phenomenal website on all things Texian is Wallace L. McKeehan's Texas A&M website Sons of Dewitt's Colony....

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/dewitt.htm

San Patricio down there on the Nueces is of particular interest to me, a few hundred Irish settling in the midst of practically nowhere. Being generally familiar with the locale and the climate, it ain't a place I'd want to live in a mud and pole hut with an adobe fireplace and thatched roof, especially if'n I was native to cool, wet and rainy Ireland.

Some quotes via McKeehan...

In Almonte's "Statistical Report of 1834" be gave the population of San Patricio as 600...

..there was bad feeling in some quarters toward the Anglo-Americans. The only bond that the Irish had with them was that of language. Some of the San Patricians considered people from the United States as foreign as the Mexicans, if not more so. In fact, they had a better opportunity to know the Mexicans than they did Austin's colonists. The reason? Their proximity. Mexican rancheros were living among them.....

There was no religious barrier; both were Catholic. The soldiers of the garrison of Lipantitlan could be seen on the streets of San Patricio without causing alarm. Lt. Marcelino Garcia, second in command, was a friend of Empresario James McGloin, and William O'Docharty was on friendly terms with the commandant, Captain Nicolas Rodriguez. The year 1834 was a year of peace and conviviality for San Patricio. John J. Linn has said that Texas was a territorial paradise. He went on to say,

"A tax collector would have been a curiosity. There were no courts in the land, for there was no litigation; sufficient money was in circulation; theft of cattle was unknown; corn cribs knew no locks; and smoke houses stood open. There was Acadian simplicity of manners and purity of morals.".....

San Patricio had no militia, or rather, no evidence can be found of its having had one...

Some colonists felt that they, as Mexican citizens, and as Catholics should stand by Mexico and the faith regardless of its form of government. Then there were those who resented a centralist government and deplored Santa Anna's disregard of the national constitution. Some were frightened at the prospect of an invading army led by Santa Anna himself, and would of necessity take up the cause of independence if it should be the only way to rid themselves of his dictatorial program. As had been seen, these San Patricians had just received their grants of land which had been long in coming, but they would fight to save them even though they preferred the plow to the sword....

...if the climate weren't all that, at least their diet had to be a step up from Ireland...

They tended their gardens where they raised corn, melons, yams, and beans. Honey could be had for the finding, and milk was always available from their cows. When it clabbered, the thick, yellow cream was skimmed off and churned into butter and buttermilk. On trips the pioneer's fare was coffee, bacon, and some form of cornbread. Wild game was there for the shooting, and it was plentiful. The colonists were almost self-sufficient except for the drink they most relished-coffee. They had to wait for boats to come from Vera Cruz, a Mexican port at the foot of lofty mountains whose sides were covered with coffee trees, to bring once again the green coffee beans to be roasted and ground which would make the aromatic and stimulating drink they needed in this low coastal region....


We learn that Grant and Johnson had three field pieces...

In January 1836 after the surrender of Bejar by General Cos, an expedition was got up to go to Matamoros, which marched from above place (Bejar) by way of Gollad . . . On their coming there Captain P. Dimitt, then commanding, had the flag of Independence hoisted on the walls of Goliad which was ordered to be taken down by Cols. Johnson and Grant stating that they were Federalists and would stand on the Constitution of 1824; they then marched to the Mission (Refugio) where they expected to meet with Fannin who had started from Valesco with 160 volunteers and provisions, and was to land at Copano to join Cols. Johnson and Grant. There was at this time say, 500 men at the Mission, all willing to go to Matamoros and only awaiting the arrival of Col. Fannin whose forces had not come......

Johnson and Grant with a company of sixty men with three pieces of brass cannon marched to San Patricio with a view, as they then stated, to stop until Col. Fanning could arrive and then proceed to Matamoros.

Urrea's view of the Americans/Texians....

On the first of March I had word from one of my spies that one of the leaders of the rebellious colonies, Don Diego Grant, was on his way to the Nueces River with a very select company of crack riflemen, well-armed and confident.

..and of his campaign at that time...

The excessive cold has affected my infantry and has delayed the ammunition and hardtack that are to come to me from Matamoros. For these reasons I may stay in San Patricio 4 or 5 days more, then march to Refugio and Goliad even though my hardtack has not arrived.

The reason for his surprise strike at San Patricio, 150 miles from his base, and further evidence of his abilities. Obviously, he had good intelligence...

Knowing about the Texian plan to take Matamoros, he had left in haste for San Patricio.

...moving this thread along, and evidence of Urrea's character....

Finally, on the 12th of March General Urrea and his troops marched and rode out of San Patricio much to the relief of the colonists. Santa Anna had ordered Urrea to "take cattle, supplies and the colonist's belongings. " Cattle Urrea took for food (his army was on meager rations), and he came upon quite a lot of arms and ammunition in the defeat of Johnson's men at San Patriclo. But Urrea states in his Diary that "the town and the rest of the inhabitants did not suffer the least damage."

...and another Mexican besides the Angel who would save lives at Goliad.....

Mary O'Boyle had a lingering, but secret, hope that Col. Francisco Garay, to whom she had dispensed hospitality, would somehow save her brother. He had asked her how he could repay her for her kindness. She had asked him that if or when he had the opportunity, would he be kind to her brother, Andrew Michael O'Boyle, who was with Fannin. He had said that he would; she could not help but believe him.

Birdwatcher

IIRC pretty much the SOP for Texas Indians as far back as Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca (1520's) at least.

Sorta related, Hamalienen in his excellent book Comanche Empire (a must-read IMHO) has it that by their population peak in the early 19th Century the Comanches in the far reaches of Texas were quickly deforesting the watercourses where they wintered, for fuel, pecans, and to obtain cottonwood bark to feed their horses in the winter months. A degree of inpact that would have been unsustainable and which was already causing them problems before the arrival of the Frontier.

Birdwatcher

Description of a dwelling in San Patricio, which could likely apply to anywhere in South Texas. Certainly log cabins were out of the question.

By the time McMullen came to the capital of his empresa on the Nueces it had been named San Patricio de Hibernia (St. Patrick of Ireland). Furthermore, McGloin had overseen the throwing up of jacales for temporary shelters as well as a few picket cabins. Among them was his own, a prototype of the rest. His cabin stood facing Constitution Square on the block south of it. Eliza, his wife, and his two children, John J., age 4, and Mary Ann, an infant, had to accommodate themselves to a picket cabin which had a palmetto roof, a dirt floor, and a clay chimney.

The latter took the place of a kitchen stove in winter. In the summer cooking was done over an open fire outside. Water was carried from the river both for drinking and other purposes until wells were dug. There was little light in the cabin. Usually there were no windows, and, at most, two doors were cut through the upright poles. There was no lumber for window blinds to keep out the cold when a norther came whistling in; besides, a cabin with no windows was a protection against the Indians.

The furniture was crude, handmade, and make-shift. But it was home in a wilderness while they awaited their land grants and until the time came when building materials would be available.

And a 19th Century painting by Gentilz of a Tejano dwelling near the missions in San Antonio, seems typical of the type...



The way these things were built is a trench was dug along the wall lines and rows of small tree trunks and relatively straight branches set in them. The spaces between this lumber then chinked with mud.

About the best that could be done in the absence of any substantial timber, but it should be recalled that winters down here are at best brief, most of the time summer heat being a greater problem.

Birdwatcher

One can contrast the attitudes of those who had been living in Texas for at least a period of time to those Americans just arrived to take part in the fight.

When the seventy Texians sent by Phillip Dimmit in November of '35 took Fort Lipantitlan at San Patricio, not a shot was fired. Many of the Texian force were of the Refugio Militia, comprised largely of resident Irish. The American militias soon to arrive at Goliad were not yet on the scene.

When Dimmitt's men arrived in San Patricio they found that most of the garrison at the fort had left in an attempt to engage them en route, leaving only sixteen men inside the fort. One James O'Rielly, "a local Irishman" was able to negotiate a bloodless takeover wherein the soldiers inside the fort were simply "set a liberty".

Later that same day the main Mexican force, consisting of ninety men, returned and shots were exchanged, the entrenched Texian riflemen killed more than twenty of the Mexican force in the first few minutes of fire and a standoff resulted.

Mortally wounded in the exchange was the Mexican officer Lt. Marcellino Garcia, a man with many friends on both sides. By common consent he was brought within the Texian lines and all available care was given to him, and when he died he was decently buried in the town cemetery. Shortly thereafter the Texians returned to Goliad and the Mexican troops reoccupied the fort.

Meanwhile, up in San Antonio de Bexar, 600 Texians, most of whom had been prior residents of Texas, were engaged in a two-month siege that would culminate in the expulsion of General Cos and set the stage for the Siege of the Alamo. Their leaders; Steven F. Austin, Jim Bowie, Ed Burleson and Ben Milam were all old Texas hands, and Bowie had been married into the Veramundi family.

Despite the length of the siege and the bloody violence of the final assault, relations between the Texians and the resident Bexarenos seem to have remained surprisingly amicable. Up until the arrival of Santa Anna, Texians and Tejanos mingled freely in the town.

More to the point, when Santa Anna DID arrive, Travis announced that the Texians had been able to round up "80 or 90 bushels" of corn from the vacated houses in Bexar, indicating that the locals HAD that corn, notwithstanding the fact that prior to that the Alamo garrison had been in desperate straights. IOW despite their supply shortages they seem to have respected the property of the locals and thus retained much goodwill, or at least neutrality.

Things were apparently different down in Goliad. There the majority of the locals came down on the Mexican side, by accounts in no small part due to the actions of the American volunteers assembling there.

It can't all be because of that, the local Vaquero leader at Goliad, one Carlos de la Garza, had already declared for Mexico prior to the militias' arrival. Yet de la Garza's relations with his Texian neighbors remained surprisingly cordial. His occupation of Refugio in advance of Urrea's force seems largely bloodless, despite the fact that this move would prompt Fannin to divide his force to rescue Americans reportedly in peril there. Later on, de la Garza himself would save five of his former Texian neighbors from being executed at Goliad on what seems to have been a basis of simple friendship.

De la Garza too was actually able to hang on to his property and prosperity after the war, a thing impossible without the continued regard of his neighbors.

But, things were different in Goliad.

Fannin himself was but a recent arrival, having been in Texas, and that back in East Texas, only a year. The American militias arriving in Goliad were of course totally new to Texas, ignorant of the area, the people, the customs and the language. There was a lot of them too, more than 400 men idle there for weeks in contrast to the modest force quartered for any length of time in San Antonio.

Fannin appears to have had little control over his men (not necessarily a slam on Fannin, Houston would experience the same problem). Goliad was plundered and the residents rendered destitute, at least some women and girls were attacked. It wasn't all the militia members of course, or even most, and Texian settlements weren't immune either, Gonzales itself having been violently looted by American adventurers passing through.

At the massacre, while some among the Mexican forces were doing all they could to rescue the 400 prisoners from execution, a German officer in Urrea's force (who himself rescued every German-speaker he could find) reported that many of the locals were clamoring for their death, on the basis of crimes committed.

And to demonstrate how I'm speaking in generalities here, IIRC at least two of the handful of desperate militia fugitives who fled during the actual massacre would owe their lives to individual Tejanos who helped them during their flight.

Birdwatcher

One thing that surprises is the size of the communities back then.

600 people at isolated San Patricio, and 1,000 people at Goliad, that latter mostly Tejanos as one does not hear of colonists settling there in numbers.

I have some sense of this; in Africa I lived in a village of 2,000 people, and the next village two miles away had 1,000 people, adobe constuction ("mud-walled") though the roofs were for the most part ancient corrugated tin rather than thatch. Me and a buddy too walked 70 miles on foot across a (then) roadless plain, coming across isolated camps and huts and a small village along the way.

My sense of it is, before independence there was no border region between Mexico and Texas, just more of Mexico continuing north, San Patricio was just the next sizeable town north of Matamoras is all, located on the next river 150 miles to the north. In the absence of a border there was little incentive for smuggling, no refuge for outlaws on either side, ergo less lawlessness.

Indians were a constant, and the possibility of death at their hands probably the greatest hazard faced by those working stock. But communities were growing anyway, and I read somewhere of just one of the leading Irish immigrants at San Patricio claiming ownership of 1,200 cattle before the war broke out, an unimaginable fortune for a regular guy in Ireland.

From which we might infer too that it wouldn't take long before these immigrants and especially their children were developing some serious cowboy skills. In any given year South Texas runs from bountiful on the one hand, to desert on the other depending on the rains. It must have been a wet span of years just then because cows in the area seem common as dirt. The 400+ militia at Goliad were fed, but were eating only beef, no flour,no cornmeal, no beans.

A town or village of 1,000 people would be smaller than you might expect. Mostly children. Figure more like five to ten people per household, houses inside town running closer together and much smaller than they are today.

But still, the volunteers at Goliad had forcibly occupied the town, taken the best dwellings for their own use and bragged upon the fact. Stored foodstuffs and blankets had been taken, people driven out and some women violated. A wave of 1,000 embittered refugees scattered into the surrounding countryside, seriously taxing the resources of friends and relatives in the area ranchos who are indundated with these people..

No wonder Fannin was left blind in a hostile region.

OK, he gets the news of Urrea's victories at San Patrico and Agua Dulce, 60 miles to his southwest, from a handful of ragged survivors of those events. Excusable that he tarried maybe on account of he had more men on hand than those forces reported for Urrea. But then on March 8th he learns the Alamo has fallen and that Santa Anna has at least five times as many men as his own force of 400.

What most at Goliad seems to have been expecting at that point is that Santa Anna was now going to come south and join with Urrea to move against them. It does not seem to have occurred to them that Urrea would have enough of an army on his own so as to render such a move unnecessary. Perhaps the lack of any such movement on Santa Anna's part added to their own false sense of security.

Fannin did have the means to evacuate, after losing all his oxen in the brief attempt to go to the aid of the Alamo at the end of February (easy to imagine those oxen were driven off rather than "strayed" at that first night's camp), John Linn at Victoria had forwarded most of the oxen in that area, twenty teams, to Fannin at Goliad. Sending said oxen a leap of faith and a move of desperation on Linn's part, as it left the Texian refugees gathering at Victoria bereft of most of their own draft animals. Linn was likely expecting to get them back shortly.

For his own part, Fannin at this point becomes the master of wrong moves and incorrect decisions.

On March 10th, two days after learning of the Fall of the Alamo, he dispatches half or more of his available oxen and wagons on what had to have been expected to be at least a five or six day rescue mission to Refugio, accompanied by only 28 men.

Birdwatcher

The things you can only learn around a campfire at Goliad reenactment, where you sit and drink a beer with the guys that write the books.


Who paid for the Texas Revolution?

Follow the money.

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/dfm01

McKinney, Williams and Company, a mercantile establishment known as the "Barings of Texas," was founded by Thomas F. McKinney and Samuel M. Williams in 1834 at Quintana and moved to Galveston in 1838. As the largest commission-merchant firm in early Texas, it controlled much of the cotton trade at Houston and Galveston.

The company held interests in lands, banking, and industrial and town promotion and helped institute maritime commerce in Texas. It aided the government of Texas during the Texas Revolution by issuing notes to circulate as money. Although neither McKinney nor Williams was wealthy in his own right, each had good credit and wealthy connections in the United States.

Up until 1830 the Texas colonies had been granted tax-free status, a couple of years later the Mexican govt starts asking for those tarrifs, worse starts enforcing them with armed schooners.

McKinney and Williams, both out of New Orleans, do pretty good for two guys with no personal wealth. They spring into being as a business partnership already with their own fleet of ships. In response to Mexican interdiction they arm their ships too so that they can shoot back, hence the 18 pounder that was brought to the Alamo.

Fortuitous maybe that somebody forgot to offload the ammunition, else that otherwise incongruously heavy piece would have been drug to San Antonio by the New Orleans Greys in time to knock down the walls of the Alamo around General Cos's ears. Holding said mission against a Santa Anna the following February would then have become a moot point. Not much left to defend one would guess.

Because of those armed merchant ships, Mexico no longer had free access to the Texas ports like Copano Bay, so Santa Anna and Urrea both had to walk more than 600 miles to assault Texas instead of coming by ship and using the ports like any sensible person would do.

First thing Urrea does when he gets here is come in along the coast cutting off Texian access to those same ports from the landward side.

Hate to say it, but slavery was in the mix too. Importing slaves into the US had been illegal for more'n twenty years by that point. A major part if not THE most profitable part of McKinney and William's trade was smuggling slaves into Texas from Cuba, and thence into the United States. Cuba was just a way-station in the African slave trade, since bringing in slaves from Africa was still legal there.

Fannin the slave broker? An employee of McKinney and Williams in that endeavor, their agent in Texas, plucked from obscurity in Georgia (nobody knows how he got the job), part of his duties being to foment revolution, or at least autonomous statehood within Mexico.

To that end he writes much correspondence to his native Georgia, resulting in the raising of the Georgia Battalion, said Georgia Battalion actually being armed by the Georgia state armories. Fannin takes command of them when they arrive by boat from New Orleans, and marches them to Refugio intending to join the Matamoras Expedition.

Fannin's connections too likely explain how he gets the job of top dog at Goliad, Commander in Chief of the Texian Army such as it was at that time.

Fifteen years later, Georgia would formally ask Texas for reparations to cover the cost of their rifles lost by the Georgia Battalion at Goliad.

Birdwatcher

Not everybody pouring into Texas to fight was nice people, this applies here because the alleged misdeeds committed by Captain Amos B. King and his men upon the local Tejano population at Refugio affected the subsequent course of events.

Point of interest as to how bad some individuals could get; somewhere in the mix among the Americans at Goliad was the future infamous scalphunter, thief and murderer John Glanton. Can't find much on how this "free scout" for Fannin, just sixteen years old at the time, escaped the massacre but a year earlier in Tennessee, at age fifteen, he was already a wanted man.

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fgl02

On March 10th, four days after the Fall of the Alamo, and eight days after the ambush of Grant at Agua Dulce, a local Texian settler named Lewis Ayers arrived at Goliad requesting help. One account refers to Ayers as the "notorious Lewis Ayers" but I can find no record of wrongdoing on his part. On the contrary, he had previously been elected by the Irish at San Patricio to be their representative at the Consultation of '35. Whatever his nature, Ayers wold survive all this, leave Texas after the revolution, and spend his remaining thirty years back in Alabama.

Twenty-five miles south of Goliad was a small settlement called Refugio which like Goliad, lay on the road from Copano Bay to San Antonio. The only building of any consequence there was a stone mission church, the last built in Texas just forty year earlier, at the very end of the Spanish mission period. This mission had been built to minister to the fierce, tall, fish oil-smeared and cannibalistic Karankawas of the Texas Gulf Coast, who otherwise seem to have horrified everyone they encountered . Their mission at Refugio had not prospered. Urrea in his account called Refugio a notably poverty-stricken place, the church being the only defensible building.

Amon B. King and his 28 Paducah Volunteers had arrived in Texas from Kentucky the previous December, more to the point they had been sent by ship to Copano Bay and then assigned for two months to garrison the Mission Church at Refugio. For a group of young men who had come a long way in search of adventure and fortune (King himself was just twenty-nine) posting to BFE Refugio had to have been a tedious assignment to say the least.

It seems probable that it also allowed them to become familiar with the local residents, on account of King's subsequent actions at the Battle of Refugio do seem to have been of a personal nature as opposed to fighting a bunch of strangers.

Likely King's familiarity with Refugio, and possible prior acquaintance with Ayers, was why King left or was sent from the mission fort at Goliad to go and evacuate an undetermined number of American families stranded at Refugio amid marauding vaqueros and Karankawas allied to the Tejano leader Carlos de la Garza, who was operating in advance of and in cooperation with Urrea's main force.

Most of the Irish and American residents of Refugio had reportedly already fled northeast forty miles to Victoria, the largest town in the area. I wonder though if there was some unknown back-story behind Ayers and King taking most of Fannin's wagons, just to evacuate a few remaining families while leaving Fannin without transport.

It is true that at that point, the 400 men at Goliad had been expecting to hold the place and were even then actively preparing for a siege. It is also true that the degree to which Fannin actively commanded anything himself is in doubt. It may have been that if King and his men had decided to take those wagons, Fannin may have had little choice but to go along with it.

It sounds crazy now in hindsight to have dispatched possibly as many as eleven slow ox-drawn wagons on a lengthy expedition, guarded by just twenty-eight men. Evidence of just how little intel as to the regional situation Fannin's command had at that point.

On their arrival at Refugio two days later, King's men found themselves opposed by eighty or ninety of del la Garza's vaqueros and took refuge in the mission church, sending a messenger back to Goliad to request reinforcements.

Birdwatcher

It would be interesting to know the exact relationship between whatever financial conglomerate was bankrolling the war and the state of Georgia, from whence Fannin for one was hired.

In November of ’35, in the Macon area one William Ward, exact age unknown, raised and equipped, at his own expense, a force of 120 volunteer, grown to 220 men by the time it reached Texas. This Georgia Battalion of Permanent Volunteers were the men armed with rifles from the Georgia State Arsenal.

Upon their arrival in Texas, Fannin took command and this force landed at Copano Bay in early February to join the forces then assembling at Refugio for the Matamoras Expedition. In Fannin’s possession were a further 625 muskets and a considerable quantity of lead and powder. Shortly thereafter, with the collapse of the Matamoras Expedition, the various militias assembling at Refugio moved to fortify Goliad.

The messenger from Amos King, pinned down by de la Garza’s men inside the church at Refugio, arrived on March 12th. At that time Fannin’s available strength was around 400 men, most of his transport had been committed to King’s rescue/salvage mission. In response to King’s call for help, Fannin dispatched about one-third of his force, 120 men of Ward’s Georgia Battalion, to go and assist King.

Delayed by heavy rains, these men left Goliad at 3am on March 13th for the 27 mile forced march to Refugio, arriving there just twelve hours later and scattering de la Garza’s force.

Ward and King remained at Refugio that night, their combined force totaling about 150 men, not far off what had been available to Travis at the Alamo. What they didn’t know was that same night Urrea had begun a forced march of his own towards Refugio, backed by 1,500 Mexican soldados.

Birdwatcher

Urrea is commonly credited by those who have studied the topic as being the best commander on either side during this short war. In fairness to the Texans tho it should be noted that he had the luxury of commanding men who followed orders.

Of Ward and King at Refugio, whose orders at that point had been to return to Goliad, John Linn later wrote "A difference of opinion arose between the two commanders in relation to the command, which seemed to be irreconcilable, as they could not be coerced into a concert of action, even by the perils that threatened them both so imminently.". One thing both men and their respective militias all had in common at that point was a desire to engage in combat, all had come to fight but thus far had seen precious little of it.

On the morning of the 14th of March, King took most of his own men and some of Ward's and set out on a strategically useless but probably personally gratifying strike at a Tejano camp some miles downriver, nine Tejanos were surprised and killed. Ward waited at Refugio but did send out a patrol to reconnoiter the area. All of the men of both parties were unaware of the catastrophe about to fall upon them.

Today one can hop in a car at San Antonio and easily see all these communities relevant to this campaign in a day, so it is easy to forget how empty and open the country was back then.

Urrea for his part was receiving a constant stream of intelligence but he wasn't omniscient, and the fog of war applied to him too.

It is a maxim of human nature that we tend to expect others to act in a similar way that we would. At the start of the campaign two weeks before, when he launched his preemptive strike on the Matamoras Expedition he had put himself 150 miles away from reinforcements with only a few hundred men at his back. At that point he was obliged to pause at San Patricio while the rest of his force caught up. Of course he was anticipating that Fannin on his part would likely strike back and reacted in a typically proactive manner.

From the account of Colonel Garay (who would later intervene to save a number of men at Goliad) with Urrea....

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/goliadurrea.htm

On the night of the 7th, Jesus Cuéllar, known as el Comanche, presented himself in San Patricio claiming that he had abandoned Fannin's force to throw himself upon the clemency of the Mexican government.... He told General Urrea that Fannin had decided to attack him and that by this time he had probably effected a juncture with the force at the mission. Consequently he promised to take us to a spot where we could lay in ambush while he went and brought the enemy into our hands....

General Urrea, confiding in his sincerity, ordered 200 men, 1 cannon, and 150 cavalry to set out early in the morning of the 8th of March for Las Ratas, 8 leagues away, on the San Refugio road. When our destination was reached, Cuéllar left us and Gen. Urrea proceeded to arrange the small force to carry out his plan.

Eight leagues would be about twenty miles, more or less, and about thirty miles from Goliad.

The surprise would have been difficult in the location chosen, for the woods where we were to hide was extremely sparse and all the trees were dry and devoid of foliage. The enemy would have detected us long before its approach. Our front, left, and rear were immense plains with not even a blade of grass, while the creek was dry and so shallow that it did not cover the infantry placed in it.

Of course Fannin did not show, but this ambush episode had taken up 48 hours. On the morning of the 10th, the same day Fannin was receiving Ayer's request for assistance at Refugio, Urrea records that he received the following report...

March 10. I received news that the enemy had changed its plan and was making ready to march, with 400 men, to the aid of those who were besieged by our army in the fortress of the Alamo. I countermarched to San Patricio and ordered the cavalry to make ready to fight the enemy on the march.....

March 12. Our whole division set out, leaving a small detachment there.

So as of the 12th Urrea was on the move, intending to intercept Fannin and 400 men he believed were heading north to San Antonio. The following day, the same day Ward and 120 men were force-marching south to Refugio, Urrea recieved the follownig intelligence, and again reacted in his typically proactive manner... another all-night movement across an open plain in preparation for a surprise attack.

March 13. I marched towards Goliad and was informed enroute that the enemy had dispatched a strong detachment to occupy the port of Cópano and that they would halt at Refugio Mission.

It would be natural for an outside observer to assume that King, travelling towards Refugio with a train of empty wagons, shortly followed by Ward and 120 men, were on their way to the strategically vital port at Copano Bay. Certainly Refugio itself had little strategic value.

I dispatched a picket commanded by Captain Pretalia and thirty civilians headed by Don Guadalupe de los Santos with instructions for the first group to hold the enemy at the mission until I arrived with my division. I selected 100 mounted men and 180 infantry; and, with our four-pounder, continued the march during the night, leaving the rest of our troops encamped on the Aranzazu Creek.

In hindsight we know how things turned out and that Urrea would prevail handily against the outnumbered, disorganized and poorly-led Texians. For his own part Urrea preceded with an admirable balance of both initiative and caution. Hard not to give the guy credit even though he was on the wrong side.

But, from Urrea's perspective, he was advancing on unfamiliar ground into hostile territory, with the constant prospect of further enemy reinforcements arriving from the east.

On a different topic, much has been debated as to Urrea's brutality or lack thereof in association with the Goliad massacre. By his own report he had sent thirty men captured at San Patricio and Goliad to imprisonment at Matamoras rather than shoot them out of hand as ordered.

From Urrea's diary entry of March 16th, we learn that he WOULD shoot prisoners if he perceived it as necessary to the mission, and also how precarious he felt his own position was despite the 1,500 men by then at his disposal.

This from after his defeat of Ward and King at Refugio, when his next priority became to locate and engage Fannin at Goliad with all possible haste.

March 16. Leaving the wounded and the baggage under the care of Col. Rafael de la Vara, and instructing him to keep a watch on the port of Cópano, for which purpose I left the necessary guard, I marched with 200 men, infantry and cavalry, to Goliad, sending out scouts to reconnoiter the road to the town. The parties dispatched to pursue the enemy captured fourteen.

A messenger of Fannin was intercepted and we learned beyond all doubt that the enemy intended to abandon the fort at Goliad and concentrate its force at Victoria; that they only awaited the 200 men that had been sent to Refugio to execute this operation. On the 14th and 15th I had fought and dispersed the latter force.

In order to observe the enemy and cut off its communication with Victoria, I ordered Capt. Mariano Iraeta and sixty men to take a position on the road between that place and Goliad to watch it. I halted that night at San Nicolás.

The many hardships endured by my division, and the rigor of the climate that was felt particularly by the troops accustomed to one more mild, made my position extremely difficult because of the necessity of properly guarding the adventurers that I had taken prisoners. I constantly heard complaints, and I perceived the vexation of my troops. I received petitions from the officers asking me to comply with the orders of the general-in-chief and those of the supreme government regarding prisoners.

These complaints were more loud on this day, because, as our position was not improved, I found myself threatened from El Cópano, Goliad, and Victoria. I was obliged to move with rapidity in order to save my division and destroy the forces that threatened us.

Ward had escaped with 200 men; the infantry was very poor and found itself much affected by the climate. I was unable, therefore, to carry out the good intentions dictated by my feelings, and I was overcome by the difficult circumstances that surrounded me. I authorized the execution, after my departure from camp, of thirty adventurers taken prisoners during the previous engagements, setting free those who were colonists or Mexicans.

Birdwatcher

At the Alamo there was perhaps 200 defenders spread out around a three acre compound. At Refugio there were 100 defenders inside just one stone church. Unfortunately this structure is gone now, and much of its original footprint covered is by a more modern Catholic church.

What it appears to have been is a medieval-looking stone edifice, two stories tall and 100 feet long on the long axis. The long hall pictured in the diagram may or may not have been intact in 1836, but there was a substantial structure just fifteen yards from the church building, substantial enough to offer some cover to the attackers, but not enough apparently to serve as a rallying point...



Taken completely by surprise that morning, Ward did succeed in burning some of the surrounding wooden structures to clear a field of fire, and at one point at least, had a body of men outside the church firing volleys from cover at the opposing Mexicans, this squad of men being backed by men firing from inside the church.

At the opening of the fight, the Texians had been attempting to haul a wagon or cart bearing two large barrels of water from the adjacent river into the church, so critical was this water that at least than half the men present were deployed in its defense. They did succeed in bringing the barrels into the church though most of the water was lost due to the barrels being perforated by flying bullets.

During the fight, King's 30 men returned from downriver, hurrying towards the sound of gunfire, not suspecting that there would be 1,500 Mexicans present. They were seen and engaged, but likewise held their own, forted up in the dense riparian woodlands along the river channel.

Though the physical premises upon which the battle was fought are gone, we are left with pretty good descriptions of the fight, from both sides.

From Colonel Francisco Garay....

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/goliadurrea.htm

That day we pitched camp on the Arroyo Aransas from which at two o'clock in the morning (on the fourteenth) the general undertook the march against the mission with two hundred foot soldiers, the cannon and two hundred horses. The rest of the division with the supplies and equipment set out at seven o'clock.

The enemy in the number of one hundred men were occupying the church, the only defensible point in that poverty stricken town. On their left, and at a distance of an eighth of a league, we had another fifty men in ambush.

The other 'fifty men' being King's force, the assumption being that their presence outside the mission compound was deliberate.

And from Urrea, note the language difficulties when communicating wit the Indians from the Yucatan...

I arrived at the said mission at daybreak where I found Capt. Pretalia holding the enemy in the church where they had taken refuge. The moment they saw me they set the houses in their immediate vicinity on fire.

I reconnoitered their position to my satisfaction; and, convinced that it afforded means for a good defense, I realized that in order to take it I would be obliged to suffer heavy losses. I at once decided to lay siege to it and to fatigue the enemy all that day and night in order to surprise them at dawn the following day. But the pitiful stories which the civilians of the place related about the thefts and abuses they had suffered at the hands of the enemy, excited the indignation of the officers and troops of my division, and decided me to take advantage of the opportunity afforded by the coming out of a party of eighty men to get water at a creek situated about a gunshot from their fortification to order a group of infantry and another of cavalry to start a skirmish, hoping to draw out the rest of the enemy from their entrenchment.

The eighty men retreated immediately to the fort. The officers and troops manifested a great desire to attack the enemy; and, wishing to take advantage of their enthusiasm, I immediately ordered a column of infantry to make the charge, protected by the fire of our cannon which had been moved forward sufficiently to destroy the door of the church. With our cavalry covering our flanks, our advance was so successful that the infantry arrived within ten paces of the cemetery without a single man being wounded.

The enemy, coming out of its lethargy, opened up a lively fire upon our men.

Translation: Ward, by accounts an excellent marksman as well, reacted swiftly and decisively when surprised that morning. First thing is, he attempted to obtain water, anticipating a long siege. Secondly, he apparently had his men withhold their fire during that first assault, opening up from point-blank range. This tactic resulted in the Mexican field piece being left close to the walls and unavailable to the Mexicans until later in the day.

We know from the American accounts (next post) that as the day progressed and their ammunition dwindled that Ward instructed his men to reserve their fire unless they were sure of their targets.

Ward's 120 had left Goliad with a reported 36 rounds per man. So 3,600 rounds expended that day give or take, in return for high Texian estimates of 200 casualties on the Mexican side, some of those casualties inflicted by King's men from the woods along the river.

Urrea himself said the Mexicans sustained 48 casualties that day, Garay said close to 70. Even if the high Texian estimates were correct, that ballbarks to less than one hit per fifteen rounds, seems likely that much of the day the actionconsisted of guys sniping at each other from behind cover between the four separate assaults.

Throughout this war of independence Texian rifles got the Mexicans' attention and are mentioned in accounts, but it is unknown how many of the Texians at Refugio were armed with smoothbores; either Fannin's 625 muskets or civilian weapons.

Point of interest, note the language difficulty on the Mexican side..

The troops, being mostly recruits from Yucatán, stopped spellbound the moment their first impetus was spent, and all efforts to force them to advance were unavailing, for the greater part of their native officers who a moment before had been so eager disappeared at the critical moment. These men were, as a rule, unable to understand Spanish, except in a few cases, and the other officers, not being able to speak their language, were handicapped in giving the commands.

...as the day progressed...

The infantry took refuge in a house and corral situated about fifteen paces from. the church. I ordered a part of the cavalry to dismount in order to encourage the former by their example. Not succeeding in making them advance, and the dismounted cavalry being insufficient to take the position of the enemy, the moments were becoming precious, for at that very moment another party, coming from Cópano, was threatening my rear guard....

I ordered Col. Gabriel Núñez, with a part of the cavalry in our reserve, to go out to meet the enemy that was approaching in our rear. The enemy had taken refuge in a woods which a large creek made inaccessible. I ordered sixty infantry, commanded by Col. Garay, to dislodge them. They killed eleven and took seven prisoners, but the thickness of the woods did not permit a more decisive victory before darkness enabled the enemy to escape.

That would be King's men.

I, therefore, ordered a retreat. This operation was not carried out with the order that might have been expected from better disciplined troops. In the meantime our cannon had been moved forward to within twenty paces of the cemetery, but my brave dragoons removed it in order to continue harassing the enemy from a distance, where the enemy fire could cause us no damage.

Translation: "We got whupped."

If you have ever spend much time dressed in period clothing, handled black powder in the rain, or walked any distance in all-leather footwear through water you can appreciate the hardships endured here by the men on both sides.

The weather during this interval was cold, wet, and miserable. Ward's march on Refugio had been delayed by heavy rain, and an account mentions them walking through long stretches of ankle-deep water during that 27-mile, 12 hour forced march to Refugio.

No small feat for King's men either to launch that morning foray against the Tejano camp under those conditions, and it explains how they were able to surprise nine men around a fire.

On the Mexican side, the Indians from the Yucatan, presumbably often barefoot and/or in sandals, are noted to have particularly suffered.

According to all the information I secured, the number of the enemy that had shut themselves in the church was 200 and they lacked water and supplies. This would make it imperative, unless they succeeded in escaping during the night, for them either to come out and fight us the following day or surrender.

In order to prevent their escape, I placed several lookouts at the points through which they might effect it, but the necessary vigilance was not exercised by all of them and the enemy escaped, favored by the darkness of the night which a strong norther and the rain made more impenetrable and unbearable. On the other hand, our troops were very much fatigued as a result of having marched all the day and the night before and of having spent the 14th in constant fighting without taking food.

Birdwatcher

Dunno how many have been actively reading this thread but I took a drive around on Sunday to actually go look at the places of which I have been writing.

Apologies in advance for the poor-quality photos, this is my very last cheap pawn shop digital camera, I join the smart phone revolution in a couple of weeks.

First off, San Patricio Texas, just west of I 37, maybe 20 miles north of Corpus on the Nueces. Twice as many people now as back then, when it was a scattering of thatched jacales and wattle and post huts.



The highway to hell? It is how you get there, perhaps TXDot was trying to drive down property values I dunno



...and the reason why San Patricio was where it was, the ford on the Nueces on the Matamoras Road.



...and the Nueces, flood-controlled now for the most part by the dam on Lake Corpus Christi. A whole lot more timber now than there reportedly was back then, when San Patricio was an oasis on a vast plain.



Not a whole lot of elevation I thought between the river and the place where the old town was, seemed like it must have been flooded from time to time. As far as buildings no sense of the old settlement remains, the highway dominating the landscape, but just like back then the Catholic Church still seems the center of the landscape, this being the fourth one on the original site, fires and hurricanes having obliterated the rest. Not enough of a congregation for a regular Sunday mass tho.





Birdwatcher

The tangible past though can be found written on tombstones.

Following independence, when it became a de-facto Border outpost at the edge of the notorious Nueces Strip, San Patricio was all but abandoned for a decade, Texian and Mexican bridgands causing what Indian raids had not. The "new' cemetery behind the church dates from the resettlement in the 1870's.

Still, a lot of sad history is written in the tombstones. Mother and infant, 1888....



Ya wont find the old 1830's cemetery unless you ask around, it sits on a low hill along a back road maybe a mile away, up an unmarked track through a hayfield.





I wonder if Larry McMurty had passed this way; McFall from Scotland.....



...and a listing of those either from San Patricio and/or those who were killed elsewhere in the War of Independence...



I have to say it seemed a fine thing to find so many Irish names there among what tombstones remained. The Sullivan's are there, and the Dougherties too who legend had it were plagued by a banshee. James McGloin, Irish Emprasario and founder of the Irish colony there, died of a fever in 1856 but his grave for what ever reason was not marked with stone and is lost today.

His children however, plainly took root....



Not so with Lewis Ayers, who figures prominently in the tale. Tragically all four of their children are likely buried in unmarked graves there too, carried off in the space of a single week by infectious strep (scarlet fever), which may explain why the Ayers left the state shortly thereafter, never to return.

OK, enough graves.....

....Oxen figure prominently in this tale, they were how you moved stuff back then.

Well, turns out San Patricio still has a couple





Birdwatcher

damn mike you were just down the rd and didn't call .

Great reading about the old battles. I am trying to get a map and figure out where each place is? Thanks for posting the stories.

Birdy,

Next time you come up to see Tommy in Austin, you two need to come out to my place! Got lots to show you! Heck you can just come up here without Tom too if you want! Figgered we could make a day of it! Tom like this stuff too!!!

Still reading Birdie

This has been one of the best threads on here in some time. Ranks up there with "Thrushes, Woodpeckers, & Little Round Top" several years ago! Thanks for putting it together.
7mm

Sorry Rog, I was racing daylight the whole time, still had to get to Fort Lipantitlan, Agua Dulce, Refugio, Coleto Creek and Goliad before dark. As it was I only just got it done.
'
Fort Lipantitlan weren't easy to find, even though it has to be at most a long walk upstream from San Patricio. Turns out even the marker was hard to find, about a seven-mile loop around ranchland on the other side of the Nueces.

Once in a while you can get a glimpse of sorta what the area looked like in '36. This is about two miles southwest of the Nueces and the old fort site...



The marker off of the backroad is easy to miss, sorta set back in the mesquite...



No one I asked knew where the old fort had been, and no wonder, no reason to go there, seven acres at the end of a dead end road, donated from a ranch in 1937 but no public river access in back though it was only about 50 yards away...



All above-ground traces of the fort gone.

To somebody's credit, the place had been mowed, and in back was what looked like an original marker, perhaps installed by a State Historian. In 1927 there would likely be people still alive in the area who remembered the ruins of the old fort.



Birdwatcher

In search of Agua Dulce Creek and a settlement or rancho called Casa Blanca ("white house") at the ford where Urrea ambushed Grant.

Four miles south of San Patricio, a historical marker in front of an old 1930's schoolhouse lends some light as to the kin of Vaquero leader Carlos de la Guerra, said kin persisting in the face of "continual attack by Indians", it mentions a Casa Blanca land grant and ranch.



Ten mile south, on Hwy 44, a road sign for Agua Dulce, note the topography and imagine it mostly treeless in 1836, the way it was back then. It ain't called the "Coastal Plain" fer nuthin.



I crossed Agua Dulce Creek coming in to the town....



..and the historical marker, the Agua Dulce battle site laying "3.25 miles Northwest" of that point...



Durned if I could find anything tho. Near as I can tell the actual site probably lies on private land and I doubt it looked like much even back then. Here's in the ballpark, what it looks like today....



This is not far north of the creek, a reasonable guess that James Grant, Reuben Brown and Placido Benavides passed through within sight of this place, hotly pursued by Mexican Lancers. Certainly one could have heard the gunfire from there.

Of that eight mile chase Benavides later said that Grant could probably have escaped, but that Grant persisted in ignoring his advice and spurred his horse too much, confusing the animal. Which I guess was the difference between a guy who had grown up on horseback and one who hadn't.

Birdwatcher

Thanks.

Quick shots of Copano Bay at the mouth of the Aransas River and of the Mission River a few miles away, looking downstream towards the bay, this maybe fifteen miles below Refugio.





Fannin, King, Ward and the Georgia Battalion all landed in this area, as well as General Cos and his army. Same thing with the Irish immigrants at Refugio and San Patricio.

Get off pavement and this becomes hazardous and difficult country to navigate even today. Sailing those unwieldy merchant ships past all the shifting sandbars along that labyrinthine coast must have been no mean trick. Even after landing one still had to traverse miles of often waterlogged and overgrown wetlands and prairie, through clouds of saltmarsh mosquitoes.

Throw in the presence of the tall, naked and fish oil-smeared Karankawas, known to cut off and eat slices of their victims while they were yet alive.

To newcomers from more pleasant and familiar climes the whole area must have been a sort of Hell.

Imagine the effect on the Irish immigrants. It is said that part of the reason they settled at Refugio is that their women were scared so badly by the country in general and and by an encounter with a band of aggressively pilfering Lipan Apaches in particular that for weeks they refused to leave the sanctuary of the old mission.

Birdwatcher

good gar fishing there.

Keep writing and taking pic's, Birdie, I'm lovin it. rio7

Got rained out of running around with the grandchild this past Sunday, so on the spur of the moment decided to hit the road instead.

Refugio, the site of the last mission built in Texas, it was aimed at the Karankawas. And just to get away from whole-cloth generalizations some of them apparently did get away from oil-smeared cannibalism, enough to fight in concert with Carlos de la Guerra's vaqueros at least.

Turns out Refugio, perhaps the first relatively mosquito-free reliably dry land adjacent to the coast, had long been a campsite of the Copanes, the local branch of the Karankawas, for whom Copano Bay is named.

The mission at Refugio, Nuestra Senora de Refugio, had been built in 1795, a full ten years or more after the five missions at San Antonio had all been secularized and the mission era had ended. Apparently it was a good-faith effort by idealists to evangelize a bunch of benighted savages, it had been in operation with but small success until 1830, and a small settlement had sprang up around it before Independence would make the area a lawless Borderland.

Again, this is an approximate image of how it looked when occupied by the newly-arrived Irish.



I cannot tell the orientation of that model, nor where the river lay. The mission river was clearly close by, running in a NW to SE direction at that point. If the top of that model is taken as north, the river would have lay to the left, and the present four-lane highway cross over the former cemetery space enclosed by the wall. This makes sense in that the long building to the left of the church proper would have been the structure behind which the Mexican soldados took shelter from the concentrated rifle fire of the Georgia Battalion.

Fortunately for those trying to reconstruct events, the mission church was rebuilt some twenty years after the fact. Like San Patricio, Refugio was mostly abandoned by the 1840's as being too unsafe for settlement, and again because of the lawlessness on both sides of the Border.

As an example on the Texian side I'll give Mabry ("Mustang") Gray. Mabry Gray seems the sort who might have become an outlaw biker had he been alive today. One of his noted stunts, repeated a number of times over the years, was to light a powder trail to a 25 pound keg of powder, run with it and then throw it into the air, where it would explode. I dunno how he contrived to survive that but it gives insight as to the character of the man.

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fgr24

Just 19 when he fought at San Jacinto, in his twenties Gray became a Ranger Captain operating out of Corpus Christi. When the bullets were flying, he sounds like exactly the kind of guy you'd want on your side. But when they weren't, murder and common thievery weren't off the table. His most infamous deed being the murder of several Tejano traders outside of San Patricio in 1842, these men having been tied together in a bundle before being shot.

Gray's party had approached the trader's camp in apparent friendship, "getting the drop" on them once in place. The motive for this nefarious act being to steal their goods.

The incident is especially notable because one of the victims IIRC was a son or nephew of Placido Benavides, and like Benavides had actively fought on the Texian side during the war.

Well, the rain falls on both the just and the unjust as they say, and so did cholera in those years. Perhaps an ignominious end for such a noted hell-raiser, but a microbe felled Gray in Mexico in '48 when he was thirty-one years old and just reaching his prime.

At Refugio, IIRC the original reconstruction attempt by the Catholics was a sizeable stone chapel using the original stones in 1868. This structure was later felled by a hurricane.

Today, the mission site at Refugio might likely look about like Lipantitlan except that in 1908 the local residents erected a fine church on the foundation of the old, which still stands today, marking the exact spot for posterity.

It has been a commonality for significant locations in Texian history to be mostly erased by development. Observe the busy four-lane highway running just feet away from the church's front door. The river lies in the background.



In this photo taken from the other side of the church the river lies maybe 70 - 100 yards away across the parking lot on the other side of those trees, the highway bridge crossing just south of that point. This would have been the space where the surprised Texians were attempting to bring in barrels of water when the gunfire commenced.



Birdwatcher

When I left off the flow of events at Refugio, March 14th 1836 (eight days after the Fall of the Alamo), Urrea's 1,500 had been thrown back by the 100+ plus men forted up in the stone church after several assaults and an all-day exchange of fire. Casualty estimates ran between 70 (the Mexican version) to 200 (the Texian version) on the Mexican side for only 6 on the Texian side.

During the fighting, Amon King, who had left with 28 men early that morning to attack a Tejano loyalist camp a few miles downriver, had returned around noon and, not expecting a large Mexican force, had come running towards the sound of battle. They were engaged in the woods along the Mission River and successfully forted up, likewise repelling a number of assaults.

Clearly with respect to King and his small band in the woods there was a reluctance on Urrea's part to take further casualties, else surely they could have been overwhelmed by the far superior Mexican force. As it turned out, restraint on Urrea's part was the correct strategy as all of King's men were captured with scarcely a shot fired the very next day on the open prairie, what little powder they had left having been wetted fleeing across the river.

Ward's 120 men would likewise flee in the night, and a few make good their escape, but most of these weary and hungry men would be captured over the course of the next eight days on the coast at Dimmitt's Landing, or outside of Victoria, looking to rejoin with Texians but finding both places already occupied by Urrea's men.

Lewis Ayers, the San Patricio colonist who's request for help from Fannin had originally prompted the Texian ill-fated rescue mission to Refugio, was with King that day.

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/goliadsanpat2.htm

I placed myself under the command of Capt. King who went in a different route from the remainder of the force, our party consisting of only 28 men after marching for several ranches which were deserted, and at about 12 o'clock came in sight of the Mission when to our utter surprise we discovered what proved to be the whole of Gen. Urrea's division of 1500 men in possession of the town.

Our friends to the number of 120 men were in the Church, my family and others were also in it. The moment we saw the enemy, we were discovered by them, and a party of Horsemen amounting to upwards of 100 men galloped to cut off our retreat to a piece of woods to which we hasted about 600 yards when we reached there we found our -number reduced to 22 men by the desertion of 6. We had time before attacked to choose a good fighting position, and for each man to have his station assigned to him, which was maintained by all throughout an engagement of about one half hour, when the enemy retreated with about 20 killed and a large number wounded.

After an interval of about one hour we were again attacked by about 200 of the enemy in two parties opening a cross fire upon us, we still maintained our ground and after an hour of hard fighting we compelled them to retreat. One of our party was killed within 3 feet of me, and four were wounded, the number of the enemy killed and wounded was very large, but I have not been able to learn the number.

Towards night we were attacked a third time from the opposite side of the river, Capt. King then directed us to lie close, protecting ourselves as much as possible by the woods, and not to fire again, holding ourselves in readiness for an expected attack on our side of the river, which however did not take place, the enemy after wasting as I suppose all their powder and ball and without doing us any personal injury, retired. I was saved from death in the second engagement by a ball glancing from one of a pair of pistols which I wore in front, they were given me by Capt. King.

When night came on it was very dark, not a star to be seen, we crossed the river at the battle ground, where it was not considered fordable, the water reached my chin, there was a ford just above and one just below us but we expected the enemy would guard them, the banks were so steep that we had to assist each other in the ascent, the wounded accompanied us with much pain. We wandered about all night endeavoring to reach Goliad, but when day dawned on the 14th we found ourselves only about 3 miles from the Mission, having lost our way. We hurried on about two miles further, when we were attacked by a party of Mexicans, and were compelled to surrender, our guns being most of them wet, and having no chance to retreat.

Birdwatcher

Birdy,

I think I hear a fire and drum playing "Will you come to the Bower" this morning!!!!

April 21, 1836

The story goes it was the only song that both the fifers knew. Naturally Dick the drummer boy just adlibbed best he could!

Indeed.

As far as I can tell, the San Jacinto (Houston) reenactment is still on for this weekend

Leastways I ain't received any emails telling me different.

In the past even dew has come close to flooding it out.

Birdwatcher

Little seems to be known about the background of William Ward, even his age at the time of the battle is open to conjecture. Whoever he was he had been a prominent enough citizen of Macon, Georgia in 1835 that he was able to recruit and lead 120 men from that place to form the Georgia Battalion of Permanent Volunteers.

Certainly he acquitted himself well at Refugio, reportedly notably good with a rifle, patently asking nothing of his men that he did not also do himself, and competently leading the defense of the church building.

Perhaps 150 people trapped inside that one mission church all day on March 14th; 120 American and some Irish volunteers, a few families from the local area. No food, no water. Under Ward's leadership that day they repelled three Mexican attacks, and after dark Ward succeeded in extricating almost his whole command intact.

A week later, against Ward's advice and urging, the weary company would vote to surrender to Urrea's force outside Victoria, Ward, outvoted, going along with the decision. Most, including Ward, would shortly thereafter be executed in cold blood at Goliad.

An account of Ward's fight at Refugio from a Texian perspective. This published five years after the fact. Excellent narrative...

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/goliadframe.htm

Col. Ward, with about one hundred men of the Georgia battalion, arrived at the Mission on the evening of the 13th of March. A single salute from their rifles served to drive off the enemy, who had invested King in his position, which. was the ruins of a stone church. Having marched during the day twenty-five miles, and most of the way in wet prairie, with the water often ankle deep, they were too greatly fatigued to think of returning the same night. Orders were given to commence their return march at daybreak, the next morning; and after posting sentinels the men were permitted to sleep on their arms.

The following part differs in minor detail from other accounts, now generally accepted as the most accurate. The consensus seems to be that King refused to accept Ward's seniority and independently left the mission with 28 men the morning of the 14th to launch an attack on the Tejano camp downriver, Ward remaining at the mission awaiting their return. Ward did send out a party for reconnaissance that morning, but it weren't King.

On mustering in the morning, a report of one of the sentinels excited suspicions that the enemy had returned into the neighbourhood, accompanied with a much larger force, and it was thought most prudent to send out a reconnoitering party, preceding the march of the main body....

Ward and his men immediately pressed forward to the relief of the advance, but at a distance of only a few hundred yards they were met in front by a body of Mexicans of six or eight hundred men. At the same instant, they discovered a body of cavalry moving at some distance in flank in order to fall upon their rear, and cut off their retreat to the Mission. A moment's deliberation determined them to retreat again to the walls of the Mission house, and by reserving their fire they kept the cavalry at a distance, and reached the walls without loss.

Preparations were immediately set about to defend themselves against an assault, as the large force of the enemy rendered it very certain that this would soon be attempted. On three sides of the church there was nothing to cover the approach of an enemy, but in advancing to make an assault, he must be exposed to the deadly aim of the garrison, the moment he came within rifle shot.

On the fourth side was the church-yard, of some fifty yards in length, walled in. From the end of this the ground sloped for some distance. This would cover the advance of an enemy until it became necessary to scale the wall, and then there were some tombs within that would still partially cover them in a nearer approach to the walls of the church.

This point must therefore be defended by a force posted in the yard. Bullock's company, consisting of about thirty-five men, then without a commissioned officer present, but acting as a band of brothers, volunteered for this dangerous service.

"Band of brothers", now there's an evocative phrase.

Ward himself, although looking well to his duty as commandant of the battalion, was never long absent from this outpost; he scarcely affected to assume the command, but ranked with the band, and none could be more expert in using the rifle....

The rest of this excellent narrative of the events that day can be found on the link.

Plainly the death of Ward and his men at Goliad was a sad loss.

Birdwatcher

Band of brothers", now there's an evocativephrase.


Straight out of Henry V!

And tomorrow being the 500th Anniversary of the Bard's death

But that's another story.

The night of March 14th must have been a Hellish one for the Kentucky (King) and Georgia (Ward) Volunteers. A February cold front complete with driving rain provided their cover. The maybe 20 men left in King's party, hiding in the woods from Urrea's 1,500, had first to cross the Mission River neck-deep in water, stumbling on the deep mud and submerged snags, and then clawing their way up the steep earthen banks. Included among their number were four wounded, who were helped along with "much pain".

As for Ward's 120 in the church, we have these interesting details from Col.Francisco Garay, serving under Urrea....

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/goliadframe.htm

A little past midnight one of our advance guards brought in a prisoner who was at first believed to belong to the band that had been chased from the woods. He was only a messenger from La Bahia [Goliad] who was trying to get into the church, information which be volunteered without being questioned. He presented a note addressed by Colonel Fannin to the so-called Colonel Ward in which he ordered him to evacuate his position upon receipt of the message, no matter what sacrifices he might have to make or what obstacles he would have to overcome. He was to go without delay to Fort Defiance (that was the name of La Bahia) where he (Fannin) would be waiting without fail the next day. Since Colonel Garay thought that it would be well for Ward to receive this information, he permitted the prisoner to deliver it without appearing that he understood its contents.

It must truly have been a miserable night because Garay by his own account acted on his own in this matter, not trying to communicate with Urrea who could not have been far away. Plainly letting the message through was an attempt by Garay to induce the Georgians to quit their impregnable position in the church and attempt a breakout.

From complimentary accounts on the Georgian side we know that the captured messenger was a local Irish settler and that Fannin had also included the information that he would be evacuating Goliad and falling back east towards Victoria.

Ward did slip out, shortly after receipt of the letter sometime after midnight, probably four or five hours after King's band had forded the river.

Both groups then floundered their way through the brush and tall grass in total darkness and pouring rain while seeking a trodden path or road, all the while expecting that Urrea's 1,500 would be hot on their trail at first light. King had been trying to circle east around the mission and the Mexican encampments so as to head north towards Goliad. From survivors' accounts we get that Ward had intended to strike out east for Victoria, so Ward's men heading east must have crossed the tracks of King's men circling around to the north and we know that neither group made it very far that night, but in the miserable conditions the two parties were unaware of each other.

Not likely would they have any source of working light with them to read a compass (whatever DiCaprio's experiences were in "The Revenant", flint and steel are actually hard to work in the rain). Not likely a compass was needed anyhow, the cold North wind would provide bearings enough.

Morning light found King's men just three miles north of Refugio, out on open ground along the expected path of flight, guns and all of their remaining powder still soaking wet and useless. They were speedily located and taken into Mexican custody.

In the dark Ward's men had finally located the wagon road heading south to Copano Bay and had taken it. Not the direction they had ostensibly intended but surely at that point the overriding need was to put some serious distance between themselves and Urrea.

The sense we are given is that Ward got away, 120 exhausted men on foot, following one of the few main thoroughfares out of town in an area thick with long-time resident Loyalist vaqueros. Perhaps just as likely any scouts on the Mexican side were not keen to close with what had been proven to be 100+ deadly accurate riflemen.

Doubtless too Urrea could have taken the time to systematically locate and hunt these men down had he so chosen, but competent strategist that he was, his considerable energies were now focused upon Fannin and the main Texian force at Goliad.

If letting Ward get away had been a gamble on Urrea's part it paid off, as it turned out most of these men would be captured the following week anyway. By Urrea's own account however, the presence of these what he believed to be 200 men under Ward, hovering somewhere off his flank and rear contributed in no small measure to his subsequent decision to execute King and his men for reasons of military expediency.

Birdwatcher

Lewis Ayers, captured with King's group of Kentucky riflemen, gave a good account of what happened next...

We wandered about all night endeavoring to reach Goliad, but when day dawned on the 14th [15th] we found ourselves only about 3 miles from the Mission, having lost our way. We hurried on about two miles further, when we were attacked by a party of Mexicans, and were compelled to surrender, our guns being most of them wet, and having no chance to retreat.

We were then marched back to the Mission, tied together two by two, the rope at the same time connecting up altogether, after which we were marched about one mile, where we found a body of the enemy drawn up to receive us, we also found a few friends, who had been picked up one by one, making in the whole 33 men.

The Soldiers loaded their guns to shoot us but in consequence of there being two Germans among the prisoners the execution was postponed at the request of a Col. in the enemy's service who was a German by birth.

Our treatment during the next 24 hours was most brutal and barbarous. I had not asked for neither did I expect any mercy at the hands of the enemy. My wife however with four children presented herself to Gen. Urrea and excited his sympathy by their tears, she was aided by some Mexican officers who were opposed to the barbarous course persued of murdering prisoners, and the General agreed to save my life, which was done, and I was given in some degree my liberty, after receiving a severe lecture on account of my hostility to Mexico and charging me to behave myself better in the future and let politics alone-I merely bowed and said nothing.

...and again, as a measure of those perilous times, the Ayers would shortly lose all four of their children in the space of a week to scarlet fever, folks from all walks of life often having to cope back then with personal tragedies that would boggle the mind today.


So, the prisoners were led out to be shot twice, the first time the German-speaking officer declined to go through with it. That German officer was one Juan Jose Holzinger, an Engineer who had originally relocated to Mexico ten years earlier in the employ of a British concern. Holzinger first came to Santa Anna's attention when he was contracted to build a house on one of Santa's Anna's vast estates.

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

During the Texas campaign he was Urrea's Chief of Artillery. At Refugio, in addition to the two Germans Ayers mentioned, Holzinger reportedly spared an additional eight men who had been local settlers, and perhaps a few others were impressed as laborers. It is believed that only 15 of the original 33 prisoners were actually marched out and shot the next day, "about a mile" from the mission.

Later that year the scattered remains of these unfortunate men were collected and interred on a hillside not far from the mission, this burial site serving as a nucleus for the establishment of a Catholic cemetery.

The exact location of the gravesite was lost for 98 years, until a construction project by chance unearthed 16 skeletons interred in a mass grave.



...and kudos to whoever in 1934 designed this appropriately 19th Century-styled monument.






Holzinger would go on to save another 25 of Ward's men held at Victoria and would attempt to save more at Goliad.

Along with Urrea and the rest of Urrea's command, he would pointedly be sent to a reserve area later in the campaign, so removing them in Santa Anna's mind from any chance of further acclaim or glory.

Thus, at the time of San Jacinto, Holzinger had been assigned to build a fort at Matagorda on the coast. It was his great good fortune to be captured upon his withdrawal from that place by a Texian force that included some of the very men he had earlier saved. Notwithstanding the fact that he was an officer in Santa Anna's army, Holzinger was shortly thereafter set at liberty with a letter of grateful commendation from Mirabeau Lamar.

He returned to Mexico, where he presumably lived out the remaining twenty-eight years of his life mostly at peace.

Birdwatcher

Mike do know anything about the remains that were found in Refugio, i guess about 10 yrs or more back when they were doing highway construction? i know they shut down the project for a while till the remains were properly removed.

Roger,

Was it an old cemetery that hwy ROW had encroached on?

Just wrote archaeologist son. The firm he works with does many hwy mitigation projects.

it was hwy 77 running through town, i think it might of been just as you were coming into town from the south and had crossed the river.

He said if it wasn't associated withthe mission he doesn't know. But it sounds native to me.

could of been.

Roger,

If you wanted, you could prolly stop by the TxDOT maintenance yard in Refugio, and they could prolly tell you all about it. Don't remember where the area engineers office for the county is. Prolly Victoria. But they would prolly let you read all About it in their files. If you were so inclined! .

Sure sounds like here, if not in the old mission campo santo (cemetery, in this case right in front of the church door) then somewhere esle on what already was or what would become the mission grounds.

You can see in the background the curve markers pointing left towards the bridge which is right there beyond the treeline....



The church was built on the foundation of the ruin of the old mission chapel. It was not easily apparent during my visit but back in the days the specific real estate the mission had been set on was by accounts a long-used camping area. So it could presumably have been a colonial-era or purely native burial or burials they came across.

Anyways, back to the main account, or at least a sideshow of the main account; a notorious Tejano named Jesus Cuellar otherwise AKA "El Comanche". Distrusted by both sides, but here doing his best to set up a battle somewhere on the prairie between Goliad and San Patricio.

First, from Andrew O'Boyle, of Fannin at Goliad....

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/adp/archives/documents/survived.html

... a report brought in by a scout named "Comanche," of the advance of the Mexican army under General Urrea, toward San Patricio....

Our commander, by the advice of "Comanche," determined to march to San Patricio, leaving one company in garrison at Goliad. The character of the scout was notoriously bad, and Colonel Fannin was informed of the fact, but gave no heed of the warning, although two of us volunteered to go to San Patricio and ascertain the truth of the report. Three days ration were distributed, and everything was in readiness to commence the march the next morning...

Meanwhile, from the account of Col. Garay at San Patricio, of El Comanche and a carefully contrived ambush....

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/goliadurrea.htm

On the night of the 7th, Jesus Cuéllar, known as el Comanche, presented himself in San Patricio claiming that he had abandoned Fannin's force to throw himself upon the clemency of the Mexican government.He was very likely sent by Fannin to observe our force and position.... His brother, Salvador, who had accompanied our forces ever since we left Matamoros, pledged himself for his brother's loyalty.

[Cuellar] told General Urrea that Fannin had decided to attack him and that by this time he had probably effected a juncture with the force at the mission. Consequently he promised to take us to a spot where we could lay in ambush while he went and brought the enemy into our hands....

General Urrea, confiding in his sincerity, ordered 200 men, 1 cannon, and 150 cavalry to set out early in the morning of the 8th of March for Las Ratas, 8 leagues away, on the San Refugio road.

Anyways, back in Goliad fate intervened at one o'clock in the morning of the planned departure, and the fight El Comanche had sought to arrange never did take place...

everything was in readiness to commence the march the next morning, when an American named Ayres arrived from the Old Mission [Refugio], some fifteen miles distant in the direction of San Patricio, and brought some reliable news of the arrival of the Mexicans at that place.

...and the last Mexican mention of El Comanche....

When our destination was reached, Cuéllar left us and Gen. Urrea proceeded to arrange the small force to carry out his plan.

Coming across mention of this guy I thought, "Well hey, Blue Duck". But, as it turns out things were more complex than that.

Turns out El Comanche had served under Cos at the Battle of Bexar in December of '35 (wherein in the Texians had first won control of the Alamo), serving as his guide and actually being given a commission as a Lieutenant in the Mexican army. El Comanche had deserted then and gone over to the Texian side, providing information about Cos' deployment and actual strength useful to the Texians going into that fight.

In return the Texian interim government, such as it was, had given him a rank of Captain in the Texian Army.

The stated reason for El Comanche's original split with Mexico had allegedly been Santa Anna's mistreatment of a brother, tho I dunno where this reportedly occurred since Santa Anna was still 600 miles away down in Mexico at that point. Cuellar had some time previously been taken captive by Comanches and had lived with them for some years, hence the name. Such prolonged acquaintance and even intermarriage between Tejano and Indio was nothing unusual, the dividing lines being decidedly blurred after all, but in this case Mexican and Texian alike judged El Comanche to be el hombre muy malo.

If we had the likes of a John Glanton running loose somewhere down there, they had the likes of an El Comanche, a good reason for decent folks of all sorts to bear arms.

Only other thing I can find on the guy is that he would die at Goliad five years later during the years when that area had become a decidedly lawless place, whether El Comanche eventually met a violent end like John Glanton or was felled by a germ like Mustang Gray I cannot tell, the cause was not given.

Birdwatcher

yes it was in front of the church.

By Ayer's account, the fifteen men at Refugio not spared from execution endured a hellish night before being marched out again and shot. Urrea and presumably those officers who might have saved them had already left the scene, hastening north towards Goliad. There were no enlightened officers, no foreign nationals, nor compassionate mistresses of the officers left to save them.

Still present at Refugio were the more than 70 Mexican dead and grievously wounded. Worse, there had been no victory, the Americans in the mission church had slipped clean away during the night following the fight.

One thing apparent in the accounts from both sides too are the grievances of the local Tejano population against those Americans that had come to fight in the war, freshly arrived from wherever they had come from in the United States.

There had previously been a community of a couple of hundred Tejanos at Refugio, a thousand or more at Goliad. These people were dispossessed, plundered, burned out, in a some cases assaulted, ravished and even killed. The village at Refugio, such as it was, had been torched by Ward and King before the fight.

The few prior Anglo settlers and their families captured at Refugio, even Ayers who had been demonstrably bearing arms, were spared. As at San Patricio, these people had a prior amicable history with their Tejano neighbors, not so the American volunteers (One notable exception among the settlers was a man who's name has been written as Sajer, of German extraction, who was shot for the crime of having shot and killed a prominent Tejano. This man's remains might have been the sixteenth skeleton recovered from the mass grave at Refugio).

So, as would shortly true at Goliad, there was among the local population a perception that the executions were a form of justice. Whether this was true or not, not everyone who witnessed or participated in these killings felt that they were committing murder.

Birdwatcher

It is not often when reading military history that one finds a commander who did everything right so often as did Urrea. It becomes a pleasure to read, you find yourself admiring the guy's proficiency. Someone earlier mentioned Patton, I would also throw in the likes of NB Forrest, and perhaps a couple of the German panzer commanders in WWII.

Urrea had just scattered what he believed were 200 of the enemy but he knew a larger force, the main Texian army, occupied Goliad. From at least two captured messengers he had proof positive of Fannin's intention to fall back 25 miles east to Victoria, the largest town in the area. Victoria represented a naturally defensible point on the other side of the Guadalupe River, easily supplied and accessed from Lavaca Bay to the south. From Urrea's standpoint it was imperative to a) engage and defeat Fannin's force before they could reach Victoria and b) take Victoria itself before the town could be used as an assembly point from which to attack him.

In typical Urrea fashion, despite the inclemency of the weather he didn't sit and wait to marshal his army while awaiting reports, nor did he lie up in comfort with a pretty teenager like Santa Anna had. Instead, taking the most mobile elements of his army, just 200 men, he moved out and began closing the net on Fannin.

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/goliadurrea.htm

I was obliged to move with rapidity in order to save my division and destroy the forces that threatened us.....

[March] 17. Very early on this day I found myself on the right bank of the San Antonio [River]. I halted at San José Ranch from where I could keep a watch on Goliad. I sent scouts to... Victoria, situated nine leagues distant. I passed near Goliad and reconnoitered it from as close a point as possible.

After having again carefully reconnoitered this place and its vicinity, I returned to my camp with my force. I took all the precautions prescribed by the art of war and demanded by circumstances. I had plenty of warnings that made me fear the flight of the enemy, so I reinforced the advanced cavalry pickets which I had placed along the river to keep watch. Our troops were obliged to bivouac all night, exposed to a continuous rain and a strong north wind which made the cold unbearable. No rest was possible during the entire night.

...and finally, reinforcements arrived from San Antonio...


During the night Capt. Pedro Pablo Ferino and two scouts came to me. Under orders of Don Juan Antonio de los Santos, they had been on the road to Béxar watching for the force that was to join me from that point. Ferino told me that Col. Juan Morales was approaching with 3 cannon and 500 men from the battalions of Jiménez and San Luis.

I repeated the order previously given to this officer to take a position a league from Goliad, on the Manahuilla Creek, north of the fort. I broke up camp early in order to march to join the division that was coming from Béxar, which I did at the appointed place.

While all this was happening, and while so many men hustled through the night braving the cold and rain, Fannin and his men resting under cover at Goliad had no clue of the doom being skillfully laid all around them.

Santa Anna would afterwards send Urrea to the bench while seeking to co-opt the glory for himself, and the decisive Battle of San Jacinto would have a fluke outcome that no one going into this campaign would have predicted. But if the war was lost, it wasn't because of Urrea.

Birdwatcher

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

Birdy,

Worth a mention to above photo. The whitewashed house to extreme right is a facsimile of the birthplace Of Ignacio Zaragosa. The man who defeated the French at Puebla on 5 May 1862. His father was a Spanish officer garrisoned at La Bahia.

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

Fannin was in a real bind and folks then, as now, were quick to assign blame when things were tough.....

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/goliadframe.htm

The signs of coming danger began to produce a feeling of anxiety, which was further increased by many vague and groundless rumors that circulated among the men.

The confinement in the garrison became irksome; our provisions, of which we had at first an abundance were becoming short; the restraints of discipline, now more necessary than ever in their enforcement, produced discontent and murmurs and a loss of confidence in their commander.

The practicability [or utility] of maintaining such forts, as it was in the wilderness, were fully discussed. Fannin was not slow to perceive the feeling coming over the men, and it caused a corresponding depression of his mind.

Leading Texians was never easy at the best of times and this was shaping up to be the worst of times. "Commanding Texians" would be too strong a term. Urrea had the luxury of command, no Texian leader ever did.

Fannin at that point bore the burden of knowing that he was THE game in town, nominal commander-in-chief of the largest extant Texian force then in the field, and personally responsible not only for the lives of his men but also for a virtual arsenal of cannon, small arms and ammunition that his employers had entrusted to him.

Worse, he had deployed 150 of those men, fully one-third of his force, on what turned out to be a fool's errand to Refugio and now could get no word from them.

So it must have seemed an act of providence when his cavalry unit, some twenty-eight men of yet another militia, the Mobile Grays under one Albert C. Horton, had returned from Victoria a short time before with a small train of ox-carts bearing food and supplies. After rationing the men for the retreat all they could not carry would be burned in place, but the ox-carts meant he now could potentially haul off those hundreds of extra muskets, at least some field pieces and the ammunition.

At least four successive messengers had been sent after King and Ward at Refugio but none had returned. One we know of, one of the Refugio Irish, had been captured by Garay's men and permitted to deliver his message to the besieged Ward inside the chapel. The other three almost certainly perished, intercepted along the way.

Finally Fannin dispatched one of those ubiquitous Scots, one Hugh MacDonald Frazer, late of Nova Scotia, one of the original Refugio Irish (ya, I know the contradiction). Frazer was one of those guys we wish we knew more about. He had been a leader of the Refugio Militia at the start of the war, and this time volunteered to go to Refugio after those four previous messengers had failed to return.

Almost certainly, based on passing mention in other survivor's accounts, Frazer took the logical step of contacting the local Tejanos around Refugio, with whom he was presumably still on friendly terms. By the evening of the 17th Frazer brought to Fannin the bad news about the events at Refugio and the size of the Mexican force now arrayed against him.

Bad news to be sure, but actionable intelligence at last.

As an aside, the ultimate fate of Frazer is unknown. Presumably he was captured with the rest of Fannin's force near Coleto Creek. Family tradition had it that he was executed at Goliad in the massacre but nobody knows for sure. Prior settlers like Frazer, personally known to their Tejano neighbors to be good people, were saved on at least some occasions. A Hugh MacDonald Frazer would be present a month later at San Jacinto, it may have been the same guy.

Birdwatcher

We could not remember ever having seen Fannin, usually so gallant and at times almost rash, so undecided as he was during the last eight days..... it seemed that one plan after another passed through his head. The large number seemed to confuse him and to hinder him in his usually prompt manner of reaching a decision on a given matter and putting it into speedy execution. Herman Ehrenberg.

Col. Fanning and Capt. Westover came to me, Col. Fanning asked me what I thought about retreating and leaving the fort; I told him that my opinion was that is was too late; for I made no doubt from what we had seen that we were entirely surrounded by the enemy, and that we had something like six weeks provisions and men enough to keep the enemy from breaking in for some time, as we had then about 360 men. Col. Fanning seemed to have his mind unsettled about it. Capt. Westover agreed with me, and said if we had left some three or four days before, he thought we might have escaped; but he made no doubt that we were surrounded now. Abel Morgan.

The only cavalry available to Fannin at this time were the Mobile Grays, twenty five to thirty men (depending upon the account) raised and financed by one Albert C. Horton, a wealthy planter from Georgia by way of Alabama who was termed their Colonel. By far the most famous member of this company had been the gallant and heroic James Butler Bonham, second cousin to Travis, who had willfully died with Travis at the Alamo, returning there to almost certain death just three days before the Fall, feeling obliged by honor to carry the message that no help was imminent.

The exact nature of the weaponry carried by the Mobile Grays is uncertain. Fighting as cavalry does seem to have appealed to those of the well-heeled Southern planter class, probably in part because of the implied romantic associations with knighthood, the works of Sir Walter Scott being very popular at that time. So we have Travis, Bonham, Horton and the future President of the Texas Republic, Mirabeau Lamar, all opting to go this route.

Cavalry represented a considerable expense above merely volunteering as a foot soldier. First was the cost of a good horse, the gear, and the upkeep. The single largest expense was the generally preferred weapon; a double shotgun, by this era either flintlock or percussion (worth noting here that the first user group to widely disseminate the new percussion cap technology had been bird hunters). Mirabeau Lamar's fine piece is currently on display in Austin, a custom weapon for which he famously paid $650 plus shipping, an exorbitant sum at the time.

To see his shotgun.....

http://www.thestoryoftexas.com/discover/artifacts/mirabeau-b-lamars-shotgun

We know that Travis brought a double to the Alamo, and was killed while firing it over the battlements on that last morning. Presumably a wealthy guy like Horton carried one too.

A double shotgun and a brace of horse pistols; interestingly the exact same weaponry some accounts say were carried by the famous trapper Jedediah Smith at the time of his fatal ambush by Comanches five years previously in present-day Kansas. While it doesn't seem likely that all of Horton's unit carried doubles, one can infer that they were heavily armed by the standards of the time, at least relative to De la Garza's vaqueros.

Texas, with its wide open spaces and vast distances, was a demanding location of horses and horsemen. Certainly the incoming Anglos would rise to the challenge, South Texas being where the classic cowboy culture, based upon the vaquero and ranchero model, would originate in the coming decades.

But overall, Horton's cavalry do not seem to have shone in their brief day of combat. One imagines too heavy and too slow relative to their lightweight and mobile opponents. Then too the well-handled rifle would turn out to be the queen of Plains combat, especially against opponents like Plains Indians and Tejano Vaqueros, neither of whom would stand to accept close combat with heavily armed cavalry.

On the evening of the 17th, while Urrea was actively closing the net around Fannin, Horton's reconnaissance of the area did at least discover Colonel Juan Morales and his 500 men, down from Bexar, camped on Urrea's orders just three miles above Goliad, but did not find the other Mexican forces gathering about them.

On the 18th, when Fannin had intended to evacuate, the garrison was distracted by a show of force by a large group of De la Garza's vaqueros openly appearing before the fort, across the river by the mission church. In response the Mobile Grays launched a furious charge, only to have the vaqueros predictably flee before them.

What followed was a protracted series of charges and counter charges, mostly for sport on the part of the vaqueros, and at one point involving the cannon of the fort and an infantry charge by the Texians, wading the San Antonio River up to their necks.

Few if any lives were lost, as Thomas Lindley of "Texas Ilaid" fame pointed out, all that was really accomplished was to distract the Texians' attention and to wear out the Grays' horses.

Meanwhile Urrea continued his methodical preparations.

Birdwatcher

One thing Fannin's command did was just flat puzzling.

When they were expecting to stay and defend they put in an enormous amount of labor, including that 100 yard armored causeway to water, and as it turns out slaughtering and jerking the meat of EIGHT HUNDRED cattle (which shows how abundant cattle really were).

When the decision was made to leave, it is understandable that all the food and supplies they couldn't carry went up in smoke, including all that beef, and that they torched the town before leaving.

Puzzling thing is they had simply buried the cannon they could take with 'em, and then dug 'em up and mounted them again when De la Garza's vaqueros showed up in force on the 18th....

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/goliadframe.htm

On the morning after Ward left Goliad for the Mission, to relieve King, Col. Fannin received Gen. Houston's order to evacuate Goliad and fall back on Victoria. He took immediate steps in making preparation to obey this order, by dismounting several guns and burying them, sending out one or two parties of men, accompanied by officers, to procure teams and carts, and making other arrangements for in immediate retreat.....

....On the 16th of March, Colonel Albert C. Horton, of Matagorda, with twenty-seven men under his command, arrived at Goliad, bringing with them some oxen, to enable us to take off our stores and munitions. A fourth messenger was despatched to Col. Ward, urging his immediate return, while we were busied in making preparation for a retreat. On the 17th, Horton was ordered to examine the country towards San Antonio, and keep scouts in every direction. On his return, Horton reported a large, force, a few miles from the fort, moving on slowly and in good order. We immediately dug up our cannon, which had been buried, and re-mounted them, expecting an attack that night, or early the next morning. Jack Shackelford.

How they expected merely burying the cannon would render them unavailable to the Mexicans I dunno, maybe they thought they could hide the excavations.

But, on the morning of the 19th the men were issued three days of rations, everything was torched, the cannon left behind were properly spiked this time, and priority was given to hauling out the ammunition, those 600 muskets, and whatever cannon they could bring.

All the artillery with the exception of two long four-pounders, a regular mortar and a small mortar were spiked and left behind as we left the ruins a eight o'clock.

Nowhere was there a trace of the enemy whose spies for several days had revealed themselves westward toward San Antonio. The number and size of the provisions and ammunition wagons that we took with us were too large and the power to move them was too small so that before we had gone half the way was strewn with objects of all kinds and here and there a wagon that was left standing or knocked to pieces. The rest of the baggage remained standing a mile from Goliad on the romantic banks of the San Antonio, or was dropped in haste into the clear water to the river. Chests filled with musket provisions or the belongings of the soldiers disappeared in the waves.

All the horses and oxen were used to transport the above named artillery, two wagons and the powder magazine. In this way we went slowly forward without even getting to see an enemy. Herman Ehrenberg.

Ehrenberg in his lucid account thus gives us a train of four artillery pieces (another account claims nine) and just three carts or wagons (one loaded with gunpowder) surviving the initial crossing of the adjacent San Antonio River.

But, even that small train was having problems. The oxen were by nature intractable, and had been mishandled and left unfed in the confusion of the days prior. One of them critical details along the lines of how amateurs talk strategy whereas professionals talk logistics.

At an early hour the next day we were under marching orders. Our cannon, baggage and sick, were drawn by Mexican oxen, in Mexican carts. Not being well broke, nor understanding the language and manners of English drivers, many of them as they issued from the fort, ran furiously into the prairie, and were unmanageable. Others would go no way but backwards...

The need to rest and feed these same oxen would be the specific cause of Fannin's fatal pause a couple of hours later.

As to what a cart and oxen may have looked like, here a couple of probably larger and better fed examples on the San Jacinto battle reenactment a few years back...





..the cart is likely smaller than was usual, here's an illustration from maybe fifteen years later by a German living in San Antonio German....



Gentilz was a good and accurate artist, he always portrays his Tejanos in taller and narrower-brimmed straw hats than we would expect today.

Meanwhile, at Goliad, it must be said that Horton's cavalry in this case were sadly deficient, maybe a case of people totally new to the area vs. mounted locals on the other side who were skilled at eluding detection. We know that at the very least there was a force of 500 Mexican army camped just three miles to the north, and maybe a couple of hundred vaqueros swarming around, likewise Urrea states that very morning he had been setting artillery in place to fire upon the fort, yet by accounts Horton consistently reported the way was clear.

On the morning of the 19th, we commenced the retreat very early, the Red Rovers leading the van, and Duval's company covering the road. The lower road had been well examined by Horton's videttes, who reported all clear. At the lower ford of the San Antonio, much time was consumed in consequence of the inability of the team to draw our cannon up the bank. I waded into the river myself, with several of my company, assisting the artillerists by putting our shoulders to the wheels, and forcing the guns forward. We then moved on briskly and in good order, Horton's scouts examining the country in front and rear. We had advanced about six miles, when our scouts came in with a report that the route was still clear. Jack Shackleford

Birdwatcher

Its probably no wonder Dr. Jack Shackleford of Courtland, Alabama turned out to be such a particularly good witness. Almost all of the Red Rovers militia he had raised and equipped, including his own son, would be executed at Goliad while Shackelford himself, who's doctoring skills were needed by the Mexicans after the bloody engagement, would be spared.

There is no suggestion that Shackleford knew what would happen on that horrible execution day, if anything it would appear at the time that he was being detained while his men and son were being deported to New Orleans. Then too, everyone in his company, like himself, had come voluntarily, knowing they might die. Still, Shackleford must have had abundant cause over the remaining 19 years of his life to relive these events. Today we would call it survivors' guilt or perhaps PTSD.

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/goliadframe.htm

The lower road had been well examined by Horton's videttes, who reported all clear..... We then moved on briskly and in good order, Horton's scouts examining the country in front and rear. We had advanced about six miles, when our scouts came in with a report that the route was still clear.

As our teams had become somewhat weary, and very much in want of food, from having been kept in the fort for the last twenty-four hours, Col. Fannin determined to halt and graze them, and that we also might have time to take a little refreshment. I remonstrated warmly against this measure, and urged the necessity of first reaching the Coleta, then about five miles distant.

In this matter I was overruled, and from the ardent manner in which I urged the necessity of getting under the protection of timber, I found the smiles of many, indicated a belief that at least I thought it prudent to take care of number one.

Here let me state one thing, lest I may be misunderstood: Col. Fannin and many others could not be made to believe that the Mexicans would dare follow us. He had too much contempt for their prowess, and too much confidence in the ability of his own little force....

We halted near an hour, and then took up our march. Horton's Company was sent in advance to examine the pass on the Coleto.

Meanwhile, Urrea had not been idle....

April 19. ...I was making ready to place our artillery on a high slope on the left bank of the river, within a rifleshot of the fort, and was about to cross with the cavalry for the purpose of inspecting the points by which the enemy could be approached, when I received notice that they had abandoned their position and were on the way to Guadalupe Victoria.

I immediately ordered 360 infantry and 80 cavalry to be ready to march, and at eleven o'clock, having confirmed my information, I set out to overtake them, leaving the rest of our force and the artillery and baggage under the care of Col. Francisco Garay, with instructions to explore the fort and take possession of it if it was really abandoned. I did not think it proper to take personal charge of this operation, fearing that the enemy might escape....

After marching two leagues, I was informed by my spies [De la Garza's vaqueros], whose activity is truly marvelous, that we were near the enemy, and that it seemed that they were not taking all the force that had garrisoned Goliad. I ordered 100 infantry to return, therefore, to protect the artillery and ammunitions which were being brought up, and redoubled the vigilance of the rest of my forces.


So Urrea succeeded in halting and bringing to bay out on the open plain Fannin's heavily armed force of 250 men while using just 260 soldados and 80 lancers of his own.

What a flying column of 80 Mexican lancers looked like we get from Ehrenberg.....

Our route led us through one of those charming landscapes where little prairies alternate with thin forests of oak without any undergrowth. Frequently we saw herds of cattle grazing on the luxuriant grass; and immense herds of deer looked with amazement at the little army wending its way through the stillness of the west. And the noble Andalusian horses, that had their beginning here with the horrible conquest of Mexico by Cortez, stamped away in close formation over the undulating prairie, and long after they had disappeared one could still hear the rumble of their fleeing hoofs.

Eight miles from Goliad begins a considerable treeless prairie, known as the nine-mile prairie. It was in this prairie that the army had warily advanced from four to five miles by three o'clock in the afternoon.

I and a few of my friends who were bringing up the rear-guard, were about two miles behind with the instructions to keep a watchful eye on the forest, which was several miles away to the left of us. Since not the least trace of an enemy had shown itself so far we rode carelessly along until we accidentally turned around noticed at a distance of about four miles a figure in the part of the forest through which we had just come that looked like a rider on horse back. Since, however, it did not move, we came to the conclusion that it was a tree or some other lifeless object. Without taking further notice of it we rode on.

A quarter of an hour might have passed; and as our army at a distance of one to one and one-half miles was moving at snail's pace ahead of us and as we did not wish to catch up with it, we decided to halt a little while to graze and rest our horses.

Now, first as we, let our gaze wander over the immense prairie to enjoy the beauty of the scene, we saw behind us near the edge of the forest a long black streak on the plain. It was impossible for us to tell what it was. A few though possibly that they were large herds of cattle that the settlers were driving eastward out of reach of the Mexicans. But this seemed improbable as all of those that stood on the side of the Texans had cleared the region west of the Guadalupe, since they would rather lose everything than to further bear the yoke of Santa Anna. As we looked more intently and observed the disturbing object more closely, we noticed a moving and twisting in the dark mass that grew larger and larger and in proportion to the distance ever plainer. We could no longer doubt that it was the Mexican cavalry that was following us in full gallop.

Hastily we mounted our horses and dashed off at full speed to our comrades to prepare them for the reception of the enemy. The news was received with a hurrah. Everything was at once prepared for battle. A hollow square was formed, and in this way, of course very slowly we continued our march.

Fannin, our commander, was a gallant and spirited warrior, but for the commanding officer, where he should act with independence, understanding, and decision, he was totally unfit. Instead of trying to reach the forest one mile away for the sake of our safety, where the Americans and the Texans are invincible, he decided to offer battle on an unfavorable, open terrain.

Urrea again....

At half past one in the afternoon, I overtook the enemy and succeeded in cutting off their retreat with our cavalry, just as they were going to enter a heavy woods from where it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to dislodge them.

Birdwatcher

Thanks for keeping this up,and running Mike !

LOVE this thread,....and will advise that until one has dismantled and serviced an original Moore lock, he's missed one of gun lore and legend's REAL pleasures.

Mirabeau's Moore and Harris is quite a piece, ain't it ?

GTC

Yes it is, and it ain't commonly acknowledged where I am that such finished designs appeared as early as the 1830's. Common consensus for example has it that Travis' double at the Alamo was a flintlock, tho I have not heard any specific justification for that.

Thanks for the kind words, and I will say I have been learning as I posted. Prior to this, like most everyone else, I had consigned the whole Matamoras Expedition/Goliad Massacre to virtual irrelevance. We toss it aside prob'ly because of the dismal outcome.

Anyways, from that same phenomenal TAMU site, a more credible account of the confusion arising that morning when Fannin decided to pull out.

Charles B. Spain, of whom at first look I can find little, other than that he passed in 1853. Here writing of his arrival in Texas (with the New Orleans Greys???)and of Nacodoches back in December of '35.

There weren't no background checks for getting into a militia...

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/goliadframe.htm

On the 10th, in the evening, we left Nacogdoches, and had gone about two miles, when Capt. Tarlton told the Orderly Sergeant to detach six men and go back for a man by the name of Smith who had two guns that belonged to the company. The Orderly, with Messrs. Perkins, Brown, Bull, Wright, Victor, and myself, went back and found Smith, who refused to go with us or to give up the guns unless Perkins would give him a receipt for them.

Perkins agreed to do so and was writing it when I saw Smith suddenly shove Brown back and draw his knife. He made a pass at Brown, and I caught the blow on my own knife. Smith then ran out of the door, and I pursued him, but not overtaking him, I saw no more of him until I got to Labahia, or Goliad, when he appeared to be every friendly to us all.


...and on the abundance of Texas in its pristine state, here the general East Central region, College Station - Bastrop....

From Tinoxticlan to Brasstrop, 80 miles, we did not see a house, but it certainly is the finest country in the world. It has more deer and turkey than any other region I have ever seen. I am confident that I saw not less than 300 deer in one drove. On the 24th I killed three buffalo; and two others were killed by some of the rest of the company. We must have seen 500-600 that day. At night we camped out on the St. Mark's River [San Marcos], where we could stand in camp and kill an abundance of turkies. The next night we encamped on the Guadalupe or Warlupe river.

Medical care, or the lack thereof....

On the second, or third day after we left San Antonio, one of our men, Mr. Pike, accidentally shot Mr. Childers. Captain Lawrence, myself and several others were left behind to have his leg dressed. We did so, and put him in an open wagon, but it jolted him so much, that before we could get him to Goliad, he was too far gone for medical assistance. He died six or seven days after we reached Goliad..

The events on the morning of the 19th, pre-dawn. After the skirmishing of the day before, scouts were sent out besides Horton's men to check for Mexicans and Tejanos. Of course they found them, these pre-dawn events didn't make it into other survivor's accounts is all.

"At least 200 horsemen", possibly De la Garza's vaqueros getting out of the way. Followed by one of those fog of war episodes, where they very nearly shot their own scouts.

That night we intended starting after dark, but some of our horsemen came up from the river, and said that there was a picket guard of the Mexicans at each ford. Col. Fannin then ordered Col. Horton to take his horse company and cross over the river with one of our company behind each of them, and to watch until we could have the artillery and baggage carried over. We thought it a very singular order, but we obeyed.

The horsemen went forward, and, in a short time, one of them came galloping back, and told us that there were at least 200 horsemen in the act of crossing. In a few minutes we heard horses coming and were ordered to form and receive a charge. They came within fifty yards of us before we could see them on account of the darkness. Captain Duval hailed them, when we found them to be our own men that we had sent to see if there was any chance of crossing that night.

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. It was so dark that the Mexicans did not pursue us. We then returned to the fort, and the next morning, at 11 o'clock we were across the river.

Birdwatcher

Turns out it was a whole month ago already (another month from now, me and my son expect to be in England, post TT races already )...

I left Refugio towards evening and to make it to the Fannin surrender site had to jet 30 miles northeast towards Victoria on 77, turn left to go north on 59, and then left again ten miles east to a wide spot on the highway called Fannin, TX.

Fortunately traffic was running at the usual Texas 80 - 90 mph (woulda been 80 to 100+ on an innerstate). East of Refugio I snapped this photo, this is the sort of terrain Ward and his 120 guys were facing trying to sneak from Refugio to Victoria....



Eastbound on 59, the infamous Coleto Creek, maybe six miles from the battle site, had Fannin pushed on for another hour, he would have reached cover and water and as Urrea himself acknowledged, been difficult or impossible to dislodge. Dunno how it woulda turned out, Urrea would still have been Urrea, but suffice to say it coulda been a whole different ballgame....



The battle site park was about two miles south of the highway, down a quiet backroad, small place, maybe ten acres. First thing you see across the fence by the gate it this, a strange piece of antique steel in the middle of a landscaped star....



Turns out there was one William Lockhart Hunter, late of Kentucky, 26 years old at the time of this battle and the subsequent Goliad massacre, who not only lived to tell the tale but prospered later in life as a resident of Goliad....

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/goliaddiverse3.htm

Hunter made an extraordinary escape from the "Fannin massacre." He was a member of the " New Orleans Grays"; he was shot down at the first fire, and remained for a considerable time unconscious. Upon reviving he could not move his body, as a dead comrade had fallen upon him. Being very weak from the loss of blood, he extricated himself with difficulty, and discovered that he had been stripped of his clothing, retaining only undershirt and drawers.

He summoned all his strength for one supreme effort to reach the river, and nearly failed in doing so. He submerged himelf in the water, and remained in that position all day. At night he crossed the river and struck out in an easterly direction. He came to a small stream the next morning, upon the banks of which he remained nearly all day, suffering excruciating pains from his wounds, and being rendered weak from the loss of blood and hunger.

He finally made another start, and soon came to another stream, and in following the course of this he came across his own tracks where he had crossed before. He then took down the creek, and came to a house, near the Coletto, where he found some Mexicans who could speak a few words of English, and received of them some clothing and food.

These people treated him with the utmost kindness and did all that they could to alleviate his pains. The owner of the jacal, Juan Reyna, had previously lived at the Goliad crossing, but had removed to avoid the unwelcome visits of the soldiers, who were continually passing between Goliad and Victoria.

With the aid of these Good Samaritans Hunter speedily recovered sufficient strength to resume his journey, when Señor Reyna himself accompanied him to the house of Mrs. Margaret Wright, wife of David R. Wright, five miles above Victoria, on the Guadalupe River....

She nursed Hunter with a mother's care, and sheltered him from the Mexicans until after the battle of San Jacinto. This statement I have from the lips of Judge Hunter himself, who now resides in Goliad, near the spot or that most terrible episode in his life.

Hunter had returned in subsequent decades and marked the site of the battle with a pile of rocks. In 1894, eight years after Hunter's death, a local landowner name of Sol Parks, concerned the exact spot would be forgotten, marked the spot with the cotton gin screw still there today.

The accuracy of Hunter's recollection was much more recently supported by a thorough archaeological exploration, the story told by 415 musket balls; .69 cal (Charleville and/or Springfield) for the Americans and .75 (Brown Bess)for the Mexicans (the following photos from the small but very good museum at the site)...



I was at first surprised that a single marker like that could mark a whole battle, but then I saw how small Fannin's formation really was; 250 men in a square, three deep (no doubt straight out of the Duke of Wellington's playbook at Waterloo). Subtracting the artillerymen at the four corners that gives a front line of no more than 20 men on each face of the square.

If figured 25 yards on a side, at it turned out that enclosed more area than that recalled in another survivor's account (same link)....

We drew our wagons into a cluster, formed ourselves into an oblong circle around them, and posted our artillery in positions to defend it: the circle was about 49 feet of shortest central diameter, and about 60 feet of longest diameter.

It was now 1 o'clock, P. M., at which time we were attacked on all sides by the enemy, with a brisk fire of musketry: we were ordered not to fire, until the word of command was given, in order to draw the enemy within rifle-shot. We reserved our fire for about ten minutes, and several were wounded in our ranks previous to our firing.

Two photos I took in the museum....





250 men corralled into that small space in the early afternoon; nowhere to run, no cover, no water, fully one in four of them dead or seriously wounded by the end of the day. Cold drizzle that night, enough to chill but not enough to drink, no fires possible because of rifle fire from the surrounding force. More than 100 enemy dead and wounded out in the darkness surrounding them.

Birdwatcher

Thanks Birdy! I always enjoy reading your historical posts.

Many thanks for the time effort to post this, Great reading.

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

Thanks Mike.

Yer welcome....

Currently I'm searching on a guy named Chadwick, originally from New Hampshire, and like Fannin a West Point dropout. No flies on Chadwick, not from the accounts, somewhere it mentions him having been out West and already being a combat veteran, gotta find that again.

It was himself and the likewise admirable John Sowers-Brooks who commanded the artillery pieces at this Coleto Creek fight, and both sides agree that artillery was very well handled.

Anyhoo, looking for that reference I came across this, which I'll throw out here because it doesn't really fit anywhere else in stuff not posted yet...

Re: the Tejanos.....

Col. Fannin and other Texans underestimated the importance of these Mexicans of Goliad, and the resentment in their hearts due to having to leave their homes. . . .

These Badeños, as they were called, were descendants of the presidio soldiers stationed at La Bahía through the years. They were indolent and maybe none too honest, but they were expert horsemen---among the world's best---knew every acre of the Goliad region and for a hundred miles around; and, contrary to the prevalent belief of the Texans, were anything but cowardly---their leader, Carlos de la Garza, had dignity and force of character, and courage and intelligence as well.

The people had abandoned Goliad at his bidding, and it was to his ranchero on the San Antonio River that they had gone. He and his men were everywhere after General Urrea came.

Lest one think that was written by some "Liberal", turns out it came from the works of one Judge Harbert Davenport (1882-1957). Davenport hailed from East Texas (which means something to those who know Texas ) .

Otherwise Davenport is known as the guy who in 1944 won the case for the old Balli family claim to Padre Island, based on the original Spanish titles.

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fda21

Another guy I wouldn't mind sitting around and shooting the breeze with.

Birdwatcher

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

Why the artillery was handled so very well at Coleto Creek: Four Polish Nationals, veterans of combat against the Russians....

http://www.texancultures.com/assets/1/15/Texans_One_and_All%20%20-%20The%20PolishTexans.pdf

After the unsuccessful uprising against Russia in 1830, many Poles left for anywhere. Some of these found the Texas Revolution timely and sufficiently dangerous. Michael Debricki, a major in Poland, was an engineer at Goliad.

Also with Fannin's artillery were the brothers Francis and Adolph Petrussewicz and John Kornicky. The artillery commander killed at Coleto was Francis Petrussewicz. All others were executed with Fannin.

Birdwatcher

Mexican history is not an easy read, bewildering in fact. Indeed one of the main complaints of the Texians at the start of hostilities in '35 was the frequent change of Mexican governments even when the Constitution of 1824 was still officially in effect.

When Santa Anna came to power he at first had substantial support among the Texians because of his promises, but things quickly went downhill when Santa Anna and those around him abolished the constitution, sparking widespread revolution across the Mexican States, that of Texas being only one of these.

Among these Mexican States, Texas alone was victorious,this due to the influx of American manpower and the financial support of the war by mercantile interests in the United States.

Where Jose Cosme de Urrea (1797-1849) fits in all of this is more than just an easy google away. Most of the Mexican Generals of that era had been born in the last decade of the Eighteenth Century and, like Santa Anna, had first seen military service under the Spanish Empire. The Urreas were of Basque origin, Urrea himself having been born in Tuscon in present-day Arizona.

(The role of the Basques in Spanish Arizona I'll leave to the Arizona crowd if they care to.)

Urrea was a military cadet at just eleven years of age and by nineteen was an officer. He was twenty-four when Mexico achieved independence.

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fur02

Much of Urrea's subsequent career was spent in the wide open, sparsely populated areas of Northern Mexico. Prior to his involvement under Santa Anna in suppressing the Federalist Revolt in Zazatecas in 1835, he had been sent to oppose Comanche raids in Durango. Given that background, it is no wonder that he worked so well with Tejano vaqueros and practiced such a mobile form of warfare here in Texas.

Against the backdrop of his whole career, so far as I can determine, his role in Zazatecas was an anomaly based upon a misguided loyalty to Santa Anna, an allegiance that would be repudiated in the years immediately following.

Not claiming here to be by any means a student of Mexican history, as far as I can gather the theme of it throughout most of the Nineteenth Century was an ongoing struggle between more egalitarian rights in the form of Federalism versus the ruling oligarchy of a Centralist government. Santa Anna himself expressed the sentiment that the people simply were not educated enough for a Federal Republic, and that the country functioned better under a benevolent Dictator (meaning himself of course).

Not every Centralist was necessarily a bad guy, Col. Juan Almonte acquitted himself well under Santa Anna in Texas and is generally favorably viewed in Texas history, notably for refusing to fire upon a rowboat that interim Texas President Burnett was escaping on because Burnett's family was in the boat. Almonte was so pro-Centralist that in the 1860's he would actually serve under the French and their short-lived Mexican monarch Maximilian, this in the interest of National order.

Smothering all of this however was the ongoing culture of corruption and inequality of wealth that renders Mexican politics opaque to outsiders like ourselves to this very day.

Where exactly Urrea fit in all of this and what his exact motives were I dunno, if his role in fighting our Second Texas Revolution wasn't actually his finest hour as a military commander, it is certainly his most easily-accessed one on the internet.

There is mention of a 1985 book The Life and Times of Jose Cosme Urrea by a local Tuscon Historian but it appears to be out of print, I cannot find it for sale else I would buy it.

We do know that he was generally pro-Federalist throughout his career, to the extent of fighting and losing two significant battles against superior Centralist forces in the decades following his Texas campaign and enduring a spell of imprisonment in the notorious Perote prison. He may well have been an honest idealist and a genuine hero.

The US invasion during the Mexican War was a unifying event across Mexico and we are told in the link that Urrea led a unit of Sonoran cavalry. What successes he may have had in that role I cannot tell.

Cholera killed him in 1849, but in 1836 he was easily Mexico's best military commander in Texas, probably the best commander on either side.

Birdwatcher

At half past one in the afternoon, I overtook the enemy and succeeded in cutting off their retreat with our cavalry, just as they were going to enter a heavy woods from where it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to dislodge them. Gen. Jose de Urrea

The Battle of Coleto Creek oughtta be better remembered than it is today.

We were abundantly supplied with provisions, and arms and ammunition, and almost every man had his rifle and brace of pistols, and besides there were a number of good English muskets captured from the Mexicans, and we had five or six pieces of artillery. The men, for the most part, were altogether superior to the ordinary material of an army in intelligence and education. They were far from being a class of mercenaries, but were men of character and standing, and some of them of wealth, who had left their homes from sympathy for a people who had taken up arms for their liberty. Dr. Joseph Barnard.


We don't have many fights on our soil where a Mexican Army was deployed with dash and elan, but more than anything else I am not aware of a fight anywhere where a compact square of 250 men, standing three deep, was equipped with two and three muskets per man plus no less than nine field pieces.

Doesn't hurt either that those men were a sort of self-selected elite in that they were all young, fit and aggressive enough to voluntarily engage in this distant Texas war and because most all of them came from a culture where proficiency with firearms was a given.

The volume of fire they could project from that square, just twenty yards on a side, must have been horrendous. Collectively about the closest one could hope to get to the firepower of modern weaponry there at the very end of the flintlock era.

A volume of fire that wrought carnage upon their attackers and in that black powder era would soon obscure the battlefield in a dense fog of powder smoke.


...a large force of cavalry were seen emerging from the timber, about two miles distant, and to the West of us. About one half of this force (350 men) were detached and thrown in front of our right flank, with the intention of cutting us off from a skirt of timber, about one mile and a half in front.

Our artillery was ordered to open upon them and cover our rear. Several cannon were fired at them, but without effect. About this time, we discovered a large force of infantry emerging from the same skirt of woodland, at which their cavalry had first been seen.

Our guns were then ordered to be limbered; and we had purposed to reach the timber in front, but the enemy approached so rapidly, that Col. Fannin determined to make an immediate disposition for battle. Dr. Jack Shackelford



...about seven miles from Goliad we entered a prairie perhaps from three to five miles across and by the time that we got about one mile into the prairie the whole Western border of the prairie was lined with Mexicans, and by the time that we got half a mile further they broke in a cloud as it were ahead of us to the East. Abel Morgan


Seeing themselves forced to fight, they decided to make the best of it and awaited our advance with firmness, arranging their force in battle formation with the artillery in the center. Gen. Jose de Urrea

The bloodletting was about to begin.

Birdwatcher

It might not have been obvious at that moment, but Fannin's battle was lost the moment they lost mobility; their oxen ran off, or were shot while in harness...

There was immediately a square formed, and as they took the oxen from the cannon instead of securing them they were turned loose and got away; for they went right off to the Mexicans. Abel Morgan

Those that remained to the enemy were killed by sharpshooters detailed for the purpose. Gen. Jose de Urrea


Urrea had a cavalry leader's mindset, the sort that we think would fit a fighter pilot today. First thing he does is attack, and under ordinary circumstances might well have overwhelmed the Texians in the first rush....

My troops, though fatigued by the rapidity of the march, were filled with enthusiasm at seeing the enemy, for they thought that to overtake them and defeat them was all one. Although our force was inferior and we had no artillery, the determination of our troops made up the disparity. Expecting the artillery and our munitions to reach us soon, agreeable to instructions given, I decided to engage the enemy at once. Gen. Jose de Urrea

The Red Rovers and New Orleans' Greys formed the front line of the square; the Red Rovers being on the extreme right. Colonel Fannin took a commanding position, directly in rear of the right flank. Our orders were, not to fire until the enemy approached in point blank shot.

About this time, Colonel Fannin had the cock of his rifle shot away by a ball, and another buried in the breech. He was still standing erect, a conspicuous mark, giving orders, "not to fire yet," in a calm and decided manner. Dr Jack Shackleford


The Mexicans sped up at a distance of from 500 to 600 yards gave us a volley from their carbines, to which, however, we paid no attention as the balls flew in respectable distance over our heads. Only occasionally one would whiz up entirely exhausted as if it were breathing its last breath and strike the ground in front of us without even knocking up any dust....

We remained completely passive and let the enemy approach who fired volley after volley at us as he came nearer our artillery officers mainly Poles and fine, tall men, patiently waited for the time when they could reply to the unholy greetings to advantage. The moment arrived, our ranks opened, and the artillery hurled death and destruction among the enemy. Herman Ehrenberg




Our fire was immediately returned by their rifles and cannons. I ordered the brave Col. Morales to charge the left with the rifle companies; the grenadiers and the first regiment of San Luis, under my immediate command, to charge the right; the remainder of the battalion of Jiménez, under the command of Col. Salas, to form itself into a column and charge the front; while the cavalry, commanded by Col. Gabriel Núñez, was to surprise the enemy's rear.

These instructions having been issued, the orders were immediately carried out and a determined charge was made on the right and left flanks. In order to obtain a quick victory, I ordered my troops to charge with their bayonets, at the same time that Col. Morales did likewise on the opposite flank; and, according to previous instructions, the central column advanced in battle formation, sustaining a steady fire in order to detract the attention of the enemy while we surprised the flanks.

Though our soldiers showed resolution, the enemy was likewise unflinching. Thus, without being intimidated by our impetuous charge, it maneuvered in order to meet it; and, assuming a hammer formation on the right, they quickly placed three pieces of artillery on this side, pouring a deadly shower of shot upon my reduced column. A similar movement was executed on the left, while our front attack was met with the same courage and coolness.Gen. Jose de Urrea

What Urrea did not anticipate going in was that the Texians were so heavily armed. The 600 extra muskets Fannin had were .69 caliber, and hence were probably US Springfields, originally government issue, and so were most likely superior to the used British Brown Bess muskets so common in Texas at the time.

I walked into the square. I knew we had some new muskets in the ammunition wagon. I selected me one of them and catched up two packs of cartridges and walked out to my wagon again where the balls were whizzing about like bees swarming. Abel Morgan

...in addition to our rifles, each man in the front rank was furnished with a musket and bayonet to repel the charge of cavalry. Besides my rifle and musket I had slung across my shoulders an "escopeta," a short light "blunderbuss" used by the Mexican cavalry, which I had carried all day in expectation of a fight, and which was heavily charged with forty "blue whistlers" and powder in proportion. It was my intention only to fire it when in a very "tight place," for I was well aware it was nearly as dangerous behind it as before. John D. Duval


The effect of our fire was frightful. Herds of horses were running without rider, while others were wallowing in blood and kicking furiously. Herman Ehrenberg


At this moment we opened our fire on them, rifles, muskets, and artillery. Colonel Fannin, at the same time, received a severe wound in the fleshy part of the thigh, the ball passing obliquely over the bone, carrying with it a part of his pocket-handkerchief. At this crisis, the enemy's infantry, from about ten to twelve hundred strong advanced on our left and rear. Dr jack Shackleford


, the withering fire of the enemy, who kept up a most lively fire, for each one of their soldiers had three and even four loaded guns which they could use at the most critical moment. The fire of the nine cannons, itself lively and well directed, was imposing enough; but our soldiers were brave to rashness and seemed to court death. The enemy put into play all its activity and all the means at its command to repel the charge. Gen. Jose de Urrea

When at a convenient distance, they gave us a volley and charged bayonet. So soon as the smoke cleared away, they were received by a piece of artillery, Duval's riflemen, and some other troops, which mowed them down with tremendous slaughter.... Shackleford

When within three or four hundred yards of our lines our artillery opened upon them with grape and cannister shot, with deadly effect--but still their advance was unchecked, until their foremost ranks were in actual contact in some places with the bayonets of our men. John D. Duval


The engagement now became general; and a body of cavalry, from two to three hundred strong, made a demonstration on our rear. They came up in full tilt, with gleaming lances, shouting like Indians. When about sixty yards distant, the whole of the rear division of our little command, together with a piece or two of artillery, loaded with double canister filled with musket-balls, opened a tremendous fire upon them, which brought them to a full halt and swept them down by scores. Shackleford


In the charge made by the Mexican cavalry they nearly succeeded in breaking our lines at several places, and certainly they would have done so had we not taken the precaution of arming all in the front rank with the bayonet and musket. At one time it was almost a hand to hand fight between the cavalry and our front rank, but two files in the rear poured such a continuous fire upon the advancing columns, that as I have said, they were finally driven back in disorder. Duval

Birdwatcher

One can only wish the action at the Alamo had been as well-reported as this battle, but still, it was a prolonged fight, maybe five hours...

The action commenced about one o'clock, and continued, without intermission, until after sunset. Shackelford

We don't have a minute-by-minute account of these events. I'm just grateful we have what we have, in the age of pens and inkwells it was no small thing to write the lengthy accounts like the survivors did.

From Urrea's account we know he assaulted the square in frontal attacks at least twice (Wiki says three times), putting himself in the line of fire the second time around.

The Texian square came so close to collapsing during the first attack that there seems little doubt they would have gone under had they been conventionally armed with one longarm to a man instead of with an extraordinary 600 extra muskets and ammunition on hand.

From this distance it seems like there's no way going in that Urrea could have anticipated that massive volume of defensive fire.

His second assault occurred just before dark, at a time when the completely exposed Texian formation had been enduring constant sporadic fire for hours and by which time the Polish guys and others originally manning the cannon had been taken out. Clearly, on this second occasion Urrea thought they might crack.

Here's a "fog of battle" (literally) episode from Herman Ehrenbach, late of Prussia (over the next forty years after the fight Ehrenberg would go on to cross the continent with a fur brigade, join the California Gold Rush, sail the South Pacific, map out Honolulu for the US, become the main guy surveying the Gasden Purchase, and like Jack Hays before him serve a stint as agent to the Mohaves in Arizona).....

We were soon enveloped in such dense smoke that we were occasionally obliged to cease firing and to advance slightly on the enemy in order to see our sights. The whole prairie as far as one could see was covered with powder smoke, and thousands of lightening flashes quivered through the dark masses accompanied with the incessant thunder of the artillery and the clear crack of our rifles.

Among them sounded the scattered bugle calls of the Mexicans, encouraging the men to battle. From time to time our grape shot hailed death into the ranks of the enemy under the majestic roll of thunder. I do not believe that a coward was to be seen on the battlefield at this moment. Who has time and disposition then to think of himself and his life in such tumult?...

All his senses are dulled. One sees nothing, one hears nothing except his enemy, and only partially does one hear the commands of the officers. That is the way it was with us. As the dense smoke only occasionally permitted us to see the advancing enemy, we stepped forward to meet them. Foolhardily several of us stood in his midst and fired....

I myself had gotten so far ahead in the general tumult and fired so incessantly that I did not notice how I stood right among the Mexicans. Everything was confusion and it seemed as if we were shooting each other down for pleasure. When I discovered my error, I hastily went back to my position as my ignition tube was stopped up besides.

One constant question among reenactors is how many caplock guns (ie. using percussion instead of flint) were in service in Texas in '35/'36. Ehrenberg plainly stated above he was using a caplock, and at that time he was a member of the New Orleans Greys yet.

On my return to my comrades I stopped at each fallen enemy and fired the often loaded musket at the living ones. But how did it look in our camp? Many of our people were either severely wounded or killed. All of our artillerymen with the exception of one Pole had fallen and built a wall around silent cannon, whose power was now passed as the range was now too close to do effective service.

..and on the effect of weather on black powder; notwithstanding all those extra muskets on hand, here's Ehrenberg scrambling around his own line looking for something that would shoot...

The whole battle ground was covered with dead men, horses, guns and all kinds of objects. I did not spend much time looking at the battlefield, but ran about to try out the guns of the fallen ones as quite a while would probably have been necessary to put mine in order again. I searched a long time before I found a usable one, as the damp, almost wet air, had made practically all unfit for use.

I do agree that even today a 'stopped up tube' in a percussion weapon is a real PITA to clear in the field. If ya ain't got a feather quill handy or some other flexible object to clear those hidden right angles your only recourse is water to flush it out.

On a flinter either the pan won't flash in which case its usually the flint or powder, or if the pan flashes and it doesn't fire, its usually the vent to the main charge that's the problem. Either way its a quick fix.

Birdwatcher

The Texian formation was stranded out in the open, 250 men with no cover, in an area no more than 20 or 30 yards across. Fortunately for them, in his haste to catch them Urrea had outrun his artillery, which did not arrive until after nightfall.

I ain't seen it mentioned, but the losses on the field to the exposed Texians could have been worse the 30% casualties they suffered. Urea was low on ammunition.

Though I had given instructions for the infantry to be provided with four rounds to the man, this order had been neglected in part under frivolous pretext of lightening their load. They had counted on the early arrival of what was coming up on our rear, when we left the camp at Manahuilla our ammunition was being loaded. The party conducting it, however, lost its way and did not arrive until the following day. Urrea

OK, I was wrong earlier, it appears there WERE three assaults made by the Mexicans against the square; the first one, the one at the end of the day, and this second one....

I decided to make a new and simultaneous charge on all fronts to see if I could disconcert the enemy before the sad moment arrived when we would entirely without munitions.....

...fortune refused to favor us. The enemy redoubled its resistance with new vigor. They placed their artillery on the corners, flanking, in this way, our weakened columns. The fire from the cannons, as well as from the rifles, was very lively, making itself all the more noticeable in proportion as ours died out for lack of ammunition.

For much of that afternoon a sort of armed standoff devolved, both sides going prone and taking aimed potshots.

In order to protect our soldiers as far as possible, we ordered them to throw themselves on the ground while loading raising up only to fire. Urrea

Fannin himself, attempting to stay on his feet as officers were expected to do back then, had already been hit three times. Three of the four Polish veterans manning the cannon had likewise been hit.

At this time four of our cannon were idle, because the regulars were wounded or killed, and Capt. Westover said that the volunteers did not like to undertake to man them, and allowed that they could do as much good with their rifles. Morgan

The Texians had brought with them some Mexican prisoners, and their actions during the fight are indicative of just how exposed the Texian square was....

We had some five or six Mexican prisoners (the couriers of the old padre, captured at Carlos Ranch). These we had placed within the square, when the fight began, for safe keeping, and in an incredibly short time, with picks and shovels, they dug a trench deep enough to "hole" themselves, where they lay "perdue" and completely protected from bullets.

I for one, however, didn't blame them, as they were non-combatants, and besides to tell the truth when the bullets were singing like mad hornets around me, and men were struck down near me, I had a great inclination to "hole up" myself and draw it in after me. Duval

Precision shooting however, was an American specialty.

...they contented themselves with falling down in the grass and occasionally raising up to fire; but whenever they showed their heads, they were taken down by the riflemen. Shackleford



About that time after I had fired eight or ten times of myself there came out four more men, and we formed a platoon of five, an Irishman by the name of Cash was at the head of the platoon. I was next. A Dutchman by the name of Baker next. A young fellow from Georgia next. A man by the name of Hews next. The last had a rifle...

Hews took advantage of the wagon to rest his rifle on. There was a low tree, from 140 to 170 yards distant where the Mexicans would creep up and shoot at us. Hews killed two and wounded a third at that tree....

...for every man killed or wounded on our side, I am confident that two or three Mexicans fell before the deadly fire from our rifles. Duval

Birdwatcher

Not usually mentioned is the large numbers of Indians on the scene, fighting on the Mexican side.

John C. Duval, a member of his older brother's Kentucky rifle company, comes across as a firearms enthusiast, in as much as he takes the time to give us a description of the guns, range and shooting ability of their Indian opponents.

...there were with the Mexicans probably a hundred or so Carise Indians, who were much more daring and withal better marksmen. They boldly advanced to the front, and taking advantage of every little inequality of the ground and every bunch of grass that could afford them particular cover, they would crawl up closely and fire upon us,

In the age of smokeless powder these guys might have done more execution than they did (which execution was apparently significant at least), but of course every time they fired they advertised their position.

...and a description of their guns, such details always gratifying to modern-day reenactors who agonize over such things...

and now and then the discharge of their long single barrel shot guns was followed by the fall of some one in our ranks.

"Long single barrel shot guns" (as opposed to, one supposes the doubles already favored by mounted Americans) sounds like the classic form of an Indian trade gun. I dunno who Morgan's "Carises" were for sure, but another account tells us the Indians [resent were a mix of Lipan Apaches and Karankawas. Prob'ly not all that important, intermarriage between tribes and between Indians and Tejanos likely blurred tribal distinctions.

Here's two Berlandier portraits of flintlock-armed Texas Indians from just ten years earlier. While allowing for the effects of an increased inflow of Euro/American style clothing and trade cloth during the decade since, the Indians at the fight prob'ly still looked a lot like this...





"within eighty yards"... Seventy five?

A pity he ain't more specific. Replica trade gun shooters today can tell you that 100 yard hits on man-sized targets are a slam-dunk with a carefully loaded smoothie. OTOH Duval's report may be the longest distance on record of precision shooting with the same back then, presumably aimed at guys likewise laying down behind some amount of cover.

Four of them had crawled up behind some bunches of tall grass within eighty yards of us, from whence they delivered their fire with telling effect.

It is entirely in character for Indians to be skilled marksmen, when you look close enough you can find mention of the proficiency of Indians with their firearms all through our Frontier history.

On this occasion they do however have appeared to be outmatched by an American with a rifle (Abel Duval's older brother; one Burr H. Duval).

Capt. D-, who was using a heavy Kentucky rifle, and was known to be one of the best marksmen in his company, was requested to silence these Indians. He took a position near a gun carriage, and whenever one of the Indians showed his head above the tall grass it was perforated with an ounce rifle ball and after four shots they were seen no more....

When the Mexicans quit the field, we examined the locality where these Indians had secreted themselves, and found the four lying closely together, each one with a bullet hole through his head....

During this exchange, it seems Capt Duval very nearly fell victim to a head shot himself...

At the moment he fired the last shot Capt. D- had one of the fingers of his right hand taken off by a musket ball.

Birdwatcher

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.htm

The 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