Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire After the Fall of the Alamo

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.