Finding Medina

INTRODUCTION

On the night of August 17, 1813, the Republican Army of the North bivouacked somewhere near the Medina River about fifteen miles south of San Antonio. Their scouts had been following the advance of a Spanish Royalist Army for almost a month now as it marched toward them to put an end to their self-proclaimed Republic, and those scouts had just returned to camp with the news that the enemy was just a few miles away.

The Royalist Army not only outnumbered the ragtag Republican army, it far outstripped it in terms of training and equipment. It’s 1,830 men were commanded by an elite, educated officer core, many of them vet-e-rans of the previous decade’s Napoleonic Wars. Two-thirds of the Royalists were mounted, heirs to the high equestrian traditions of the Iberian Peninsula and armed with lances and quick-firing carbine rifles. The men in this Royalist army particular had spent the last three years crushing Mexico’s fledgling independence movement as a unit and had won for themselves a fearsome reputation. Though short on supplies and in some cases even clothing, they faced the south Texas August sun with a confidence and eagerness that even their one-eyed general could see. That general – Joaquin de Arredondo – was himself a twenty-year veteran of military commands through the far-flung Spanish Empire. That he had chosen to lead this expedition personally, however, suggested the magnitude of the threat posed by this “Republican Army of the North” in little frontier San Antonio to continued Spanish rule in the Americas.

The 1,400 man Republican Army, by contrast, was an improbable mix of Tejanos, Native Americans, and volunteers from the United States. The Tejanos who constituted a majority of the force stood out in their short-crowned wide-brimmed felt Cowboy hats (“sombreros de fieltro de anchas alas y aplastada copa”), high-shanked leather boots¹, and pommeled saddles. They made quite the impression on these early American immigrants to Texas, as did the painted Apaches and Tonkawas riding alongside them. For many of the Americans, it was the first time they had encountered this sort of frontier style, and you can almost feel their admiration for it through the ages.

They also admired the Tejanos’ horsemanship.² Our image of Anglo-Americans in Texas is strongly tied to the horse and the cowboy, yet we must remember that at this time, Anglo-Americans had not yet learned to “ride like Mexicans,” as historian Stephen Hardin puts it.³ Americans were still principally woodsmen and accustomed to doing their fighting on foot, and so made up almost the entirety of the infantry in the Republican Army. Tejanos, by contrast, refused to do almost anything on foot, and Spanish observers frequently mocked them for this and their other pretensions to grandeur arising from their silly little “ranchos” and high-seated saddles which were, technically, the prerogative of Spanish nobility.⁴

Despite their motley appearance and numerical disadvantage, the Republican Army of the North was probably the favorite going into the battle.⁵ They were fighting on their own soil, and they had not yet lost a contest! In the last six months, they had three times routed better-trained and better-equipped Royalist armies by employing the hard-charging, quick-strike techniques of mobile warfare that Tejanos had perfected over the previous century in their never-ending battles with the plains Indians.

Now, 100 or so of those plains Indians lined up alongside 900 Tejanos – mostly San Antonians⁶ - and 400 or so American volunteers inspired by the spirit of 1776 to spread their gospel of liberty across the continent.

And on the morning of August 18, 1813, they marched out together – Tejano, Native American, and Anglo-American – shoulder-to-shoulder to fight in what remains the largest, bloodiest, and most underappreciated battle in the history of Texas.

The outcome of the subsequent Battle of Medina ensured that Centralism and Statism remained the dominant political impulses in Mexican politics, even as it previewed the fault lines within Mexican society that have so often destabilized it since. The battle permanently severed the loyalties of most Tejanos to dictatorial regimes in the Valley of Mexico. And the aftermath impoverished Texas – making it the poorest state in the soon-to-come Mexican nation⁷ - and sent hundreds of Tejano families fleeing into the United States, where they established important cultural ties that would later mature into a revolutionary brotherhood.

And yet we don’t even know where this battle took place!

In fact, in Episode 11 of the first season of my podcast A New History of Old San Antonio, I got it really wrong. I placed the Battle of Medina “somewhere in the area between modern-day Lytle, Somerset, and Von Ormy.”

That was probably off by about fifteen miles or so, and yet the fact is that no one in modern times has been able to find artifacts that can definitively confirm the site of the largest, bloodiest battle in Texas History.

People have their theories, of course. Historians Ted Schwarz and Robert Thonoff in their book “Forgotten Battlefield” rescued the battle from obscurity thirty years ago and convincingly demonstrated that it had not occurred on the Medina River, where a Battle Marker had been placed in 1936. Others history buffs like Dan ArrellAno, Robert Marshall, and Bruce Moses, to name a few – have conducted their own research and some have placed their own markers. No less than three markers now stand near the Bexar-Atascosa county line claiming to be the site of the Medina battlefield. Yet none of these sites have ever produced archaeological evidence of the battle.

Tantalizingly, people used to know where it had taken place! The bleaching bones of the dead lined the road near the battlefield for almost a decade. Stephen F. Austin marked it on all of his maps. Jose Antonio Navarro and Antonio Menchaca all reference it in their memoirs. We have, in fact, almost a dozen quasi-contemporary accounts of the battle – yet almost each one contradicts the others in some frustrating detail!

Over the course of the last year, a team of volunteers (including myself) have scoured the archival records for clues as to the exact location of the battle. We’ve interviewed local residents, studied the work of others, sent out mailers, given away bandanas from the first season of this podcast as meager enticement for people to come forward, and knocked on more doors than I care to confess. We’ve gotten close…very close we think finding the battlefield.

As we narrowed our search area, we discovered that we weren’t alone. We joined forces with other groups sniffing around the same spots we were, all of us committed to finally identifying the location of this historic event and united in the belief that the time had come to put this mystery to rest!

And yet we’ve concluded that to do this, we need the help of the community. We have decided to publish everything we know in the hopes that it might inspire someone to come forward with some new piece of information or some new interpretation to help crowd-source – for lack of a better word - the exact location of this lost battlefield.

Over the next few months, we’ll share what we know about the battle of Medina, about the first Republic of Texas, and about the search for the battle site itself on the Rivard Report and on this podcast feed. I invite you to check each episode’s webpage on the Rivard Report, where we’ll be posting maps, photographs, and other supplemental information! And PLEASE comment and leave us reviews, we welcome your ideas and suggestions! The only way that we are going to be able to solve this mystery, is with your help.

This is one of the most cinematic moments in the history of North America, with Tejanos, Native Americans, and Anglo-Americans standing side-by-side against the forces of oppression and offering their lives for the dream of liberty. That their valiant efforts ended in so much bloodshed only heightened the battle’s importance to contemporaries and left a lasting impression on the residents of town that nearly disappeared in its aftermath – our beloved San Antonio. By comparison, the neighboring United States wouldn’t experience so bloody a day until the Civil War! this is the first chapter of the war for Texas Independence, and like the Battlefield of Medina itself, this it’s been overlooked for too long.

The Roads to Revolution

Texas in 1800

Texas in the early 1800’s was defined by its isolation. Monclova, the capital of neighboring Coahuila, was 300 miles away and was itself little more than a frontier outpost. Saltillo at 400 miles away was Texas’s real connection to the rest of New Spain, though just as often Tejanos looked to the east to the markets of Louisiana to access the broader world. San Antonio with around 2,000 inhabitants contained 80% or so of the non-Indian population of the province, and served as the capital and only polity in the province with any form of recognized government.

San Antonio, frankly, was lucky to still be on the map in 1800. In 1767, a Royal inspector recommended that the entire province of Texas “be returned to the Indians,”⁸ who in truth remained the masters of the province. Europeans came to Texas on Native Americans’ terms. And Tejanos almost by definition were among the few who were truly able to meet them on those terms.

Yet rather than admire Tejanos’ toughness, peninsular-born Spanish authorities harbored deep suspicions towards these frontiersmen. Some of this was certainly racial. If you believe the census designations, almost two-thirds of San Antonians in the late eighteenth century claimed some form of African ancestry, to say nothing of the innumerable other admixtures of native American and European bloodlines in the little frontier community. Royal authorities didn’t know what to make of this ““ragged band of men of all colors,”⁹ much less of their never-ending lawsuits, petitions, and electioneering. The diversity of early San Antonio gave it a reputation for fractiousness,¹⁰ though in reality, this diversity created quite a dynamic and vibrant polis. In most other New Spanish frontier towns, a city council position was held for life, and vacancies were filled by appointment, bequeathed to an heir, or sold to the highest bidder. Yet within two decades of the formation of San Antonio’s first city council, councilmen and mayors were rolling off and stepping down with their successors determined by annual, open elections.

Early Tejanos became semi-autonomous and self-governing because it had to be, owing to the inefficiencies of New Spain’s bureaucratic system. They reported to San Luis Potosi for tax matters, to Monclova for political matters, to Chihuahua and Monterrey for military matters, and to Guadalajara for legal and religious matters.¹¹ Responses took months, when they came at all.

To most Tejanos, it seemed that the only time that Royal authorities involved themselves in their affairs was to tax them. In 1778, the Comandante of the northern New Spanish provinces toured Texas and was appalled to discover what San Antonians and probably most Tejanos spent much of their free time doing: rounding up wild cattle of their own initiative, without royal authorization to do so! It was the kind of micro-entrepreneurship that the Spanish mercantile system abhorred. The Comandante ordered that going forward all unbranded livestock were to be considered the property of the Crown, that the unlicensed killing of the Crown’s livestock would be treated as a crime, and that anyone exporting cattle from the province was required to pay a substantial tax. Yet San Antonians weren’t intimidated. They united their voices to protest the decree, tied it up in court, and defied royal authorities to enforce it. The dispute was eventually resolved in San Antonians’ favor, yet the 1778 cattle tax controversy was an example of how San Antonio and the rest of Texas chafed under the Spanish mercantile system, which was set up to enrich Spain at the expense of the colonies.¹² Many products were subject to royal monopolies held by politically-favored friends of the government, further inflating already exorbitant prices. All finished goods were required by law to come from Cádiz in Spain through Veracruz, from there to Mexico City, from there to Queretaro, from there to Saltillo, and from there to San Antonio, having been marked up and taxed at each stop along the way.¹³

Restrained by their own laws from improving their economic lot, Tejanos did what frankly I think any of us would have done today: they circumvented those laws. They became smugglers, taking advantage of their proximity to French Louisiana and the Anglo-American colonies, where they forged important cultural ties with their neighbors and began to appreciate what might be possible under a more open trade system.

For this and other reasons, by 1800, much of San Antonio and Texas at-large had begun to view their interests as almost antagonistic to those of the rest of New Spain. A traveler during the period noted that San Antonians referred to their supposed countrymen from the interior as extranjeros, “foreigners.” Tejanos’ “ear-bending” dialect grated on Castilian ears, and French and English were heard just as often in the province as Spanish.¹⁴ And the region developed a unique style of dress, favoring a mixture of fashions from Mexico, New Orleans, and North America, all tinged by frontier accents like leather and wide-brimmed, short-crowned felt hats.¹⁵

Mexican Historian Alessio Robles has concluded that by 1790, San Antonio’s “vinculación racial y económica con el resto de la Nueva España era asaz débil, casi nula.” That is, her “cultural and economic ties to the rest of New Spain were exceedingly weak, and effectively non-existent,”¹⁶ and that sentiment could be applied even more broadly to Tejanos’ living elsewhere in the province. Alessio Robles again: “The landscape was admirably well-prepared for a revolution.”¹⁷

Battle of Medina Markers Today

Working in the energy business and loving history aren’t actually as unrelated as they seem.

Both fields reward a fascination with maps. Both fields require a balance of hard-nosed science an almost artistic-level of creativity to fill in the gaps in the data which are sometimes as dark as the ground into which we sink our wells. And both fields actually come together whenever you build a large infrastructure project, like a pipeline. Typically such projects require detailed Environmental assessments, which bring together archaeologists, anthropologists, and biologists to carefully survey affected areas for their historical and cultural significance.

And in my career in the Energy business, I have done several Environmental assessments with Crystal Allgood from SWCA Environmental Consultants here in San Antonio.

One day, Crystal and I were talking about the first season of this podcast, and she mentioned that on a previous project she had worked on a location near the supposed site of the 1813 Battle of Rosillo, which we will discuss again later in this series as well. That of course led me tell her about another, larger battle that had been fought soon after Rosillo but whose location had been lost to time: the Battle of Medina.

For those who don’t know, the Battle of Medina is the largest, bloodiest battle in Texas history. In 1810, Father Miguel Hidalgo’s grito in central Mexico set off a war of Independence against Spain, during which San Antonio very briefly became a focal point of this struggle when it declared itself the capital of a self-proclaimed independent Texas. The revolt in Texas was led by an acolyte of Hidalgo’s, José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara who assembled a multi-ethnic army of Tejanos, Native Americans, and volunteers from the United States. For a year, this Republican Army of the North – as they called themselves – defeated every Royalist force they came up against, making Texas the first former Spanish colony in the New World to completely clear its territory of royal authorities. On August 18, 1813 the 1,400-man Republican Army of the North marched out for one last battle against 1,830 Spanish Royalists under General Joaquin de Arredondo. The aftermath was so horrific and unspeakable that it very nearly disappeared from the historical record.

The prospect of finding a long-lost battlefield – particularly one of this size - piqued me and Crystal’s inner Indiana Jones, which lays just below the surface of most archaeologists’ otherwise professional demeanors! She immediately brought in Rob Lackowitz, the Office Director of SWCA in San Antonio, and Zack Overfield, an archaeologist with SWCA as well who had worked on the Battle of San Jacinto battlefield.

Crystal, Rob, Zach, and I began to collect pretty much everything we could find about the battle of Medina: archival records online, in San Antonio, in Austin and in Mexico City, secondary sources, area archaeological digs, newspaper articles, internet forums, you name it, we were gonna look at it.

We started by examining the locations where historical markers of the battle stand today. A warning in advance here: I generally avoid overloading podcast listeners with names because they’re hard to keep track of in an audio format. In the case of this season, however, where we are exploring multiple sources and multiple people’s theories, I think it’s important to properly credit people for the work they have done. That said, for the purpose of following along with the story, it isn’t critical that you keep track of all of them, though I will try to conspicuously flag the names of the principal historical actors.

The site with the oldest claim to a Battle of Medina connection is El Carmen Church, located in the community of Losoya, TX just outside San Antonio’s city limits on the southern bank of the Medina River. To be fair, the Church doesn’t actually claim to be the site of the battle, but the church has long traced its founding to the construction of a crypt by Royalist General Joquin de Arredondo honoring his dead from the Battle. No one has confirmed this archaeologically, though the church has historically been open to researchers who wish to investigate the issue through non-invasive means.

Three different historical markers actually claim to be on or very near the battle site. The first marker was placed in 1936 on modern-day 281 just a few hundred yards south of the Medina River, effectively on the campus of Southside High School. This first marker claiming to represent the site of the Battle of Medina seems to have drawn from the traditions placing the battle on the Medina River, an idea that prevailed well into the 1960’s and 70’s.

After reading several of the primary accounts of the battle, Atascosa County native and historian Ted Schwarz grew skeptical of this idea. He had grown up several miles south of the 1936 battle marker on the other side of a sandy oak forest known in Spanish as the Encinal de Medina. The sandy Encinal or oak forest is a remarkable feature, a two-to-five-mile wide band of oak trees girding the Bexar-Atascosa county line and corresponding to the outcropping of the Carrizo aquifer. In a way, the sandy encinal gave Atascosa county its name. “Atascosa” in Spanish means “sticky” or “boggy”; like when your truck gets stuck in the sand, you say that it is “atascada.”

Schwarz was struck by how clearly the action of the battle seemed to be occurring inside this familiar Encinal de Medina, not along the Medina River. Schwarz would spend the rest of his life studying the archival sources and interviewing locals in an attempt to confirm the battle site location. His manuscript would be published after his death in 1985 under the title “Forgotten Battlefield” by Robert Thonoff, a history teacher, Karnes County Judge, and former president of the Texas Historical Commission. Schwarz and Thonoff convincingly demonstrated that the battle had not occurred on the Medina River, but had in fact taken place somewhere inside or very near the Encinal de Medina. After careful study of the old roadways in use in 1813, they became convinced that a small rise about 10 miles southwest of the 1936 marker represented the location of the battle. In 2005, Thonoff placed a marker at the intersection of Old Applewhite and Bruce roads, though again, no archaeological evidence has ever been produced that would confirm this location.

About two and a half miles east of Schwarz and Thonoff’s site near the intersection of Old Pleasanton Road and 281, a different battle marker was erected in 2013 by Robert Marshall, a retired petroleum geologist – by the way, note the energy business history-loving overlap. Marshall decided on his location for the battlefield by deducing the armies’ respective movements based on their known positions in the days before the battle. He placed the battle on the very southern edge of the Encinal de Medina, where he theorized a rested Royalist army could have surprised a hot, thirsty, and fatigued Republican army just as they stumbled onto the open South Texas plains. The chalky looking soil of a nearby property, he suggested, might be the calcium residue of hundreds of bleached bones in a mass grave that had leached to the surface. Walking surveys and some metal-detecting have yielded a few possibly period artifacts like a hook and a piece of a bridle, but nothing definitive and certainly not the concentration of munitions you would expect in a battlefield.

Others have proposed yet different locations. Avocational historian Dan Arrellano has proposed a site about three miles southeast of Schwarz’s and about three miles southwest of Marshall’s. The late Bruce Moses favored a site four or so miles north or Marshall’s. Pretty much everyone you talk to who has studied the battle at any length, in fact, has a theory as to where the battle took place.

Crystal, Rob, Zack, and myself plotted these different sites on the map posted with this episode on the Rivard Report. Taken together, they help us define a general area where a lot of smart people have placed the battle site, though it was still a pretty broad area at twenty-plus square miles. If we were going to find archaeological evidence of the battlefield, we were going to have to be more precise. We decided that we needed to get on the trail of these armies in 1813 and try to retrace their marches. And to do that, we needed to study the roads leading to San Antonio, both literal and historical.

The First Rumblings of Revolt in Texas

In 1808, Napoleon declared war on Spain and invaded the Iberian Peninsula, deposing the Spanish king and placing his own brother on the Spanish throne. Later that same year, Napoleon decided to undermine Spain’s power further by cleaving off her North American colonies, starting with Texas. He dispatched an agent to Texas to attempt to raise the local population in revolt against their neglectful and now-deposed sovereign and to declare allegiance to the new revolutionary government of Napoleon’s brother.

Napoleon wasn’t entirely misreading the political disquiet in Texas at the time, particularly in San Antonio. Like the rest of New Spain, San Antonians were splitting into two factions, so-called “Royalists” or “Republicans.” The “Royalist” faction strongly defended the traditional structures of Spanish society, in particular, the Crown and the Church, and it counted many of the town’s most prominent citizens amongst its members, including the Zambrano brothers, José Darío Zambrano and Juan Manuel Zambrano. Born into one of the wealthiest families in town, the brothers were ordained priests in 1793, though neither overly concerned himself with strict adherence to his vows of poverty or chastity. That said, they weren’t insensitive to the frequent royal neglect of their province’s needs, they simply mistrusted the ability of an alternate system of government to provide for them.

A sizeable majority of the town, however, subscribed to the “republican” ideals coming out of the United States and Europe. These included many if not most of the members of the Menchaca, Delgado, Arocha, Ruiz, and Navarro clans. “Republicans” were enchanted by the liberal¹⁸ ideas that had fired the American and French Revolutions and subscribed to the radical notion that human society had no need for top-down direction from a monarch or bureaucratic state, and that people might better be able to organize and direct themselves toward their own happiness and well-being through representative government.

The entry of Napoleon’s agent into Texas in 1808, however, totally scrambled the political lines of the Royalists’ and Republicans’ old debates. Should Royalists support a Spanish crown worn by an atheistic Frenchman? Should republicans continue to insist on a reduction of royal authority when suddenly that authority seemed posed to implement some of the liberal ideals of the French Revolution?

Loyalty to king and country eventually triumphed. San Antonians couldn’t agree on much, but in the end, they agreed that Napoleon’s shiny agent was not their answer. They rallied behind the Spanish Governor – who had been tipped off to Napoleon’s plan – and arrested the Frenchmen, sending him to Mexico City for execution.

Sadly, however, the fact that this comically inept insurrection happened in this remote frontier province full of known smugglers and individualistic ranchers actually heightened official Spanish suspicions of Tejanos. More troops were sent to the province, as well as a new and particularly merciless Governor, Manuel Salcedo. His, by the way, is a name that you should remember.

Back in Spain, a resistance government loyal to the deposed King of Spain called a convention of all Spaniards, inviting delegates from even the most remote provinces on the Northern New Spanish Frontier. It looked for a moment as if royalists and republicans might unite behind a form of constitutional monarchy to drive Napoleon out of the peninsula, and hopes were high even in remote places like Texas that a more representative and responsive government might lie in their future.

The Spanish Viceroy in Mexico City, however, decided that one delegate from the relatively central state of Durango would be enough for all of the so-called “Interior Provinces,” which is to say, all of future Texas, Nuevo Leon, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas.¹⁹It was an unnecessary and inflammatory provocation to Tejanos of all ideologies. To Republicans, it looked like a clear denial of representation. To royalists, it looked like poor recompense for their loyalty to the Crown.

For decades, now royal insensitivity and neglect towards Texas had frustrated Tejanos’ attempts to develop their province. Now, it was uniting otherwise antagonistic local factions in opposition to continued Spanish rule.

The Casas Revolt

El grito

On September 16, 1810, Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a parish priest in the small town of Dolores, Guanajuato, unleashed a cry of protest over centuries of Spanish exploitation of New Spain. His grito set off a revolt that swept across Mexico more rapidly than anyone could have predicted, including probably Father Hidalgo himself. Five days after the grito, Hidalgo and his growing band of followers captured the nearby town of Celaya; seven days later, they defeated the small Spanish garrison of Guanajuato and killed the Spanish governor there. A month later they had taken modern-day Morelos and by November 1st they were at the gates of Mexico City.

Father Hidalgo – like Napoleon – quickly recognized that San Antonio was fertile ground for an independence movement and a critical supply station to a sympathetic United States. As such, he endorsed the plan of a retired San Antonio militia captain named Juan Bautista de las Casas to capture the town, raise the banner of revolt there, and use it to supply the heartland of Mexico in the battles to come.

De las Casas was encouraged in his plan by San Antonio’s civic leaders, who had grown concerned over Governor Manuel Salcedo’s stated intention to send San Antonio’s military units south to help put down Hidalgo’s revolt. San Antonians were, frankly, still undecided as to the merits of Father Hidalgo’s revolt, yet they were united in their opposition to sending away the military units on which the town depended for its defense against hostile Indians, civil instability, and foreign invasions – all of which menaced at the moment. Most of the men in the units stationed in San Antonio were from San Antonio as well, and their departure would have posed severe hardships on local families and the entire community.²⁰ And so, many if not most San Antonians were happy to help De las Casas if for no other reason than to keep their boys at home.²¹

Before dawn on January 22, 1811, after several weeks of plotting and with nearly the entire town as accomplices, de las Casas and most of the local militia marched in columns to the Plaza de armas.²² They positioned themselves strategically throughout square and covered all possible escape routes, focusing their attention Governor Manuel Salcedo’s home. When the governor emerged that morning to go about his daily duties, he found himself surrounded. He was arrested, along with his top lieutenants, who were soon marched south to the Rio Grande in chains.²³ After which De las casas sent out men to Nacogdoches and the rest of Texas to capture any other Royalists – “gachupines” as they called the peninsular-born Spaniards – and to announce the arrival of Father Hidalgo’s Revolution on Texas’s shores.

Joaquín de Arredondo’s Account of the Battle of Medina

When I first sat down to read Royalist General Joaquin de Arredondo’s post-action report of the Battle of Medina, I was pretty sure I was going to solve the mystery of this 200-year old battlefield right then and there. I just had a feeling that some great epiphany would strike me or that I would be able to make some ingenious deduction that would lead me to the spot that had eluded other searchers for two centuries. In retrospect, it’s easy to see the arrogance contained in that way of thinking, but you don’t undertake this kind of project unless you have a little bit of that kind of delusional ambition driving you.

Our delusional and ambitious Battle of Medina research team had decided to divide and conquer the subject matter. Crystal, Rob, and Zack charged themselves with reviewing all the scholarship of the Battle and all the archaeological surveys in the area, playing to their own professional expertise. I, in turn, was tasked with surveying all of the primary accounts to see what conclusions I might independently come to with respect to the location of the Medina battlefield while avoiding secondary sources for as long as possible.

And the principal and most primary account of the Battle of Medina is the post-action report of Royalist General Joaquín de Arredondo which I just mentioned.

My first encounter with Arredondo account was through a 1908 english translation, which we’ll post a link to on the episode webpage on the Rivard Report. I was unsatisfied with reading Arredondo’s account in translation, however, and so dispatched a friend in Mexico City – the publisher of my Spanish-language novel, El Inmortal Vaquero Quigley, in case you’re interested – to the Archivo General de la Nacion to get a copy of the original. And boy am I glad I did.

Although the 1908 English translation of Arredondo’s account is good, it goes to great lengths to smooth out Arredondo’s prose and to calm his raging pen. By contrast, Arredondo’s personality comes through unfiltered in the original Spanish– which I had another friend transcribe and post as well to our Rivard Report episode page.

Arredondo’s account is equal parts bureaucratic detail and self-promotion, both of which Arredondo supplies with the self-certainty of an internet troll and with just as much disregard for punctuation. On those rare occasions when he does punctuate a stream of though, he seems to prefer semi-colons to periods, perhaps an expression of his energy or maybe of the adrenaline rush following the battle.

Podcasts aren’t the best format for extended readings of rambling 19th century Spanish military reports, so I’ll just summarize the highlights for you here:

On July 26, 1813, Arredondo with maybe 1,000 or so men departed Laredo. This is a more important detail than it sounds, because there weren’t that many roads in Texas at this time, and knowing that he was on the Laredo road gives us a pretty good linear trajectory to follow.

Around August 1st, he was in the vicinity of modern-day Choke Canyon where he was joined by the Royalist troops under Colonel Ignacio Elizondo – whose name you should take note of, as we’ll see plenty more of him. This brought the total Royalist command to 1,830 men: 1,195 cavalry and 635 infantry, to be precise.

For the next two weeks the Royalists continued north, enduring the savage August sun and the merciless South Texas plains. Some were down to rags by the time they approached San Antonio, though in Arredondo’s words: “[I saw in them] the most urgent desire to confront as soon as possible the evil rabble in all their arrogance... My troops did not have to wait long – most Excellent Sir [he’s addressing the Viceroy] to see their wishes come true.”

On August 17, 1813 – the day before the battle, Arredondo “made camp a league and a half this side of a place called Rancherias.”

Now pay attention to this, again from Arredondo’s account: “On the 18th of August I directed my march toward the Medina River, changing the course I was on to cross the River at a different point than the direct road, owing to the fact that there was a canyon on the direct road which would have offered substantial Benefit to the enemy, if he were to try to set an ambush there in the thick woods that covered it.”

So fearing an ambush in the thick Encinal de Medina on the road ahead, Arredondo sent forth a 180-man skirmishing party under Colonel Ignacio Elizondo to probe. Sure enough, the Republicans had set an ambush on the road, and Elizondo with his 180 men would have stumbled right into it, had not the Republicans prematurely given away their position by firing on one of Elizondo’s outriders.

Elizondo was an impulsive man, as we’ll see several times later in this series. Knowing this and wanting to restrain him, Arredondo had made it abundantly clear to him that he was NOT, under any circumstances, to engage at length with the Republican enemy. He actually repeated it twice in his battle report and attached one of his aides-de-camp to Elizondo to make sure he didn’t forget this order. Instead, Arredondo ordered Elizondo to “maintain contact with [the enemy] as he retreated toward me, notifying me as soon as possible so that I might make the appropriate disposition of my troops. I let him know the route that I had chosen to cross the Medina River and the path I was on so that he might follow it in his retreat in order to join up with me.”

Arredondo was using Elizondo as bait. And it worked. As soon as the Republicans fired on Elizondo’s outrider, they realized that they had given up their position and launched a full-on attack on Elizondo’s unit. Hearing the sounds of battle, Arredondo sent forth another 150 men under San Antonian Juan Manuel Zambrano, who we met in the previous episode as the town’s most vocal Royalist. When the Republicans saw Zambrano’s men join Elizondo’s, they thought it was the entire Royalist force. And to their pleasant surprise, they clearly outnumbered this force! “The taste of Victory made them bold.”

Overwhelmed by the 1,400 Republicans rapidly encircling them, Elizondo and Zambrano began to pull back. The Royalists retreated in good order, sticking to the path that Arredondo had told them to follow. Elizondo and Zambrano reached the safety of Arredondo’s main body not a moment too soon, and now it was the pursuing Republicans’ turn to be surprised. “They encountered the full brunt of my Army drawn up in battle formation with the artillery positioned on the flanks. Only the infinitude of oak trees on the field of battle gave them cover to re-form their lines, which they did, yet they continued advancing with too much ardor, ultimately coming to within pistol range….The enemy continued to respond in turn, however, approaching to within forty paces of our lines with their artillery. For more than two hours this gruesome action ensued, without either knowing the outcome...”

I’m gonna leave you with that cliffhanger for now. Let’s review the geographic clues that Arredondo has given us:

First, he indicates pretty clearly that he started the morning of the battle on the road from Laredo approaching San Antonio.

Second, he states that on the seventeenth of August, 1813 – the night before the battle - “I camped with my army a league and a half north of Rancherias.” If we could identify Rancherias and confirm the route of the Laredo Road in 1813, we could pretty well fix the position of Arredondo on the morning of the battle, which would be something.

Third – and this is the excerpt that every student of the Battle of Medina fixates on – Arredondo’s description of his line of march on the morning of the battle seems to be a critical clue: “on the 18th of August I directed my march toward the Medina River, changing the course I was on to cross the River at a different point than the direct road…”

While I experienced no great epiphany while reading Arredondo’s battle account as to the battlefield location, the old Royalist general had given me some good clues to start our search from. Namely, if we could find “Rancheriás,” we could pin down Arredondo’s starting point on the morning of the battle. And if we could identify a “canyon” of some kind on the 1813 Laredo road we could probably confirm the spot where the Republicans started on the morning of the battle.

Crystal, Rob, and Zack, meanwhile had reviewed all of the known archaeological surveys in the area. Our area of interest wasn’t far from the only slightly-less contentious and-never-built Applewhite reservoir. As such, quite a few archaeological digs had been performed nearby in the 1980’s and 90’s during the heyday of the Applewhite discussions. Yet these had turned up no NOTHING about the Battle. Which seems pretty odd, doesn’t it? Three thousand plus men had slugged away at each other at forty paces for two hours and left behind NO evidence of it? It made us wonder if we were even looking in the right part of the world. So then they went back and carefully reviewed the maps being used by various scholars of the battle: and realized that nearly everyone was working off of different presumed routes for the 1813 roads into San Antonio.

Unlike most history projects, this one has a correct answer: whatever leads us to archaeological confirmation of the location of the Battle of Medina. As we’ve seen from Arredondo’s account, the broad strokes of the battle are pretty-well-documented, as well as the respective armies’ movements in relation to each other. Yet without a precise knowledge of the locations of the roads themselves, we might as well have been just been throwing darts at the map.

The Counter-Revolt

In retelling the story of the Casas Revolt nearly forty years later, Jose Antonio Navarro said that that De las casas only “accepted the command ordered him by the citizens and military garrison of San Antonio because he believed the time had come to do battle against the natural enemies of this country, and above all, because he was one of those men who, because of excessive courtesy, [was] unable to refuse a favor or to withstand opportunity.” Navarro clarified this sympathetic if unflattering description by adding that de las Casas was a man of only “mediocre” talents, and he soon “found himself among people who had no knowledge of warfare, no political initiative, and with no better guide than a blind lust for vengeance.”²⁴ Following the spirit of the times, De las Casas quickly declared his revolution to be against European rule and ordered the arrest of all pure-blood Spaniards in Texas and the confiscation of their property.²⁵ San Antonio wasn’t actually home to that many pureblooded Spaniards, but many saw in the decree a chance to settle old scores., de las Casas apparently did little to filter the accusations that soon flooded in, and began to seize the property of the many alleged “Spaniards” in his midst, but eventually cast the net so wide as to threaten the families and associates of many of his original supporters, including the venerable Delgado family, who will be the tragic center of so much attention in this series, remember the Delgado name.²⁶

Unfortunately for de las Casas, the opening days of the so-called Casas Revolt coincided with the arrival of news of atrocities perpetrated by Hidalgo’s forces down in Central Mexico. This left San Antonians acutely uneasy. It also dawned on many of the locals that Governor Salcedo was not without friends in high-places, like, specifically an uncle who was the Commandante of all of the Northeastern provinces of New Spain and in charge of a lot of regular Spanish soldiers. San Antonians began to second-guess what they had done.

On March 2, 1811 – just five weeks or so after the so-called Casas Revolt had begun – ten of San Antonio’s leading men met in secret at Juan Manuel Zambrano’s ranch. The group included not only the hardline royalist Zambrano brothers, but also disillusioned Republicans like the Delgados, Arochas, Ruiz, Navarros,²⁷as well as the commander of the local militia, Erasmo Seguín. The next morning, March 3, 1811, in coordination with the other conspirators, Seguín and his men mutinied against De las Casas. Republicans and Royalists had come together to install de las Casas; they would come together again to depose him. When the mutineers surrounded De las Casas, he called them out: “Are you the same individuals who placed me in this office and now you add infamy to treason by capturing me and delivering me to the gallows?” he asked them.²⁸Juan Manuel Zambrano, soon-to-be President of the counter-revolutionary junta that would replace him, might have answered him Yes; then again, he might not have needed to say anything. It was now Captain de las Casas’ turn to march south in chains.

The uprising had not gone much better for Father Hidalgo. After marching his army to within striking distance of Mexico City, he lost his nerve and pulled back. The momentum swung wildly back in favor of the Royalists, who regrouped and began taking back the towns lost in the initial fervor of Father Hidalgo’s revolt, with just as much violence and bloodshed. Pretty soon, it was Father Hidalgo who was on the run, fleeing north toward Coahuila as his revolutionary army disintegrated beneath him.

Only Hidalgo’s closest advisors - including perhaps an aged San Antonio Colonel named Antonio Delgado – knew his true destination.²⁹Hidalgo was headed somewhere he might extend the Royalists’ supply lines and shorten his own; somewhere hostile to Spaniards, both geographically and politically; and somewhere where the flame of revolt still burned bright – or so he thought. Father Hidalgo was headed to San Antonio.

What he didn’t know was that his path took him directly past the ranch where former Texas Governor Manuel Salcedo was being held prisoner, and – more importantly -where Governor Salcedo’s jailer was having serious doubts about his commitment to the cause of Mexican independence.

That jailer was Colonel Ignacio Elizondo, whom you might recall from General Arredondo’s battle report and whom you might also recall I told you was a bit impulsive. Elizondo had been among the first Spanish regular army officers to declare for Father Hidalgo’s revolt. But the Revolution either couldn’t quite figure out what to do with him or didn’t quite trust him, and he was relegated to the rather unimpressive role of serving as Governor Salcedo’s jailer. Colonel Elizondo, however, soon began to believe that being a prison guard was beneath his dignity and that the revolution didn’t really know how to value his talents. Coincidentally, right around the time that Father Hidalgo’s movement stalled out, Colonel Elizondo saw the total error of his ways and came back to the Royalist fold.³⁰ He released Governor Salcedo and began to conspire with him and other Royalist sympathizers to ambush the retreating Hidalgo.³¹

The Governor Returns

The Restoration of Royal Authority in Texas

In March of 1811 - barely six months after he had raised his grito and less than two months after San Antonio had raised hers – Father Miguel Hidalgo was captured by Royalists. More specifically, he was captured by the former Royalist Texas Governor, Manuel Salcedo. While imprisoned near Monterrey, Governor Salcedo had worked over his jailer, the impulsive and flip-flopping Colonel Ignacio Elizondo we met in the previous episode, and convinced him to betray the revolutionary cause and put an end to Father Hidalgo’s flight to San Antonio. Almost from the moment he had declared for Hidalgo, Elizondo felt underappreciated by the revolutionary movement, a grievance that conveniently grew only more acute with each battle Hidalgo lost. He decided to throw in with Governor Salcedo, and at a spot in Coahuila called Acatita de Baján, they sprung their trap. On March 21, 1811, Salcedo and Elizondo captured what remained of Father Hidalgo’s army, including the priest himself, who was sent to Chihuahua City in chains and executed on July 30, 1811. San Antonio insurgent Captain Juan Bautista de las Casas, the man who had originally deposed former Texas Governor Salcedo, met the same fate as Hidalgo the following day. For all intents and purposes, the Mexican War of Independence appeared to be over.

As a reward for putting down Captain de las Casas’ Revolt, the Villa of San Fernando – the principal town amongst San Antonio’s communities – was elevated to the dignity of a Ciudad. Yet when Governor Salcedo returned to San Antonio on September 11, 1811, he didn’t view the town’s inhabitants with the same magnanimity.³² Still smarting from his exile six months earlier, Salcedo resolved to put them in their place.³³His first measure of business was to dismiss the ruling junta that had reinstated him, which to be clear meant that he was brushing aside the few people in the community that had ostensibly supported his return to power. To be fair, many members of the ruling junta had also been instrumental in removing Salcedo from power, and Salcedo hadn’t forgotten this.³⁴Indeed, he never tired of reminding San Antonians of the “stain on their honor” in his words for having initially supported de las Casas, whose salted head he hung in an iron cage in the Plaza de armas.³⁵ Having removed the counter-revolutionary junta, Salcedo then proceeded to arrest those suspected of revolutionary sympathies and confiscated their property, which brought him into conflict with many of the town’s most influential and vocal families. When they began to protest, Governor Salcedo escalated. His vengeful gaze fell on the Delgado family.

The Delgado family descended from an old line of Canary Islanders who had arrived on the San Antonio frontier in 1731. Their patriarch around 1810 was Antonio Delgado, a man who had served on the city council multiple times and with distinction in San Antonio’s militia for three or four decades now, earning him the rank of Colonel. For as long as he had battled Spain’s enemies on the Texas frontier, he had also had to battle consistent royal neglect of his community’s needs. As such, Colonel Delgado had become an early and active follower of Father Hidalgo, joining him in the interior of Mexico and sharing with Hidalgo his triumphs and tragedies there. Including, unfortunately, the tragedy of his ambush at Acatita de Baján. Like Governor Salcedo, Colonel Delgado had also returned to San Antonio in September of 1811. He returned, however, as Governor Salcedo’s prisoner.³⁶

Colonial Roads to San Antonio

On August 10, 2018, I went on GreatDaySA on KENS5 news to announce our efforts to “crowdsource” the location of the Battle of Medina. At the same time, we pulled the addresses – several thousand of them – of residences in the general search area and just carpet bombed them with postcards, mass mailers, even hand-signed letters. “Do you have the answer?” our postcard screamed out to recipients in size 64 font. “The Battle of Medina is a story that needs to be told!” we implored residents.

The initial response was promising. That’s selling it too short, it was exhilarating! We met dozens of people who knew of battle artifacts: rusted-out swords, old gun barrels, tiny cannonballs. We pursued each lead diligently, hoping to locate these artifacts, plot them on a map, and try to identify concentrations or trends. Yet the artifacts were as elusive as the battlefield. Despite the sincerity and I believe honesty of those who reported artifacts to us, two centuries of family moves, house fires, and a lack of general interest in the battle seemed to have scattered all evidence of the battle to the winds. When it came down to it, we initially weren’t able to actually put our hands on any.

Still, in talking to the folks who responded, we learned information about the area that we never would have found in books. We met people like Fred Martinez, a parishioner at the same El Carmen Church from Episode 01 which claims to be a burial site of the some of the dead from the Battle of Medina. Fred is an avocational historian active in Los Bexarenos Genealogical Society and a former Bexar County Historical Commission member. Fred’s ancestor, Dionisio³⁷ Martinez, had received one of the original land grants along the Medina River just after the battle and not far from it. He told us how these lands along the Medina River were among the most prized by Old San Antonians, how they laid out their tracts in long, skinny “porciones” along the Medina River so that everyone could water their livestock, To pull their livestock off the river banks and maximize their grazing, they also dug shallow wells back in the dry streambeds of the Encinal - which represents the outcropping for the prolific Carrizo Aquifer. Even just a few decades ago, back when the water table was higher, you could find reliable water just a few feet below the surface of the Encinal. Las Gallinas creek, for example, – the stream along which the Royalists probably camped the night before the battle – was actually referred to in the nineteenth century as the los Charcos de Gallinas, or the “puddles” of Gallinas, because of how the stream would hold water in spots. Indeed, according to Fred, up until the early twentieth century, there was a community south of the Encinal known as Los Pozitos…in English, “Little Wells,” a location also referred to in contemporary accounts.³⁸

In meeting with Fred and other who responded to the mailers, we had the chance to begin exploring the area on foot. We walked roads, looked through cemeteries, and trudged through streambeds. I began to spend every free lunch I could at different restaurants along the Bexar-Atascosa County line, talking to anyone who would let me buy them a hamburger.

One of the people I met over hamburgers was Cathy Brown. Actually, she sold me the hamburger. At the time, she owned Home Plate burgers on Old Pleasanton Road. This is just one of the many entrepreneurial accomplishments in her impressive career, which also includes the invention of chocolate tamales, check them out at chocolatetamales.net they are awesome. They make great Christmas and Fiesta gifts.

Cathy is another long-time resident of the area, who traces her family back to Jose Antonio Navarro and later Mexican president Venustiano Carranza. Having grown up along Old Pleasanton Road, she possessed a wealth of anecdotes about some of the major players from the Battle of Medina period - including Santa Anna, who legend says camped on her family’s land at some point in the distant past. She talked about playing in the nearby creeks as a child where her grandfather would send her and her siblings to go “dig for Santa Anna’s treasure,” and where indeed they would occasionally find little treasures like buttons, spoons, and marbles - though to their great disappointment, however, they never found any of Santa Anna’s gold.

Recall that in the previous episode, we had been frustrated to learn that many of the maps of the old roads leading into San Antonio during the early 1800’s were inconsistent. Still, all the sources agreed that in 1813, two primary roads converged on San Antonio from the south, each crossing the Medina River about fourteen miles south of town. The eastern road, which the Spanish Royalists under General Joaquin Arredondo were on, came from Laredo, arced eastward from its origin, then shot up through modern-day Choke Canyon and Pleasanton into San Antonio. Predictably, it was known as the Laredo road.

The other, western road was the Old Camino Real, known to contemporaries as the Lower Presidio Road. This road was older than San Antonio itself, having been blazed in the 1690’s when Spain began sending forth “entradas” into Texas. As its name suggests, this Lower Presidio road began at the Rio Grande Presidio near modern-day Guerrero, Coahuila. From the Rio Grande, the road drifted east toward the Frio River then northeasterly through modern-day Fowlerton-Charlotte-and Poteet before crossing the Medina River just below its confluence with Leon Creek.

Rob Lackowitz from our research team had the idea to purchase LIDAR imagery to try to pick out potential old road paths in this area. LIDAR measures distances by means of a laser light, seeing through brush and other ground cover to reveal underlying terrain features. It has been used in other parts of the world to reveal Roman trenches and Viking burial sites that were otherwise invisible to the naked eye.

Check out the Rivard report webpage to see the LIDAR images that we put together. The whiter areas are higher points. The darker areas are lower ones. If you look closely enough, however, you can see a few dark lines crossing the topography in ways that water features don’t. One of these dark traces on the eastern part of the map cut through the thinnest part of the Encinal and ran toward El Carmen Church. On the western side, a collection of several parallel dark lines punched through a gap in the hills…and ran right along side Cathy Brown’s property on Old Pleasanton Road.

We started focusing our efforts around these dark lines on the LIDAR. One day, while meeting with a group of parishioners of El Carmen church near what we suspected the more easterly path through the Encinal, we found something much bigger and more important than an old cannon ball: we found out about another Battle of Medina research group asking some of the same questions in the same area. Then, a few days later while talking to residents along the westerly paths along Old Pleasanton Road, we learned that the same group had been sniffing around that area as well!

And this group wasn’t amateurs. They were a sort of San Antonio historical and archaeological supergroup. Kay Hindes, Rudy de la Cruz, and Art Martinez de Vara .In case you don’t recognize their names, I’ll give you their bonafides as well: Kay Hindes, official San Antonio city archaeologist, and co-discoverer of the long lost San Sabá mission; Northwest Vista College professor Rudy de la Cruz and former Von Ormy Mayor Art Martinez de Vara, authors of the history of El Carmen Church, including the Church’s claim to be the burial site for some of those killed during the Battle of Medina; additionally, Art Martinez de Vara has done more research and writing than anyone I know on the life of Jose Francisco Ruiz – who is one of the most underappreciated badasses in Texas history and a major player in this season as well.

Yet Kay, Rudy, and Art couldn’t have been more gracious. I think for both of our groups it felt like independent confirmation that we were on the right track, and we began to compare notes. They pointed us in particular toward the work of the late Bruce Moses, a research associate at the Center of Archaeological Research at UTSA and former Chairman of the Southern Texas Archaeological Association.

Bruce Moses had been fascinated by the Battle of Medina for years, and he had decided to attack the problem methodically. Like us, he realized that it all started with understanding the precise routes of the roads to San Antonio in 1813. But Bruce took this task to a whole nother level. He started with the work of Al McGraw, a former Texas Department of Transportation archaeologist who has also published extensively on the old Spanish Caminos Reales.

Bruce began corresponding with Al, some of which I later found in a manila folder at UTSA. They traded notes about specific details of the roads through the Encinal, down to details like which side of a tree the road would have passed. And Bruce went out and personally walked many miles in the presumed area of the battle, finding blazes cut into trees, photographing old swales from wagon roads, and identifying crossing points along the Medina River. With this information, he was able to document and refine Al’s maps even further. Bruce’s work hasn’t yet been formally published, yet he was very active on Texas history discussion boards online. And THAT’s where I was able to find Bruce Moses’s road maps.

We downloaded Bruce’s maps into our master Google Earth file. We overlaid them onto our LIDAR imagery. They were as perfect of a match as you could ever hope to find in this kind of project. Check them out on our Rivard Report webpage.

Bruce’s road maps gave new precision to our search and gave us the confidence to start mapping specific clues from Royalist General Arredondo’s account. The first clue, recall, was that the night before the battle, Arredondo camped “a league and half” north of a place called Ranchericas. Local tradition and most scholars of the period place Rancherias about three miles north of Pleasanton along a stream known as Las Gallinas Creek. A “league and a half” would have been about four miles north of there, or maybe seven miles north of Pleasanton, about a day’s march south of the Medina River.

Second, Arredondo also claimed that on the morning of the battle he had redirected his march from the Laredo road toward a different crossing of the Medina River. If he was on the Eastern Laredo road, the other logical crossing of the Medina River would have been toward the Western, Lower Presidio Road. Well, we felt like we knew where the Eastern, Laredo road had run. If we were right, we now had a starting point and a route of march for the Royalist army on the morning of the battle! Check them out on our Rivard Report episode webpage.

Bruce Moses died tragically in 2011 at the age of only forty-five years old, but events since his death have validated the quality of his research. In 2016, Kay Hindes and her staff at the city archaeologist’s office confirmed the discovery of the old Powder House in San Antonio City Cemetery #2³⁹ - right where Bruce had said it should be! And that’s important, because the Powder House is where the other Army – the Republican Army of the North - started on their march toward the Medina Battlefield just a few days before.

The Execution of Colonel Antonio Delgado

That Colonel Antonio Delgado was a rebel no one disputed. Governor Manuel Salcedo had likely known Delgado from their time together back in San Antonio, and would have been able to identify him among the followers of Father Hidalgo that he captured at Acatita de Baján.⁴⁰ Delgado wouldn’t have been the type of man to hide from what he had done anyway. He was a proud Tejano and veteran of decades of warfare on the frontier. He knew the stakes of the game he was playing when he took up arms against Spanish rule. The Mexican War of Independence was a violent, bloody affair for everyone involved. Neither side went out of their way to take prisoners. Whole units and sometimes even civilian communities were put to the sword.

The salted head of fellow revolutionary Juan Bautista De las Casa hanging in the Plaza de Armas left Delgado little doubt as to the fate that awaited him. Yet being from an established family and having served nobly in the defense of his community for so many years, Delgado had every reason to expect at least a proper death, even by the customs of those turbulent and violent times.

When Salcedo’s executioners came for old Delgado, his only request was for a priest to hear his confession and administer last rites. A formality, perhaps, but a small source of comfort and certainly not an unreasonable ask. Even Hidalgo had been granted access to a priest. Delgado’s request, however, was denied. And it got worse. Delgado was escorted from his cell and marched into town, where the Governor had ordered a crowd to assemble. There, in the front of the crowd, compelled to attend by a merciless and frankly petty Governor Salcedo – sat Antonio Delgado’s wife. As if death weren’t punishment enough, Delgado would have to die with the knowledge he was leaving his wife with the trauma of witnessing his execution. And believe it or not, it actually gets worse from here.

The only account I’ve found of Delgado’s execution doesn’t reveal how the old Colonel met his final moments. It does, however, record what happened after the firing squad’s volley rang out. As Colonel Delgado fell limp to the ground, a Royalist lackey shuffled over and sawed off his lifeless head with a knife. Following Governor Salcedo’s instructions, he then carried it over to where Delgado’s wife was sitting and began to sprinkle her with the blood of her executed, unconfessed husband’s head!⁴¹

Salcedo’s actions after returning to San Antonio in September 1811 are inexplicable, and only serve to lend credence to San Antonian’s earlier complains of royal neglect toward their community. His retributions and confiscations alienated even the very people who had just returned him to power. And with the execution of old Antonio Delgado, the Governor had radicalized a wealthy, prominent San Antonio clan with a lot of soldiers in it. Colonel Delgado’s son, also named Antonio, had served for many years in the San Antonio presidial unit. And his nephew, Miguel Menchaca (whose mother seems to have been a Delgado), had served as an officer in the regular Spanish army.⁴²Fans of the first season of this podcast should recognize his last name. On his father’s side, Miguel Menchaca was descended from the great presidial commanders of the 18th century, a post that had been held by his father, his great uncle, and great-great uncle, José de Urrutia. Like their ancestors, the younger Antonio Delgado and Miguel Menchaca were not the type to suffer injustice in silence.

José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara

Hidalgo’s Emissary to the North

Just before Father Hidalgo was captured in March of 1811, a man of modest means from the Rio Grande Valley came to him offering “my services, my hacienda, and my life” for the cause of Mexican Independence.⁴³The thirty-six-year old José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara had actually come to Father Hidalgo’s attention previously as a propagandist of Hidalgo’s cause back in his home state of Tamaulipas. Hidalgo was at this moment in full flight toward San Antonio, and needed friends wherever he could find them. He accepted Gutiérrez de Lara’s offer of help, and in fact appointed him his emissary to the United States.⁴⁴ Gutiérrez de Lara departed within days, narrowly escaping the fate that befell Hidalgo.⁴⁵

Gutiérrez de Lara was descended from the one of founding families of Tamaulipas.⁴⁶ His father had served prominently as a city councilman in his hometown of Revilla - later known as Guerrero - Tamaulipas. One of his brothers was a priest, suggesting the family had the means to educate their children to some degree, though Gutiérrez de Lara would insist throughout his life that his learning came from the “school of practical experience.” – “la escuela de la experiencia práctica.”⁴⁷ Indeed, there is an old but hard-to-confirm tradition that Gutiérrez de Lara earned at least part of his living as a blacksmith. He was worldly, however, and accustomed to the hardships of the frontier, and had already built a following of a dozen or so loyal disciples of revolt.

News of Father Hidalgo’s capture at Acatita de Baján reached Gutiérrez de Lara and his entourage soon after they left the revolutionary priest’s company. Undiscouraged at the news, Gutiérrez de Lara undertook his mission now with even greater urgency and energy. He passed through San Antonioa the behest of José Félix Menchaca, who put him in contact with the other republicans there.⁴⁸ Gutiérrez de Lara tasked them with recruiting a new revolutionary army while he continued on to the United States in search of resources and more volunteers. As Gutiérrez de Lara crossed Texas, he began trying to recruit several Native American tribes over to the revolutionary cause,⁴⁹ including perhaps the Tonkawas, Caddos, and others. Once in Louisiana, Gutierrez de Lara quickly won over the young, idealistic relatives of some quite powerful American politicians: James Biddle Wilkinson –son of one of the first American Governors of Louisiana– and James Gaines – double first cousin of a later commanding General of the Louisiana Territory. Gaines may have even joined Gutiérrez de Lara for part of his journey back to the United States.⁵⁰ Both Wilkinson and Gaines, by the way, will leave us accounts of the Battle of Medina.

Despite having lost his letters patent from Hidalgo and despite Hidalgo himself having been captured and executed, when Gutiérrez de Lara arrived in Washington, DC, he managed to secure meetings with Secretary of State James Monroe and President James Madison. Such was the power of Gutiérrez de Lara’s charisma and of his message. He became, in historian Julia Garrett’s words, “the first ambassador from the Mexican people to the United States.”⁵¹that he won from the American diplomatic corps their admiration and sincere support, though disappointingly little in terms of actual resources. Recall that this is late 1811 and Americans were about to thrust themselves into a war with their old colonial masters. Gutiérrez de Lara continued on to Philadelphia. There, he met and recruited a like-minded Cuban-born Spaniard named José Álvarez de Toledo, who impressed him as a man of “great talents.”⁵² Toledo preferred the world of newspaper editorials and political intrigue to front-line combat, however, and so when, Gutiérrez de Lara returned to Texas the next Spring, he left Toledo behind to continue lobbying the American government for support.

By April of 1812, Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara was back on the Louisiana-Texas border, where his efforts from the previous year were showing much greater success than his visit to Washington DC. José Felix Menchaca had assembled maybe 150 Tejano volunteers; and Wilkinson and Gaines had cobbled together 150 or so American volunteers under a twenty-four year old former U.S. army lieutenant, Augustus Magee. Gutiérrez de Lara’s outreach efforts to Native American tribes had paid dividends as well, as a few dozen East Texas Indians lined up in his ranks, which could now, with a little imagination, be called an army.⁵³

On August 8, 1812, José Felix Menchaca guided Gutiérrez de Lara’s army –the self-styled “Republican Army of the North” – across the Sabine river.⁵⁴ Sadly José Felix Menchaca quickly fell into Royalist hands and would spend the rest of life in a Chihuahua jail cell.⁵⁵ The Republican Army of the North, however, marched on and grew stronger each day.

Republican Accounts of the Battle of Medina

We left off in the last episode having settled in on a pretty fair approximation of Royalist General Arredondo’s position and line of march on the morning of the battle.

But where was the other army – the Republican Army of the North - in all this?

The three most detailed and contemporary primary Republican accounts of the battle of Medina all come from American Volunteers: an anonymous participant in the battle who reported his experience in a Lexington, KY, newspaper in the months afterward; Henry Adams Bullard, a twenty-four year old relative of Yes-those-Adamses serving on the staff of the Republican commander-in-chief; James Biddle Wilkinson, son of that first American governor of Louisiana we just mentioned, who died just a few weeks after the battle. All of these we’ll post to our Rivard Report webpage, and we’ll use them here to piece together the Republican Army’s movements.

The night before the battle, the anonymous Lexington Reporter account placed the principal Republican camp somewhere south of modern-Day Stinson Airport and just north of the Medina River.⁵⁶

The morning of the battle – and here I’m quoting Bullard - “The Republican army crossed this stream [by which he is almost certainly referring to the Medina, though he doesn’t say it] and occupied such a position as to watch the only two fords by which San Antonio could be approached,” referring presumably to both the Laredo Road to the east and the Lower Presidio road to the WEST.

Bullard again, “the army was drawn out in order of battle, crossing the road in the center, the artillery on each side and a corps of cavalry and friendly Indians on each wing concealed in the thick of woods. In front of the line was a small prairie and such was the position of the troops that the enemy might approach within rifle shot without [detecting] their presence.”

The Lexington Reporter supplies a little more detail: “we formed the battle line leaving a clear forest to our backs. On our right was located a large hill, at whose back there was an impenetrable forest that entirely protected us from being flanked on that side. On our left there was another large hill, more considerable and difficult than the one on the right. In front, we had a plain extending for a mile which was then followed by a thick encinal [oak forest] in an extremely sandy soil through which passed the road to Laredo. Our vanguard was located forward in this dense encinal with orders to avoid all attack and to retire back to our formation without being seen when the enemy approached it. This because, as I have already said, the General's idea was to surprise the enemy on his march and upon his exit from the encinal.”

Now let’s bring in Wilkinson, slightly abridged: “we formed our line of battle, and had reason to believe we should see [the enemy] in an hour or two…soon after… a stranger, who appeared from his dress an officer, rode within 60 -70 yards of our line, apparently without seeing them – when he reined in his horse, wheeled, and went off at full speed, six or eight shot were fired at him…”

By the way, Arredondo recounted the same event in his report. He even gives us the Cavalry officer’s name: 2nd Lt Francisco Lopez. The subsequent events sound familiar as well: the Republicans, realizing the element of surprise has been lost, began to pursue the scout force in front of them, which we know to be under the command of Colonels Elizondo and Zambrano. They followed after the Royalists, according to Wilkinson for two miles or so through the “deep sand” and “thick scrubby oak growth” of the Encinal de Medina. The Republicans grew tired, thirsty. Disagreement broke out among the Republican commanders, with the Commander-in-chief wanting to fall back and regroup while the others wanted to continue the pursuit. The rank and file, it seems, decided the issue for them: “It being ascertained that there was water just ahead, we moved on to it,” Wilkinson says. The Republican Army of the north continued on, the Anglo-American infantrymen on foot in the center, the Tejano and Native American cavalry marching along the flanks. With each forward step, their confidence grew. Word went down the line that the Royalists were retreating! Some of the men began to push on even more aggressively, while still others went back to help drag the cannons through the all-consuming sand. The Republicans were getting strung out, however, confused, losing contact with each other. Wilkinson: “In this manner, we approached the enemy; in this manner, we went into action. We found the enemy well-posted, as they received us warmly as in their power.”

These first three accounts all agree rather nicely with one another, and with Royalist General Arredondo’s account. Enter the William McLane account to complicate our lives. Written 48 years after the battle in 1861, McLane injects a complicating detail. All the other Republican accounts seem to place the Republican camp the night before the battle just north of the Medina River. McLane, however, claims that the Republicans “encamped for the night 4 or 5 miles South West of the Medina River at a small stream of water…” and that Arredondo and the Royalists were camped “about six miles from the Americans.”⁵⁷

Aside from being many miles forward of where the other accounts say the Republicans camped, there’s another problem with McLane’s version of events: the first stream four or five miles southwest of the Medina River isn’t on the Laredo Road! It would actually place them squarely on the Lower Presidio Road. Why would the Republican army set up an ambush on a different road from than the road they knew the Royalists were on?

But maybe instead of dwelling on inconsistencies in mileages and distances from battle accounts written down a half century after the fact, we should focus on what the different accounts have in common. McLane actually describes the topography of the ambush site in similar terms to the other accounts we have just reviewed, “with a post oak grove in rear and an opening in front.” And he seems to agree with all the accounts – including Arredondo’s! – that it was a “most admirable position” for their ambush.

And if we could positively identify the Republican ambush site from topographical details alone, the other inconsistencies wouldn’t really matter, we could confirm the Republican army’s location on the morning of the battle. And that’s the goal here.

So summarizing the points of agreement – or at least the points of non-contradiction - from the principal Republican primary accounts of the battle, here’s what we’re looking for: the ambush site ideally should be a few miles south of the Medina River, on the Laredo Road assuming we know which one that is, probably six or so miles north of the Royalist campsite, maybe with hills on either side, with some kind of wooded feature to the rear, an open plain to the south, and the Encinal de Medina just beyond that.

GoogleEarth and LIDAR are pretty good tools, but they are no match for the human eye. And the only way for a human eye to get perspective on an area as large and as wooded as the Encinal de Medina, was to see it from the air.

The Republican Army of the North Enters Texas

In the summer of 1812, Governor Manuel Salcedo knew that trouble was brewing across the Sabine. Louisiana was a hub of political intrigue in these years, with agents from all over the Americas and Europe scheming and spying on one another to effect revolutions and revisions to the world’s maps.

And Rumors of Gutiérrez de Lara’s efforts in Louisiana had become too loud to ignore. Governor Salcedo decided he had to do something. He sent a few dozen Spanish regular under the command of the reverend Lieutenant Colonel Juan Manuel Zambrano – the royalist hero of the counterrevolution against The Casas Revolt in Episode 2–and he called out the local militia in Nacogdoches to keep an eye on the Texas border. An attempted incursion by 300 Americans in October the year prior had been repulsed with only the slightest show of force, so Salcedo might have hoped that Zambrano’s mere presence alone would be enough to deter the Republicans. But Gutiérrez de Lara wasn’t leading a run-of-the-mill cattle rustling expedition. Gutiérrez de Lara was leading a movement.

When Col. Zambrano arrived in Nacogdoches, he must have sensed this. He resolved to bring the issue to a head by pushing into Louisiana. He requested safe conduct for him and his men from American officials, ostensibly to deliver a shipment of wool to Louisiana, but also probably to make a bit of a show of force in the wild borderland region separately the two nations.

Gutiérrez de Lara and his men learned of Zambrano’s plans. Perversely, it may have been what finally drew them across the Sabine. Though rich in recruits, it the Republican Army of the North was decidedly poor in terms of supplies. And they knew that Zambrano was well-provisioned.

On August 8, 1812, the Republican Army of the North crossed the Sabine River. Zambrano got word of their crossing and marched out to meet them. Sometime around August 18, 1812, Zambrano’s scouts tracked the Republicans to a swamp just west of the Sabine and tried to sneak up on them in camp. Republican pickets detected their approach, however, and fired on them, sounding the alarm and rousing their comrades-in-arms. The Republicans drew up their lines and quickly took the offensive, a tactic that frontiersmen from sides of the border consistently favored. Zambrano was surprised perhaps by the intensity of their opposition and, frankly, undermined, by the lack of commitment on the part of his militiamen to the hiscause. The Royalist force disintegrated and Zambrano retreated with his regulars all the way to San Antonio.

Gutiérrez de Lara and the Republican Army of the North found themselves doubly strengthened by their victory over the Royalists near Nacogdoches. First, they had captured large quantities of supplies which they were able to put to good use or trade for hard cash in Louisiana. Two, most of Zambrano’s militia stayed behind and joined up with Gutiérrez de Lara’s movement.⁵⁸East Texas came out in support now of the Repubilcans and filled their ranks, which soon swelled to 600 men. Gutiérrez de Lara’s long year in the wilderness was at an end, and the results spoke for themselves. The Republicans marched onward now, deeper into Texas, in Gutiérrez de Lara’s words, “united, well-armed, and determined to besiege Hell itself.”⁵⁹

The March on Goliad

The Charisma of José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara

“Have you heard of Don Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara?” a colleague from Monterrey asked me one day.

I thought he was joking. Why in the world was this employee of mine asking me about the commander-in-chief of the Republican Army of the North, the man who almost single-handedly carried the torch of Father Hidalgo’s revolt in the North of Mexico through the winter of 1811 and 12, the man who had traipsed halfway across the North American continent in search of allies and supplies to fight for a cause that appeared for all intents and purposes to have been crushed, and the man who was the central character of my upcoming podcast? I mean, I make no secret of my historical projects when I’m working on them, and everyone I’ve shared a meal with in the last year knew I was working on the Battle of Medina. But I don’t typically bore regular people with names and dates and details of these projects. I save that for you, my dear podcast listeners.

I eventually learned that when my colleague, Sergio Roblesgil Gutiérrez, asked me his question, he actually had no idea that his great-great-grand uncle, Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, had any connection to the Battle of Medina. He simply had a faint idea that his ancestor had been involved in some sort of trouble in Texas around this time.

After I responded enthusiastically to Sergio’s question that Yes, I have heard of Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara was and oh-my-god you’re related to this guy, Sergio shared with me copies of some of his personal documents, which I will link to on the Rivard Report webpage. In many English-language accounts of the events covered in this series, Gutiérrez de Lara is like a silent extra in the background, a piece of the scenery. When you read his memoirs, diaries, and proclamations, however, Gutiérrez de Lara comes alive! He was as potent and capable a revolutionary leader as any of the other heroes of Mexican independence – moreso, I would argue, than many of the more famous ones. He could touch men’s souls with his rhetoric and inspire them with his charisma and he possessed a unique ability to transcend borders and move between worlds, from his own sleepy hometown on the Rio Grande to the turmoil of a revolutionary army camp to Native American villages in East Texas to the backwoods of Louisiana to the diplomatic salons of Washington DC. Everywhere he went he won over allies: Tamaulipas, Texas, Native American communities, Louisiana, Washington DC.

Recall that Gutiérrez de Lara had gotten his start as a propagandist for Hidalgo in the Rio Grande valley. Father Hidalgo eventually recognized Gutierrez de Lara’s effectiveness by commissioning him his emissary to the United States, and Gutierrez de Lara’s words remained his most potent weapon. To Americans, he adapted his rhetoric to sound like Patrick Henry.⁶⁰Here he is addressing his volunteers: “[you will] shew your enemies and the enemies of liberty, in every part of the world, that the spark which lighted the flame of independence in the northern parts of America is not extinct in the bosoms of the descendants of those who fought.”⁶¹ To Tejanos, he sounded like Father Hidalgo, charging his message with grievance and imperatives: “Esuchad! Despertad! Abrid los ojos! Tomad ejemplo de la Patriotica ciudad de San Fernando de Béxar!”

If you have previously heard of the events covered in this season of the podcast, you probably learned of them as the “Magee-Gutiérrez” or “Gutiérrez-Magee Expedition.” I dislike this name for several reasons. First, Gutiérrez de Lara’s – Texas’! – uprising in 1812-13 wasn’t an “expedition.” It was a revolutionary groundswell, a tidal wave emanating out of Central Mexico through Texas, breaking onto American shores, receding back into Mexico to regain strength before surging forward once again. Second, the man with whom Gutiérrez shares billing in our seventh-grade history books (Magee) died four months into the campaign…and no one seemed to notice. Indeed, Magee may even have been poisoned by the American volunteers he was supposedly in command of.⁶²To give Magee equal billing with Gutiérrez de Lara is to severely undersell Gutiérrez de Lara’s role in bringing about these events. Gutiérrez de Lara had been planning this since 1811, lining up diplomatic support and resources, of his own initiative and in many cases out of his own pocket.⁶³ Even English-language primary accounts from the period very clearly characterize Gutiérrez de Lara as the unifying figure of the moment.⁶⁴Everything about Gutiérrez de Lara’s career after these events as well suggests that he was a natural leader.

His contemporaries – like Texas Royalist Governor Manuel Salcedo – certainly knew this. As Gutiérrez de Lara’s army marched toward San Antonio in September and October of 1812, men from throughout Texas flocked to his banner. By the time it reached the Guadalupe River, the Republican Army of the North had swollen to 800 men.⁶⁵Tejanos were openly deserting from Royalist militia units and even the regular Spanish army to join Gutiérrez de Lara. To Governor Salcedo’s horror, the flames of Hidalgo’s revolt were burning bright all around him once again. He decided that he had no choice but to march out himself to quench them.

Overflying the Encinal de Medina

Alberto Muzquiz towed his Cessna 182 out from his T-hangar while I pushed on the wing strut. We hopped in, went through our pre-flight checklist, ran her up, and taxied into position along the freshly paved runways of Stinson Airport, the second oldest municipal airport in the United States. One hundred years before Stinson began operations, Alberto’s ancestor, Ramon Muzquiz, had perhaps camped on this field in August 1813 on his way to participate in the Battle of Medina as one of San Antonio Colonel Miguel Menchaca’s wing commanders.

Alberto and I have been friends for twenty years or so. We’ve bonded over the years primarily over two shared fascinations: the Texas-Mexico border, and aviation. Muzquiz’s family has been in Northern Coahuila and South Texas for centuries now. In addition to a wing commander in the Republican Army of the North, the Muzquiz clan has produced Department Chiefs of Texas, Coahuilan vice-governors, and even an early Mexican President. When I needed a wingman to go up with me to do some scouting for Battle of Medina locations, I could think of no one better than Alberto.

We went up on an overcast June morning, which spared us some of the heat that the sun-baked participants in the Battle of Medina had had to endure. We set a heading toward the Medina River, where we crossed over a lovely, rolling little hay farm just before sighting El Carmen Church. From there, we flew south toward the site that we believed General Arredondo had occupied the night before the battle.

I had only told Alberto in the broadest terms what I was doing in search for the battlefield, without bothering to give him the details of the various accounts. Still, as we cruised along at 2,500’, Alberto was acutely attuned to the changes in topography, albeit for a different reason. “There’s a couple of hills,” he said pointing ahead into the Encinal de Medina.

“Where?” I responded, struggling to make out meaningful landmarks in the thick oaks of the Encinal.

“Do you see the cell towers? They place towers on the highest points.”

What had jumped out to Alberto as a hazard for piloting the airplane immediately recalled to me one of the Republican descriptions of the ambush site, which I’ll repeat here: ”we formed the battle line leaving a clear forest to our backs. On our right was located a large hill, at whose back there was an impenetrable forest that entirely protected us from being flanked on that side. On our left there was another large hill, more considerable and difficult than the one on the right. In front, we had a plain extending for a mile which was then followed by a thick encinal [oak forest] in an extremely sandy soil through which passed the road to Laredo.”

Looking down from the high-winged Cessna, I analyzed Alberto’s hills with this description in mind. Though they didn’t really form a canyon in the traditional sense of the word, they would have had a decided funneling effect on any army marching between them before spitting them out into the relatively more open plain just north of the Encinal. And winding its way through the middle of those hills – depressed about fifty to a hundred feet beneath the elevation on either side, ran modern Campbellton road…right where Bruce Moses said the Laredo Road had been!

What was missing, however, from this otherwise promising site, was a stream. Although the other accounts don’t mention it, recall that the William McLane’s 1861 account quite clearly says that the night before the battle the Republicans camping along a stream “four or five miles southwest of the Medina River”. There is a stream about four-five miles southwest of the Medina River, only it isn’t on the Laredo road, the road that Arredondo was approaching on: it is on Bruce Moses’s Lower Presidio road, the other major road coming up into San Antonio in1813. The stream the Lower Presidio Road crosses, incidentally, is Las Gallinas Creek, the creek that we think Arredondo camped on the night before the battle, albeit six or so miles downstream.

In older times, Las Gallinas Creek – or part of it anyway - was known as the Charcos de Gallinas. A charco in Spanish means a puddle, or a small pond, a reference in this case to the stream’s tendency to hold water in spots. And even on that hot and dry June day on which we overflew it, the impoundment tanks along Las Gallinas creek still held water, even as water tables have dropped significantly in recent decades.

There is, incidentally, a battle account I haven’t talked about yet that specifically mentions the Charcos de Gallinas.

Antonio Menchaca, one of the premier statesmen of the later Republic of Texas, was a thirteen year old boy at the time of the Battle. Antonio Menchaca was, also, the cousin of Miguel Menchaca’s, the commander of the Tejano units at the Battle of Medina. For Antonio Menchaca, the Battle of Medina wasn’t some distant event: it was family history! I’ve linked to his memoirs as well on our Rivard Report webpage.

He described the movements of the Republicans and Royalists on the day before the battle as follows, slightly abridged:

“[The Republicans] crossed the Medina River and on a hill, (a short distance the other side) they thought a convenient place to take the enemy at a disadvantage. Arredondo also coming to a place he considered advantageous to his purpose, stopped at the water holes called "Charcos de las Gallinas" on the hill this side of the [Las Gallinas] creek and about five miles from the Medina River.”

We have a problem here. The Charcos de Gallinas 5 miles southwest of the Medina River can’t be both McLane’s Republican campsite AND Menchaca’s Royalist campsite. And you know what the Charcos de Gallinas actually looks like from the air? A little canyon that would have made a pretty decent Republican ambush site. In fact, hills rise almost 150 feet on either side of the creek which runs parallel to modern-day Old Pleasanton Road. Many students of the battle, in fact, have identified this spot as a likely ambush site.

Does this mean we have labeled the Laredo road incorrectly? Several contributors to this podcast – Fred Martinez and Joseph Bexar – have pointed out that that the road we have been calling the Laredo Road, was just ONE of the Laredo roads. That another, parallel road joining up to the Lower Presidio also served as the road to Laredo at different times. As I was writing this, the mysterious Joe Béxar whom I discussed in a post-script to Episode 3 and whose work I’ve been publishing on our webpage came forward once again to blow my mind with another alternative: What if instead of starting the morning on an eastern Laredo Road, Arredondo had started on a more westerly Laredo trail from which he deviated EASTWARD to head back toward the area of El Carmen Church and that lovely little hay farm we had seen earlier. Another listener, Michael Olivares, suggested something similar as well, I should note. And there’s nothing we can point to to definitively refute this theory.

How in the world were we going to run this to ground? At a certain point, attempting to reconcile all of the ambiguities in the various two hundred year old accounts becomes impossible. Changing landscapes, faulty memories, and the fog of war can play tricks on people’s minds. Were the Republicans or the Royalists camped on Gallinas creek? Or did the battle start way up on the Medina River itself, as one of the more colorful and otherwise plausible accounts of the battle seems to suggest? How far did the Republicans pursue the Royalists? One account says a half mile, one says 2-3 miles, one says 4 miles,⁶⁶ a range which kind of makes a mockery of our attempts at precisely identifying old roadways. In piling estimates upon estimates, we’re actually compounding our imprecision, not reducing it.

You have to take your victories where you can find them. At this point in the project, I felt pretty good about our approximations of the opening positions of the Arredondo’s Royalist army. And we had now, following our overflight, identified the most likely “canyons” in where the Republicans could have set their ambush. Even if we were still unclear as to which of two roads the respective armies had been on, it did feel like we were at least narrowing down the options.

Once we had wrapped up our scouting exercise, we pointed Alberto’s Cessna toward Stinson Field and flew back the way we came, over El Carmen Church, the Medina River, and that lovely little hay farm. We landed and taxied back to Alberto’s T-hangar. As Alberto and I were packing up our headsets and folding up our sectional charts, Alberto paused for a moment, and turned to me: “3,000 men marching around in the monte. You mean to tell me none of them had a map?”

He wasn’t the first to have brought this up. Rob Lackowicz from our research team had been pretty vocal about this too. There had to have been a contemporary map, either from before or right after the battle, he insisted! It wasn’t a secret to contemporaries where this battle took place. Up until 1822, in fact, the bones of the dead still lined the road. Thereafter, a marker commemorating the dead hung on an oak or pecan tree, depending on your source. Someone had to have put this on a map somewhere.

Alberto and Rob were right. Someone had put it on a map. And not just anyone. One of the most famous Texans of all times was also one of most prolific mapmakers of early Texas.

Why they Fought

In Episode 01 of this season and indeed for much of the first season of this podcast, we studied what drove Tejanos to take up arms against Spain in 1811, 12, and 13. But what was it that motivated Gutiérrez de Lara’s American volunteers to go fight for the independence of a foreign country?

U.S. government agents in Louisiana at the time certainly hyped their role in recruiting men to enlist in Gutierrez de Lara’s army. They wanted to undermine Spain’s position on the continent and to prevent Napoleonic France from stepping into a Texas power vacuum.⁶⁷ But we shouldn’t overplay their role either. U.S. agents were never actually as in-control as they occasionally made themselves out to be in their letters back to Washington DC, something which certainly contributed to the mis-perception of these events as an “Expedition” from Louisiana rather than as a Revolution IN Texas. In truth, official US government support of Gutierrez De Lara was lukewarm at best. Recall that the United States in 1812 was about to go to war with her old imperial master and could ill-afford to open a second front with Spain on its southwestern border.

What should we even call these volunteers from across the Sabine? Tejanos at the time called them “Anglo-Americanos,”⁶⁸ which entered Texas English as “anglos.” These volunteers might not have appreciated that term, however, given that their old homes were about to be attacked by England and given that many of them were, apparently, Irish, for which reason Gutiérrez de Lara chose a solid green banner as the battle flag of the Republican Army of the North. Later Mexican sources would call these men “norteamericanos,” but “North America” means different things to different people and so is again imprecise. And so we are left with the admittedly imperfect term “Americans,” which is indeed what Gutiérrez de Lara’s volunteers called themselves, though it should be noted that most Mexicans – then as now – also consider themselves to be “Americans,”⁶⁹ inhabiting as they do the American continent. For all its problems, “Americans” is perhaps the least confusing term, however, so we’ll stick with it.

Of course, a fair number of Gutiérrez de Lara’s Americans were, in truth, Frenchmen, holdovers from a decade prior when Louisiana had been French. They had long been joined to Tejanos by bonds of family and trade. Many of Gutierrez de Lara’s Americans came from families that had followed the steady advance of the frontier over the previous generation, from New England, through Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee. In their working lives, they were printers, doctors, lawyers, and farm-boys tired of tilling the soil.⁷⁰There was at least one slave in their ranks, named Thomas.⁷¹A few of the men were actual veterans of the American Revolution. All were heirs to the ideology of 1776. And they believed unquestioningly in the right of revolt, particularly against distant European masters.⁷²

One of these volunteers described his comrades’ motivations in this order: “Their first desire seems to have been to escape the sleuths of justice back at home: next, the love of adventure…and [third] the prospect of establishing a new republic.” Recall that this was a time of worldwide tumult, of revolutions and nation-creation, and these men wanted to be a part of that. Such was Americans’ passion for the ideals of liberty that most of the people, according to Gutiérrez de Lara, “ particularly in Kentucky and Tennessee…did not even want me to proceed, wishing me to remain there, and saying that they would make up a considerable army of volunteers, with which, under my command, we would invade the provinces of Mexico and sweep before us all the oppressors of our liberty.”⁷³It as though he can hardly hold them back. Gutiérrez de Lara, in turn, spoke generously of his American volunteers. He described them as “valiant”⁷⁴ “brave, free, and independent,”⁷⁵ and “veterans, hardened to work and the strains of military life, and supremely accurate and skilled marksmen.”⁷⁶

As products of the frontier like their Tejano comrades in arms, these Volunteers’ toughness was unquestionable and their idealism was more than likely genuine, but so too was their “opportunism.” An 1832 immigrant to Texas said it well, “You may ask why we leave the United States of America, for that of the United States of Mexico – in answer, I can only say, that it was through choice, with a view of bettering my fortune.”⁷⁷ More specifically, in 1812 American volunteers – indeed, all of the men in the Republican Army of the North – were fighting for the promise of $40/month and a square league of land – 4,428 acres each.

Gutiérrez de Lara was aware of this opportunistic streak, and at different times would complain about the “doctors and lawyers” in the Americans’ ranks gifted in “matters of rascality.”⁷⁸ Yet more striking than their “rascality” was how much they otherwise resembled the Tejano contingent that had formed the core of Gutierrez de Lara’s army. The Tejanos in the Republican Army came from a similarly broad swath of their society. Historian Raúl Ramos has cross-referenced the names of known San Antonio supporters of Gutiérrez de Lara with contemporary housing records to reveal that three-quarters of the Republicans lived in jacales or hide-covered shacks, a proportion that corresponded to the at-large home ownership patterns of the community. This data suggests rather broad-based support for the Republican movement and some sort of ideological alignment across much of the San Antonio community.

And chief among the many grievances of Tejanos in 1813 were Spanish restrictions on trade with their American neighbors and the Crown’s refusal to free up land, causes that seem like they were almost tailor-made to fire up early 1800’s American.⁷⁹ Americans saw the advantages of freer trade with Texas,⁸⁰ which they got a taste of when the short-lived de las Casas government briefly removed trade restrictions in 1811.⁸¹ And land was inextricably linked with liberty in Americans’ ideology of the day. Land guaranteed a man an income, freed him from interference from others and absolved him of the need to grovel at the feet of feudal or bureaucratic superiors. Texas, of course, had land in abundance, yet in the three hundred years of Spanish rule over Texas, the crown would release less than 15% of Texas’s lands to its citizens.⁸²

Last, but not least, what unified Tejanos, Native Americans, and Anglo-Americans was Gutiérrez de Lara. His presence in front of all three groups is the most tangible thing they had in common. And he was clearly a capable and astute leader of men, even if he was recognizably human and possessed of some of the less desirable qualities that are often found in effective leaders. I like Elizabeth West’s assessment of him:

“He was undoubtedly high-tempered; he permitted, if he did not order, cruelty in the treatment of prisoners of war. He was inclined to extremes of judgment. He had limitation, partly inherent, partly due to lack of education and experience; he took himself too seriously. He was capable on occasion of dissimulation.

It is equally certain, however, that he had native mental ability, restless energy, courage, resourcefulness, strength of will. He must have had personal force, even charm, for, coming to the United States penniless, without credentials, he was able to inspire confidence in high places even to the extent of being able to borrow money on his personal note. Moreover, his patriotism must have been genuine, for self-seeking ambition is hardly sufficient to explain his continued fidelity to the insurgent cause in the face of discouragement, privation, and ill-fortune.”⁸³

Gutiérrez de Lara was the kind of person that other people formed strong opinions toward. And he was clearly a little bit of a badass. He wasn’t afraid to get dirty or worth with his hands. During the upcoming siege of La Bahia, he set up and worked a forge repairing his men’s arms himself, while still being present at all points in the action.⁸⁴He also knew how to take care of himself. Earlier, on his journey to D.C., he learned of Spanish assassins hired to ambush him on the Natchez Trace. He got the drop on them first, however, recording only in his diary that “I did not carry my arms to play with.” In future battles, we will see him leading from the front, placing himself in the heat of the action. American volunteer James Gaines would conclude his account of this great drama with a brief but poignant post-script – almost as if it were the only concrete conclusion that he could really draw from the entire episode. I’ll say it the way he spelled – “Gutaris was a good patriot.”⁸⁵

Gutiérrez de Lara did something really remarkable between 1811-1813: he built a multi-ethnic Tejano, Native American, and Anglo-American volunteer army and launched it against one of the most powerful empires on earth. And he won their first contest near Nacogdoches on September 18, 1812. By October 16, the Gutiérrez de Lara’s Republican Army had marched west across the Colorado River, where recruits had swollen their ranks to over 800 men. Spanish Royalist Governor Salcedo could no longer ignore the growing threat and so mustered what forces he could to meet the Republican Army himself. He sent forth spies to follow Gutiérrez de Lara’s advance, and laid a trap for him where the Nacogdoches-San Antonio Road crossed the Guadalupe River.⁸⁶

But Gutiérrez de Lara wasn’t heading to San Antonio. He had decided to march on La Bahía, better known today, as Goliad.

The Battle of Rosillo

Salcedo Rides out to Meet the Republicans

Throughout September and October of 1812, Texas Governor Manuel Salcedo anxiously followed the advance of Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara’s Republican Army of the North across his province. After they had taken Nacogdoches, Govern Salcedo had assumed that they would march on San Antonio – the capital of Texas and gateway to the rest of Mexico. Salcedo had marched out himself with maybe 1,000 or Spanish regulars, presidials, and militia, intent on ambushing the Republicans just as they crossed the Guadalupe River.

The Republicans, however, captured one of his spies “on the top of a tree, looking out; but not vigilant enough to save himself,” one Republican recalled mockingly. From the spy and perhaps from some of their Tonkawa allies scouting ahead, the Republicans learned of the Governor’s trap on the Guadalupe.⁸⁷Instead of marching in Governor Salcedo’s trap, Gutiérrez de Lara set a course toward Goliad– then known as La Bahía. Governor Salcedo learned of their detour, and raced south to catch up to them, but not before the Republicans captured the town on November 7, 1812.⁸⁸

The second and third largest communities in Texas had fallen now to Gutiérrez de Lara barely three months after he had crossed the Sabine. And in some ways, taking Goliad placed the Republicans in a stronger position than they would have been in had they captured San Antonio first. From Goliad, they controlled Salcedo’s access to the sea and threatened to cut off his supply lines down to the interior, all the while poised to march on the provincial capital if Salcedo left it undefended. As Gutiérrez de Lara built on his own success, more and more recruits flocked to his banner. Even the small Royalist force in Goliad that Gutiérrez de Lara had just defeated came over to his side.

Governor Salcedo had been tactically bested for the moment, but it didn’t seem to dampen his resolve. He was, after all, the man who had put an end to Father Hidalgo’s revolt: he would surely crush Gutiérrez de Lara’s as well. His force arrived in Goliad six days after the Republicans, on November 13and Governor Salcedo knew how to make an entrance. His cavalry trotted in front of the Republican lines in full parade attire while his infantry set up three camps forming a triangular perimeter around the town. On the way in, he had captured an unfortunate Republican scout, whom he ordered bound and dragged to death around the town, like Hector around the walls of Troy, in full view but just beyond the reach of the holed-up Republicans. Governor Salcedo then followed through in what was becoming his signature move: he severed the head of the dead Republican and impaled it on a lance as a reminder to the other rebels of what awaited them.⁸⁹

Understandably, this display “dampened the ardor” of the Republicans considerably, according to one participant⁹⁰. The Republicans’ merry revolutionary jaunt from the Sabine had just gotten real. Conditions in the besieged town quickly deteriorated. Food ran out. Lice broke out.⁹¹ Some men deserted.⁹² Some, including Magee, tried to negotiate a surrender, though the rest of the men in the Republican Army refused to go along when they found out the terms offered required handing over Gutiérrez de Lara and the Tejanos to Salcedo’s well-known mercy.⁹³Magee then died, either of a fever or from poisoning at the hands of his own men. Gutiérrez de Lara reached out in all directions for help, including to U.S. agents in Louisiana whom he encouraged to annex Texas as far as Goliad as a pretext for coming to their aid. The request went unheeded. At one point, the entire army was saved from starvation only when “an obscure Mexican, dark as an Indian, but little known or noticed in the ranks, at length proposed that he might be allowed to take a small party with him and bring in beef from the country.” He succeeded in bringing in fifty or so head of cattle, which would sustain the Republicans through the winter as they watched Governor Salcedo’s force grow larger.⁹⁴ At one point, Royalists outnumbered the Republicans almost two to one.⁹⁵

Yet miraculously, each day found the Royalists even weaker than the Republicans.⁹⁶. Many of the Governor Salcedo’s 1,500 men were, in fact, conscripts without any particular antipathy toward the Republicans. Many more harbored active sympathies with them. As fast as reinforcements came in, many of them went out, some directly into Gutiérrez de Lara’s ranks!⁹⁷ Most notable amongst these royalists aiding and abetting the Republican cause was San Antonian José Francisco Ruiz. Ruiz commanded the Bexar Royal Presidial unit, but was in contact throughout most of the siege with Gutiérrez de Lara and the Republicans.⁹⁸

Each day brought a new minor skirmish – more than two dozen of them in total⁹⁹- often provoked by the most mundane of events, like hungry Republicans chasing a cow all the way to Royalist lines or Republicans trying to sneak up on the Royalist horse herd.¹⁰⁰ Yet each time, the Republicans seemed to come out a little bit ahead in terms of body count and territory controlled.¹⁰¹ The Republicans grew bolder, and began to send out raiding parties to capture and kill Royalists at night.¹⁰² Gutiérrez de Lara counseled his men to make their shots count, and their superior marksmanship began to exact a toll on the Royalists’s morale.¹⁰³ Behind the lines, the Republicans’ native American allies – Comanches in this instance - picked up their raiding activities on San Antonio and on Royalist supply lines, stealing thousands of heads of livestock destined for Salcedo’s army.¹⁰⁴At the same time, Governor Salcedo was never quite able to cut off supplies from getting into Goliad, and soon, the primary source of reinforcements for the Republicans during the siege of Goliad was deserters from his besieging army.¹⁰⁵

Governor Salcedo realized that his army was dissolving beneath him and knew he needed to bring things to a head. On February 10th, 1813, about three months after the siege began, he ordered an assault of the town under cover of darkness. No sooner had the Royalists drawn within cannon range, however, than they were detected by alert Republican lookouts. They sounded the alarm and rallied their comrades, who formed into battle lines and began to assault the assaulters, driving them back with surprising force and winning the day. Undeterred, Salcedo tried again three days later. He was repulsed this time even more resoundingly. The Republicans suddenly appreciated their strength. The momentum had turned.

Stephen F. Austin’s Maps of Texas

I am going to go ahead and assume that if you are listening to this podcast, you know who Stephen F. Austin is. What you may not know is that – in addition to his many other talents – Stephen F. Austin was also an accomplished cartographer.

And Stephen F. Austin clearly knew where the Battle of Medina took place.

I have copies of several different Maps that were either created by or derived from maps created by Stephen F. Austin – Don Estevan as he called himself at the time. So significant a landmark were the bones of the dead near the old Battle of Medina site that Austin marked it on nearly all of his maps with some variation of “Derrota de los republicanos” or “Republicans Defeated”.

Created for the most part between 1822 and 1829, all of Austin’s maps place the battle in the middle of the Encinal de Medina, which he also occasionally marked. And all of them place the battle on the road to Laredo, more or less equidistant between the Medina River and Las Gallinas Creek, which he calls “Atascoso” creek. If anything, he perhaps favored the Las Gallinas half of the 10 mile expanse separating the Medina and Las Gallinas, though he doesn’t zoom in enough in his maps for us to be any more precise than that.

In 1815 – just two years after the battle – a Spanish mapping expedition came through this exact area. Juan Pedro Walker – born John Peter Walker in New Orleans – was the expedition’s surveyor. In his journal on the afternoon of October 5th, he noted the following:

5:15: Crossed the Medina River

7:00: “Field of the Battle of Medina. Huesos y calaveras por espacio de cerca de una legua” Bones and skeletons for a space of about a league

8:50: We stopped near Rancheria.

So, let’s do some quick math. Walker had started the morning in downtown San Antonio, stopped for several hours mid-day, then resumed his journey around 4:00 PM, hitting the Medina at 5:15 and making Rancherias by 8:50. That’s almost 30 miles total in a little over 7 hours of travel or about 14 minutes per mile over the course of the day. So if Walker’s diary indicates that they encountered the battlefield 105 minutes after crossing the Medina River, that would have put him 7 or 8 miles south of the Medina River on the Laredo Road. That fits perfectly with Austin’s maps…now if only we knew where the Laredo Road was!!!

This is the problem with relying on these roads to find the battlefield, as we’ve discussed many times in previous episodes. These roads changed all the time. Austin’s maps actually offer some of the best proof of this. Some of them pretty clearly show the Lower Presidio Road separate from the Laredo. Yet some of his maps only show one road. Some show two roads diverging south of the Medina; some show the divergence north of the Medina; and others still show two roads coming out of San Antonio and then converging south of the Medina river! Which one of these was the Laredo road in 1813?

Check out these maps, by the way, at our Rivard Report Webpage.

This feels familiar, doesn’t it? A promising new lead that resolves itself into only more ambiguity. And the map thing is particularly frustrating, because the battle site seems to be so clearly marked on them. X should mark the spot, shouldn’t it!

At this point, our whole little research team: Crystal, Rob, Zack and I were frustrated and frankly tired of the purely academic approach to this exercise, though perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised. I mean, if this mystery had been solvable just from the archival record alone, someone would have already done it. We knew we needed to get out into the field and start digging to anchor our search in something real. Now, despite continued mailers and conversations with locals, we still hadn’t been able to lay hands on any artifacts from the battle. Not a single bullet, button, or horseshoe nail even. But maybe we hadn’t been looking hard enough.

During the course of this project, my mind had drifted back repeatedly to El Carmen Church in Losoya. Recall that it was the first place we looked when we surveyed the locations that claimed connections to the battle. We didn’t necessarily think the battle had occurred there, it was far too close to the Medina River for that, but it claimed to be the burial site of at least Arredondo’s Royalist dead. If the Royalists had buried their dead on that spot and camped there after the battle, perhaps it meant that the Republicans had camped there the night before. That it was a good spot to camp or that it was at least the prevailing route in 1813.Perhaps that was a clue as to which road each of these armies considered to be the Laredo Road in 1813.

I had remained in contact with my friend Fred Martinez, parishioner, descendant of one of the original land grantees in the area, and former Bexar County Historical Commissioner from Episode 3 of this season. Over lunch one day, I voiced my frustration to Fred at our inability to find artifacts and my theory that somewhere near El Carmen might be the best place to start looking.

“You know they found a bunch of old Spanish weapons here when they tore down the high bridge in the 1950’s?” he said, pointing to the FM1937 crossing of the Medina River just below El Carmen Church.

No, Fred, I had not known that.

One of the great things about Fred is that he can cite you the source almost every fact he knows. True to form, he told me where to look. Actually, he gave me a copy of the book.

In the 1960’s and 70’s, journalist Ed Syers published a column that was syndicated in many Texas newspapers called “Off the Beaten Trail.” In one of these, he visits Losoya, and interviews residents about what they know about the Battle of Medina. I love his concluding paragraph, for what the lead it gives us, and for the challenge it poses to those of us trying to tell this story:

“[Local resident] Ella Lee Jasper can tell you of the graves she found up where the Medina joins the San Antonio, of the rusting Spanish arms[emphasis mine] turned up when they made the cut for the new bridge.

San Antonio historians – if they work at it – can tell you a lot more.

Much always can be told, and should be remembered, when many men die, believing something.”

I knew where we needed to dig. Right between El Carmen Church and the old High bridge in Losoya. Right on that lovely rolling hay farm that Alberto and I had seen from the air in Episode 5.

The Fall of Salcedo

On February 10 and on February 13th, 1813, Governor Manuel Salcedo had assaulted the Republican army of the north entrenched in Goliad. Both times, he was repulsed, and badly. What had been an irregular trickle of men deserting from his ranks now became a steady stream, and Comanches allied with the Republicans increased their attacks on his supply lines and on his capital. Governor Salcedo was beaten, and he had the good sense to realize it before the situation spun too far out of control. On February 19, he lifted the siege of Goliad and undertook a not-altogether-orderly retreat back to San Antonio, leaving behind several hundred of his men who either couldn’t or wouldn’t come along. Many of them instead marched directly into the Republican ranks.¹⁰⁶

Miguel Menchaca’s mounted Tejanos harassed Salcedo all the way back to the provincial capital, stealing horses and supplies wherever they could while the rest of the Republican Army regrouped and prepared to resume the offensive.¹⁰⁷A few hundred Coushatta, Lipan Apaches, and Tonkawas soon joined the Republicans under the command of James Gaines, one of Gutiérrez de Lara’s first followers in Louisiana who had also helped him recruit helped him recruit many of the Americans now serving under him.¹⁰⁸All in – Tejanos, Native Americans, and Americans – the Republican Army now numbered as many as 1,000 men. And on March 19, 1813, they march out of Goliad bound for San Antonio.

Foreshadowing the tactics of the later Battle of Medina, Governor Salcedo elected to lay an ambush for the approaching Republicans about eight miles southeast of town, perhaps to protect the town from battle, or perhaps because he mistrusted the loyalty of the townsfolk in the event of a siege.¹⁰⁹ On the morning of March 29, 1813, Salcedo’s 1,200 man Republican army took up position just outside modern-day loop 410 near where Rosillo Creek enters Salado creek on the North side of the Goliad Road.¹¹⁰Morale in Salcedo’s army must have been low. In addition to having just lost the three-month siege of Goliad, the Spanish regulars in the army probably no longer trusted the conscripted militia and local presidial units lined up beside them. To-date, many of the Tejano militiamen called up by Salcedo had proven themselves less-than-committed to the Royalist cause. And the commander of the San Antonio presidials - José Francisco Ruiz – had been actively passing information for some time now to Gutiérrez de Lara, whose army he would be a part of before the month was out.

Around mid-day on that March 29, 1813, the Republican army came into view of the Royalists lying in ambush. The Royalists held their fire as the Republicans filed past. With impressive discipline, the Royalists didn’t give up their position until they had almost the entire Republican force in front of them, well past the point at which they could have retreated from the ambush. The first indication that the Republicans seem to have had of a Royalist presence in the area, was when Royalist artillery tore into their rear at just a few hundred yards range.¹¹¹ The surprised Republicans halted their march, and looked around to locate their enemy. They absorbed the opening attack as best they could, eventually finding cover in the brush along the road where they drew up their battle line. Separated now by only a small plain, the armies began to trade insults with each other. One Colonel Montero in the Royalist army singled out Colonel Reuben Ross amongst the American volunteers, and called him out in Homeric fashion for a personal duel. “Ross advanced and they slashed away upon each other with their sabres, and in their furious charge upon each other, as Montero’s horse passed the other, Montero was shot down. The General Action now commenced.”¹¹²His mounted Tejanos attacked the Royalist right, while the Native American allies tried to turn the Royalist left and the American infantrymen charged the center on foot.¹¹³San Antonian Miguel Menchaca was in the thickest of the fighting and distinguished himself for bravery – as he had during the siege of Goliad and in the pursuit of the Royalists back to San Antonio The action, we are told, was “brief, but very bloody.”¹¹⁴

With less than 900 men, Gutiérrez de Lara’s Republican Army of the North overwhelmed Governor Salcedo’s 1,000+man royalist force that day at Rosillo.¹¹⁵The Republicans lost only 6 men killed and 26 men wounded, to some 330 killed and 60 captured of the Royalists.¹¹⁶ The Royalist force dissolved, some coming over to the Republican side, many others fleeing toward the interior.

Two days after the battle – April 1, 1813 – the Republican Army of the North entered San Antonio. Still refusing to recognize the legitimacy of Gutiérrez de Lara’s command, the Spaniards tried to turn themselves over to American officers.¹¹⁷ The American officers, however, uniformly refused and pointed the Spaniard to their Commander-in-Chief. Gutiérrez de Lara recalled in later years, “Here before me, I had the glory to see humiliated at my feet all the Despotism and arrogance of Europe.”¹¹⁸ Salcedo and the Royalist officers were sentenced to death in rapidly convened kangaroo courts. Some in the Republican Army protested the lack of due process, while others objected out of practical concern that executing the Spaniards might provoke reprisals or strengthen Royalist resolve. After much pleading by locals, Gutiérrez de Lara agreed to commute the Royalists’ sentences to exile, and ordered the prisoners marched to Matagorda Bay where a ship would carry them off.

Royalists down in Central Mexico were shocked by the Republicans victory in Texas. Father Hidalgo’s revolt had, they thought, been thoroughly crushed. Now, his ghost had returned and was riding down on them from the North. Rebels had established control over an entire province – albeit one of the poorest, most distant, and least populated ones –it was the province with open supply lines to a sympathetic United States.

Most of the royalist infrastructure in New Spain was paralyzed as to what to do next. Their forces were already spread thin throughout Mexico and the mass defections of Salcedo’s army boded poorly for any new attempts to conscript men and send them off to a rebel frontier.

The Royalist commander of a fearsome Regiment of Spanish Regulars from Veracruz, however, didn’t hesitate. His Peninsular heart burned with hatred for these provincial revolutionaries, whose comrades he had so effectively crushed over the last few years in San Luis Potosi and Tamaulipas. Without waiting for orders from the Viceroy or even asking for them, Joaquin de Arredondo moved his headquarters to Laredo, where he began amassing forces and planning the reconquest of Texas.

The Free and Independent State of Texas

The 1813 Texas Declaration of Independence

On April 6, 1813, just five days after capturing San Antonio, a revolutionary junta led by Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara de Lara declared Texas’ Independence from Spain.

“Nos el Pueblo dela Provincia de texas.” the declaration begins, “swearing before the supreme judge of the universe the rightness of our intentions, declare that the chains that have held us under the domination of European Spain are forever dissolved; that we are free and independent; that we have the right to establish our own government and that henceforth all legitimate authority shall arise from the People, to whom alone this right belongs; that from now on and forever we shall be free of any duty or obligation whatsoever to any foreign power.”¹¹⁹

And this wasn’t just an aspirational statement. It was a more or less accurate assessment of the current situation. Following the Battle of Rosillo the week prior, as Julia Garrett notes in her 1939 book, Green Flag Over Texas: [Texas] became the first [of Spain’s colonies] to “achieve complete independence from Spain. It was also the first to establish a separate government without an opposing force in her environs, in that during April of 1813 every Spanish official had been removed…”¹²⁰

The April 6thdeclaration of independence appointed “Senor Don Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara” as a sort of Regent, a position sometimes described as “President Protector,”¹²¹charged with naming seven men to a revolutionary junta that would establish the new state’s government. He chose seven San Antonians with impeccable Canary Island pedigrees and equally impeccable revolutionary credentials: three Arochas and four Delgados.¹²² This group along with many of the dozen or so many who had followed Gutiérrez de Lara since 1811 when he’d got his start as a revolutionary, set to work on a new constitution, which they published eleven days later on April 17, 1813.¹²³

Texas’s First Declaration of Independence and first Constitution are truly underappreciated documents, probably because they’re hard to categorize neatly. At least two American historians I’ve read describe them as descended from the Spanish tradition; yet I have also read a Mexican historian who categorized them as distinctly North American.¹²⁴ In reality, they are both, employing the Anglo-American language of liberty within a Hispanic legal tradition to call for a hybrid form of representative government. They are profoundly authentic, autochthonous documents arising from the place in which they are written. They articulate grievances that Tejanos had been voicing for generations, and would continue to voice well into the events of 1835-36: eg, general neglect by government officials, suppression of trade, arbitrary enforcement of laws, etc, all the kind of things that make people want to revolt against distant foreign masters. Yet they also show an awareness of different political traditions, particularly those of their North American neighbors. The opening paragraph of the 1813 declaration which I read above, should have recalled for you the openings of the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Another example would be the way that the 1813 Declaration seems to draw on Anglo-American notions of Natural law, appealing to “derecho natural” three different times,¹²⁵which something that neither the Spanish nor the Mexican founding documents do. Spanish and Mexican documents are much more likely to refer to the “rights of man,” something the 1813 Texas Declaration also does, albeit only once.

Yet if anyone reading the 1813 Texas Declaration of Independence thought that Gutiérrez de Lara was about to bring Texas into the American fold, they were quickly disabused of that notion. The last line of the preamble to the 1813 Declaration plainly affirms that Texas “is free of any obligation to any foreign power,” (absueltos de deber y obligacion a todo poder Extranjero). And the document ends too with an unequivocal declaration of alignment with Mexico and an aspiration for Texas to lead a “rebirth of the Mexican people, taking in our hands the reins of our government,” a fitting horse-based metaphor for our horse-crazed Tejanos to use.

The 1813 Constitution is similarly unpretentious and succinct. It creates a familiar three branch structure of government, with certain checks and balances between the respective branches. It explicitly recognizes certain inalienable, civil rights, such as a prohibition against unlawful takings of property and the guarantee of a trial for all men accused of crimes.

The one thing that the 1813 Texas constitution was NOT, however, was democratic. In a nod toward representativeness, Gutiérrez de Lara swapped in a couple of Americans into his revolutionary junta,¹²⁶ yet the manner of selecting future members of this junta was undefined, as was the term of these initial members. And in rather circular fashion, it fell to the junta to elect the governor, and they unsurprisingly elected Gutiérrez de Lara. Other communities in Texas were provided with even less self-rule. The Constitution called for each town to be governed by a military officer appointed by the Governor.

We should acknowledge that this was, first and foremost, a wartime constitution, drafted in a hurry and under trying circumstances. No one at the time seemed unduly concerned by its obvious shortcomings. Indeed, the most pressing issue for most of the men milling about San Antonio in April of 1813 was making sure they got the $40/month and four thousand acres of land that Gutiérrez de Lara had promised them. Gutiérrez de Lara and the ruling junta made sure to include this guarantee in the last article of this first constitution of Texas.¹²⁷

This need to constitutionally guarantee that the soldiers in his army would get paid was really a sign of the precariousness of Gutiérrez de Lara’s position at this moment. Just a few days prior, he had angered many of his volunteers when he placed former Royalist Governor Manuel Salcedo and twelve of his officers on trial for treason, which violated some of the volunteers’ understanding of the conditions under which the Royalists had surrendered.¹²⁸His ever-procedural American volunteers insisted on appointing defense counsel, but were overruled by Gutiérrez de Lara. The subsequent outcome of the trial was never really in doubt, and the Spaniards found themselves sentenced to death less than twenty-four hours after they had surrendered. Many of Gutiérrez de Lara’s volunteers objected, loudly, and threatened to leave his command. The uproar was too much for Gutiérrez de Lara to ignore. He agreed to commute the Royalists’ sentences to exile. He ordered them marched to Goliad…or to Matagorda Bay for passage to Havana…or all the way back to New Spain perhaps?¹²⁹ The varying destinations passed down to us in different accounts point to the larger deception that was underway.

The Hay Farm

The project made me buy a hay farm. Here’s how it happened:

Recall that in the previous episode, our friend Fred Martinez had pointed us to the low bridge in Losoya, TX as a place where rusting Spanish arms were rumored to have been found in the 1950’s. The low bridge today sits a few hundred yards downhill and downstream of El Carmen Church, a claimed burial site of some of the Battle of Medina dead. And recall that the low bridge crosses the Medina River alongside a lovely little hay farm that Alberto and I flew over back in Episode 5.

One day after kicking around the general area of the battlefield with San Antonio City Archaeologist Kay Hindes, she decided to head back through Losoya to try to find an old Spanish blaze along a tree, that is, a mark left behind in Colonial times for travelers to measure distance and mark forks in the road.

On the way, she stopped and sent me a picture from in front of that lovely little hay farm. You may be tired of hearing me use this lovely little epithet for this lovely little hay farm, but it really is quite pretty: after passing through the thick Encinal de Medina and the brush that has taken over the south Texas prairie around it, just as you cross the Medina River, you emerge into this little bowl, 60 acres of gentling rolling hay fields dotted with centuries’ old Pecan trees. And it sat right on Bruce Moses’s Laredo road at one of maybe two spots on the Medina River – according to our mysterious contributor Joseph Bexar – where wheeled-traffic could have crossed. This meant that it could have been the Republican camp site the night before the battle. Or the Royalist campsite immediately following the battle. And actually, if we believe Carlos Beltran’s battle account, it might even have been where the battle started!¹³⁰He describes the mounted contingents of the Republican army staged at a spot just north of the Medina River behind three easily crossable fords; it stands to reason that this Losoya crossing could have been one of them. At the first signs of battle – which in his account almost sounds like it starts on the river bank – they go charging across. And by the way, I can’t believe I’ve gotten this far into this series without mentioning Carlos Beltran. Carlos – born Charles Beltran, in West Virginia – came to San Antonio in 1807, fell in love with it, learned the language, and lived the rest of his life in Mexico. During the Battle of Medina, he actually fought with the mounted Tejano units, not the American volunteers, though he moved in and out of their camps and so is able to give us perspectives from the various different units of the Republican Army. Beltran’s account is posted back on our Episode 4 page at the Rivard Report, and if you’re only gonna read one of these old Republican accounts of the Battle of Medina.

Given the ambiguities we kept running into during our archival research, I had started thinking about our project to find the Medina battlefield in probabilistic terms. That is, even if we couldn’t be certain about some things, we could at least try to compare different pieces of information and identify where they overlapped, and maybe those overlaps could tell us something more important than the accounts other, more minor contradictions. And a lot of data points were overlapping at this lovely little hay farm on the Medina River.

And the picture that Kay Hindes’ sent me showed that it now had a for sale sign in front of it.

A historic property on the banks of the Medina River, originally patented to Jose Antonio Garza the designer of the Lone Star of Texas (see Episode 12 of Season 1 of this podcast), and that may also have been the spot on which the Republican and or Royalist armies camped in days surrounding the Battle of Medina, how could I pass this up? I of course then did what any motivated Battle of Medina searcher would have done. I called up the number on the sign and made an offer.

And the owners accepted.

We were ecstatic. Finally, the search was getting real, even if our first dig was based on some pretty attenuated evidence! I called up Kay Hindes, I called up my SWCA research buddy Zack Overfield, and with a little persistence and the promise of free BBQ, we assembled a team of archaeological field techs and trusted metal detectorists. We went out on December 29th, 2018 – possibly the coldest day of the year, it turned out. 60 acres is a still a lot of ground for a half dozen people to cover, so we figured that we had to be methodical about this, probabilistic, if you will. We defined define a grid that our metal detectorists would walk. Behind the metal detectorists, the rest of us would follow, shovels in hand, ready to dig. Hits would be marked, dug up, and examined. Check out a video we have posted on our Rivard report webpage of Zach Overfield explaining our methodology. Especially listen to the last part, people need to understand this: finding a a historical artifact on your property does not give any one – including the government! – any rights to come on to your property or even to take that artifact. Both the artifact and the land remain entirely your property to do what you want with! This is one of the most difficult things to convince people of when asking for permission to conduct surveys on their property, so I want to push this out there.

Despite my excitement, I had been warned by Kay and Zack to moderate my expectations. Expect to find far more beer cans and bottle tops than buttons and bullets. Then like twenty feet into walking our first line, one of our metal detectorists, Larion Crumley, got a hit. Our volunteer archaeological techs, David and Rachel, shuffled over and started digging. As the hole was dug, Larry moved in with his handheld detecting unit to more precisely identify the objects location. He then pulled out a spade and began carefully scraping away the dirt. He felt something, picked at the dirt around it with his finger, then pulled up a square nail. Kay Hindes rushed over to look at it, you can see the picture on the Rivard Report webpage. Unlike modern wire nails, this nail appeared to have been forged, suggesting it was old, maybe 19th century old. Not Battle of Medina old, perhaps, but it was something.

Sadly, it was the most luck we’d have all morning. Whoever had camped on this lovely little hay farm hadn’t even drank their share of beer. We didn’t even find a single beer can or bottle top. We kept on trying however. Zack went down to the river bank and augured out about a few ten-foot deep hole, hoping to maybe come across a layer of debris or evidence of some other historical activity. Our metal detectorists, Larion Crumley and Bill Telford, kept working our grid, while I followed them around distracting them with my questions about what other types of artifacts they had found on other projects. It turned out that they had long been involved also in searching for exact location of the Battle of Rosillo, which they believed they were close to finding based on a few bullets and 3” cannonball they had dug up.

And yet that kind of luck continued to elude us well into the afternoon. I had brought my six year old son, Memo, along with us for the day because I felt like searching for buried treasure brings out the inner six year old boy in all of us. He was initially fired up at the prospect of finding some sort of buried treasure, but by the late afternoon he, like the rest of us, had grown pretty despondent. In an effort to keep him entertained, I decided to put him to work. We rigged up on of the metal detectors to his arm and showed him generally how to use it. We pointed him on a line along the base of a hill, and told him to get to work. Like ten feet in, he got a hit. We figured he had just scanned his boot or something, but we went over to see what it was. Where’d you get the hit? We asked. He swept the machine in front of him. Beep. We told him to sweep it over again. Beep beep beep. It was a big solid hit. BEEEP! Huh. And it was long, like 18” long or so. Interesting. We pulled out the shovels and started digging, carefully, excitedly. About 6” down, we hit something solid. We pulled out the handheld detector to try to better identify the object. Sure enough, it was a long bar-shaped object, not more than 1” in diameter or so, with maybe a bend on one end. I tried not to think about rusting Spanish arms, but of course I couldn’t help it. We dug more, around the beeps, careful not to get too close less we damage the object. We eventually got a spade under it. Then a hand on it. Then a small bit of it peaked through the dirt. By this point, I’m down on all fours, digging on my knees like an infantryman trying to scrape out a foxhole. It was something metallic, ferrous, you could tell from the rust. It was a little skinnier than you would have expected for a gun barrel, but it was hard to tell what else it could be. We kept digging, scraping, pulling gently, digging some more, until finally, at last, it emerged… the most perfectly aged 13/16” tire iron you had ever seen.

As the sun set, and once I had stopped weeping, Zach came over and tried to console me. The rusting Spanish arms may still be there somewhere, he said, underneath the 95% of the property we weren’t able to survey in our brief time. And as the new owner of this hay farm, I had a lifetime to keep searching for them. Even then, he pointed, out, finding rusted Spanish arms might not tell us as much as I wanted it to. Spanish arms were marching up and down this road for three centuries; even if you found some, you’d be hard-pressed to make them tell you anything definitive about the battle. Archaeology typically confirms very little, he reminded me. I responded that when it came to the battle of Medina, it seemed that archaeology finds very little too. It’s funny you say that, he shot back. Someone actually had found something not even three miles north of where we were standing, something that was probably from the Battle of Medina, he said. How do you know it was from the Battle of Medina, I asked? Again, he responded, archaeology alone couldn’t really say for sure. But what conclusion would you draw, he asked me, if you found the body of a twenty-something year old man along the main road to and from the area of the battle, wearing buttons from around 1813, with cannon shot in his neck?

The Execution of the Spanish Officers

On April 1, 1813 - for the second time in two years – Spanish Governor Manuel Salcedo found himself marching out of San Antonio in chains. A 60-man escort of Republicans including the younger Captain Antonio Delgado and José Francisco Ruiz guided the former governor and twelve of his officers southeast along the road to Goliad and Matagorda Bay, where they would be packed off into exile they had been told. Salcedo surely detected more than a little smugness in his captors’ faces as they reveled in their newfound superiority over the man who had so terrorized their town, the man who thought he had ended Father Hidalgo’s two years ago. Yet even now, Salcedo still apparently failed to comprehend the depth the enmity he had engendered amongst his opponents over the last couple years.

When the group stopped at the spot where the Battle of Rosillo had been fought just a few days before,¹³¹ Governor Salcedo, he must have grown suspicious. He didn’t have long to ponder his plight, however. He and the other prisoners were promptly yanked down from their mounts, stripped of their clothes, and tied to nearby trees. Carlos Beltran describes what happened next:

“Realizing that their end was near, these unhappy men begged to be spared until a priest might be brought from town to administer the last rites of the church, but this was refused. ‘You sent my father into eternity denying him the consolation of religion in his last extremity,’” said Captain Antonio Delgado.¹³²The other men in the escort pulled out their knives and began to whet their blades on the soles of their shoes.¹³³ There could be no mistake what they intended to do. Beltran again, “[The Lieutenant Governor] exhorted his companions in misfortune to face the ordeal like men and to die like true soldiers, loyal, even in death, to their masters, the King…[Governor Salcedo meanwhile] begged to be permitted to die like a soldier. He asked to be shot, and for reasons that will never be known, his request was granted. He was the first to be executed, and then at a signal given by Delgardo, the men chosen for the murderous task advanced and, with gleaming knives, cut the throats of the remaining [men].”¹³⁴

After killing the Royalists – “gachupines” the Republicans would have called these Spaniards -the men in the escort then mutilated their corpses in gruesome frontier fashion, and left their bloody, dismembered bodies for the wild animals to finish off.¹³⁵

The execution of Governor Salcedo and his officers is indefensible by any measure. It fits, however, the pattern of the War of Mexican Independence, and even has a certain barbaric logic to it if you recall the deliberately cruel and unusual executions that Governor Salcedo had carried out in San Antonio over the previous years. Many of Gutiérrez de Lara’s non-San Antonio volunteers lacked this context, however, and so Captain Antonio Delgado returned the next morning to outrage in the streets of San Antonio. A mob of American volunteers gathered around him and took him into custody. They resolved to try him and Gutiérrez de Lara for the execution of the Spaniards, whom they believed had surrendered with promises of safe conduct.

The trials of Delgado and Gutiérrez de Lara began immediately. Antonio Delgado decided to conduct his own defense, and so rose to speak. He reminded the court, the volunteers gathered around him – Tejano, Native American, and Anglo-American – of the history that had brought things to this point. For one hundred years, the citizens of Texas had been neglected by their own King; for one hundred years they had been exploited by a system meant to enrich Spaniards at their expense! He reminded them of what had started this whole revolt two and a half years prior, namely, the grito of a small-town cleric in Dolores, Guanajuato and his heroic march to the gates of Mexico City, followed by his betrayal, his ambush, and his execution. This was a story that Antonio Delgado – and presumably many others in San Antonio – had lived personally. Here are Delgado’s words: “My father was a patriot. He fought the Gachupin under Hidalgo. Here in San Antonio he was betrayed into the hands of Governor Salcedo, by whom he was cruelly put to death and his venerable head – my father’s head – was hoisted upon a pole – a horrible sight which all you gallant Americans witnessed when you entered the city. I shall not seek your clemency by saying that I acted under orders of my superiors. Far from it, I would rather have you consider that I acted under my own volition. I am not a penitent. I have no regrets over the execution of the men who have been a scourge to my race and country…As a son, no less dutiful to his parent than loyal to his country, I have avenged the murder of my venerated father. If there is an American present who would have done less, let him rise up and pronounce me guilty.”¹³⁶

Delgado was acquitted.¹³⁷At that point, there wasn’t really any need to go forward with Gutiérrez de Lara’s trial, so we hear no more about it, no evidence for or against his role in the executions.¹³⁸Despite his later condemnation of the “horrific and detestable throat-slittings,”¹³⁹ his protestations ring a little hollow. If he had been that serious about protecting the lives of the Royalist officers, he wouldn’t have entrusted them to the son of a man who had been very publicly and very brutally executed by Governor Salcedo six months before.

Yet here’s the strange part…(see footnote)

There was still damage control for Gutiérrez de Lara and his allies to manage. Miguel Menchaca, James Gaines, and perhaps Carlos Beltran tried to explain the context of the executions to the Americans,¹⁴⁰but their faith in Gutiérrez de Lara seems to have been severely shaken. Perhaps too they had been swayed by a recently begun smear campaign conducted by envious rivals back in the U.S. who eyed Gutiérrez de Lara’s success as a threat to whatever personal ambitions they had for Texas. Whatever the reason, following the trials Gutiérrez de Lara was deposed as Commander-in Chief of the Republican Army of the North in favor of American Colonel Reuben Ross, who we met in the previous episode as the victor of a mounted duel at the opening of the Battle of Rosillo.

The execution of the Spaniards, the trial of Delgado and Gutiérrez de Lara, and the subsequent months of inactivity following the Battle of Rosillo in March of 1813 frayed ethnic relations within the Republican Army of the North. Many Americans still stewed over the execution of the Royalist officers, and some left, reducing their numbers to less than a third of army. Tejanos meanwhile looked askance as those Americans who remained “gave themselves up largely to every form of dissipation – cards, horses, wine, and women.”¹⁴¹Despite Miguel Menchaca’s tireless efforts to mediate between the distrustful factions,¹⁴² some Americans became convinced that the Tejanos were now conspiring to turn them over to the Spaniards. Unbeknownst to them, however, that the Spanish commander of the force marching toward them – our old impulsive and flip-flopping friend Colonel Ignacio Elizondo - was intriguing with diplomats in the U.S. to possibly come over to the Republican cause – which US diplomats rebuffed – even as he was also being intrigued upon by Gutiérrez de Lara to come over to the Republican cause – which Elizondo rebuffed.¹⁴³

If only cross-cultural dealings were as easy as Coke commercials make them out to be! Trust in a cross-cultural setting goes against everything in our tribal nature, especially when money, life, and national honor are at stake! I have spent the majority of my professional career working in foreign countries, and I can tell you that misunderstandings are always magnified in such a context. Different communication styles are interpreted as dishonesty; ignorance of cultural courtesies gives offense where none was intended; and simple acts of incompetence are attributed to malice.

[More discussion on this tension…] Yet I honestly believe that when you parse through the facts. Gaines didn’t like Bullard. Villars didn’t like Muzquiz, but was higher on Gutiérrez. You have to kind of average out the accounts. Or better yet read them for yourselves.

All of which played into the hands of the men marching up the Camino Real, of course. But it also played into the hands of a schemer newly arrived in Louisiana, that purported revolutionary of “great talents” as Gutiérrez de Lara himself had described him a year and a half earlier when they had met in Philadelphia. Cuban-born Spaniard and fairweather-Republican José Alvarez de Toledo had actually spent most of the time since their meeting the year before conspiring to have Gutiérrez de Lara removed from command of the army he had led to such surprising success. Upon hearing of the execution of the Royalist officers, Toledo redoubled his efforts to undermine Gutiérrez de Lara. Despite the recent drama, Gutiérrez de Lara’s battlefield record stood as a formidable impediment to anyone else wishing to make themselves the leader of this revolt. Toledo knew he needed to strike soon.

The Battle of Alazán Creek

Dissension in the Republican Ranks

Joaquín de Arredondo was a Spanish nobleman born to a line of soldiers and administrators that included a Governor of Cuba and a Viceroy of Buenos Aires. He had begun 1810 as a mere Colonel of the Royal Regiment of Veracruz, but the coming revolutionary tumult in Mexico suited his talents well. Over the next two years, Arredondo and his Veracruz regiment excelled as Royalist firefighters, quelling uprisings in modern-day Nuevo Leon, San Luis Potosi, and Tamaulipas – where one wonders if he might have heard of a fiery revolutionary from the Rio Grande named Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara. Arredondo promised to put to “fire and sword” all who opposed him, and he was a man of his word. He tortured enemies who fell into his hands executed prisoners captured in combat, and proved himself to be a ruthless and relentless campaigner. With a patch covering one eye, he even looked the part of an aristocratic rebellion-crusher. He was brutal, he was feared, and he was unquestionably effective.

When Arredondo heard about the Republican victory at the Battle of Rosillo and the capture of San Antonio, he informed the viceroy that he would personally march north and remedy the situation. That’s right, he didn’t wait for orders or ask permission. He just told the Viceroy that he was gonna go handle it. More accurately, he ignored the viceroy’s actual orders to attend to a smaller revolt back in Tamaulipas. So necessary was Arredondo to the royalist cause and so far-removed from central authority was his command, however, that the viceroy could do little more than fume about Arredondo’s disobedience in letters. A new viceroy soon came along and, recognizing Arredondo’s abilities and importance, formally promoted him to the position of Comandante General of Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, and Texas – effectively the same position that former Texas Governor Manuel Salcedo’s uncle had held. By 1813, Arredondo was forty-three years old, a virtual second viceroy of northern New Spain, and on his way to Laredo to undertake the reconquest of Texas from the Republican Army of the North.¹⁴⁴For more information about Arredondo background and rise to power, I recommend you read Professor Bradley Folsom’s recent biography of the one-eyed general, which we’ll link to on the Rivard Report webpage.

In the short term, while he made his preparations and gathered reinforcements, Arredondo needed a way to pin down the Republicans and halt their momentum. Despite the distances involved, there was legitimate concern that Gutiérrez de Lara would just keep marching south right down into Mexico.¹⁴⁵ Hidalgo had done no less and in much less time with an untrained mob just two years prior, almost capturing Mexico City.

Arredondo called on a Royalist Colonel whom we know well: the flip-flopping and Father-Hidalgo-ambushing Ignacio Elizondo. In May of 1813, Colonel Elizondo commanded 700 hundred men in the field, many of them the remnants of the Royalist force defeated at the Battle of Rosillo a few weeks prior, the rest an assortment of regulars hailing principally from Chihuahua. General Arredondo ordered Elizondo to march across the Rio Grande, but to halt at the Frio River where Arredondo’s larger army would rendezvous with him in a month or two. The plan was for Elizondo to make a show of force, reconnoiter Republican strength, and sow dissension in the Republican ranks – but NOT to attack yet. Suspecting perhaps that Elizondo might be overeager to redeem his earlier flip-floppery or aware perhaps of his impulsive nature, Arredondo tried to make his order not to attack the Republicans abundantly clear to Elizondo. Under no circumstances was he to cross the Frio or march on San Antonio. Arredondo wanted to overwhelm the Republicans, to combine his force with Elizondo’s and bring to bear the full brunt of the Crown’s vengeance on the Republican army in one great battle.

Elizondo received Arredondo’s orders and marched north from Laredo sometime in mid-May of 1813. Republican scouts and their Comanche allies under the command of a chief known as Prieto followed his advance all along the way.¹⁴⁶Elizondo’s force wasn’t large, they soon realized, only half the size of the 1,500 or so Republicans in San Antonio at the time, but 700 trained Spanish regulars with 6 pieces of cavalry was nothing to sneeze at. And the Republican Army of the North was in disarray. The only thing that seemed to unite them, according to one volunteer’s memoir, was their belief that discipline was unnecessary.¹⁴⁷They had grown cocky, it seems, after having defeated the Royalists so resoundingly at Nacogdoches, Goliad, and Rosillo. And now, several months of inactivity had not only sapped their discipline, it had left plenty of time for infighting. The commanding general who had led the Republicans to victories in those battles – Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara – had been sidelined after the execution of a dozen or so Spanish officers. In his place, an American who had distinguished himself by winning a mounted duel before the Battle of Rosillo – Colonel Reuben Ross - had been elevated to commander-in-chief. Yet suspicion ran high among the different ethnic factions composing the Republican Army and it was an open question whether they would even take the field together once the Royalist enemy arrived.

Around June 1, 1813, Colonel Elizondo brought it all to a head by crossing the Frio River – in direct violation of Arredondo’s orders. As Arredondo had feared, Elizondo was intent, it seemed, on blotting out the stain of his earlier flirtation with revolution by becoming the man to have twice crushed Father Hidalgo’s revolt: once at Acatita de Baján in Coahuila, and now in San Antonio. The boldness of the Elizondo’s advance certainly had an effect on the surprised Republicans. Colonel Rossbecame suddenly overwhelmed by the conviction that the Tejanos in his ranks were conspiring to turn the Americans over to the approaching Royalists. When informed that Colonel Elizondo had pulled within a few days march of San Antonio, Colonel Ross decided that discretion was the better part of valor and beat a hasty retreat to Louisiana, leaving the Republican Army now without even a nominal commander-in-chief.

In reality, Colonel Ross had the read the situation entirely wrong. Elizondo wasn’t really interested in the American volunteers. At one point, he had even intrigued with U.S. agents in Louisiana to align himself with American interests, and he consistently seemed to show Americans small courtesies of war that he never considered offering to Tejanos. This was because Elizondo was actually far more concerned with exacting revenge on the Tejano leadership, namely, Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, Miguel Menchaca, and Antonio Delgado. It was Gutiérrez de Lara’s who had resurrected Father Hidalgo’s revolt in the North of Mexico. It was Miguel Menchaca’s devotion to the cause that held together the bickering Tejano and American factions following the demotion of Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara.¹⁴⁸It was Captain Delgado’s fanaticism that had led to the execution of Elizondo’s Royalist compatriots, including his co-conspirator in the ambush of Father Hidalgo, Governor Manuel Salcedo.

As such, Elizondo concocted a plan to try to turn the Americans against their Tejano companions. As he set up camp on June 12, 1813 along Alazán Creek in the middle of modern San Antonio’s near-West side, Elizondo sent secret messengers to the American volunteers with a simple proposition. The Americans might return in safety to the United States, unmolested, with their arms and all their belongings. Everyone would just forget that they had had any role in this little revolution thing. All they had to do was turn on their Tejano brethren, and hand over Gutiérrez de Lara, Menchaca, Delgado, and the rest of the local leadership of the Republican Army of the North.¹⁴⁹

The Blue Wing Body

In early 1968, a skull emerged from the bar ditch running alongside Blue Wing Road just 3 miles north of my lovely little hay farm and just a quarter mile east of South Flores Road, one of the old Laredo Roads, you might recall. Anne Fox with the Witte Museum was called in to lead the excavation. Careful digging revealed a fairly complete skeleton, as well as seven copper buttons, a few fragments of cloth and pottery, and a 4-ounce, 1.18” diameter lead ball lodged in the skeleton’s neck.

The Blue Wing body and associated artifacts today reside at UTSA’s Center for Archaeological research, CAR for short, where the late Battle of Medina road-mapper Bruce Moses actually worked. His colleague, Cyndi Munoz, has studied these artifacts at-length and so Zach Overfield from our Battle of Medina research team set up an appointment for us to go meet with her.

On the day of our meeting, Cyndi laid out the box containing the artifacts from the so-called Blue Wing burial on a table in the back of CAR’s warehouse. The box contained maybe two dozen little zip-lock baggies, most of them full of the old, decaying bones of what appeared to be a pretty complete skeleton. The lower jaw bone with its perfect complement of teeth really stood out to me. I picked it up and did my best Poor Yorick, trying to picture the man whose jaw I now held. We knew that he was a young man, Cyndi told us, based on the pelvic and skull shape. His teeth, spine, and pubic bones suggest he was in his twenties, and stood about 5’8”. A healed fracture on the underside of his forearm was a classic indicator of a self-defense injury, suggesting this particular individual was no stranger to violence even before that 1.18” lead ball entered his neck.

The lead ball in the poor fellow’s neck is actually even more interesting than it sounds. 1.18” caliber balls weren’t fired from rifles, then or now. A round that large would have only been fired from a cannon. More specifically, this appeared to be grape or canister shot, 1” or so diameter balls which would have been packed by the dozens into a single canister and set off, turning each cannon into a giant shotgun. People don’t get shot with cannons that often, even in a town with as violent of an early history as San Antonio’s. A body found with canister shot lodged inside it is almost certainly a war casualty rather than just a victim of everyday violence.

The seven copper buttons were also more interesting than they first appeared. Buttons, I learned from Cyndi, are almost as close to a date-stamp as you can get in archaeology. Their composition, style, and method of manufacture can generally be dated with a fair degree of accuracy to within a few decades. These buttons were brass with a plain flat crown and back, with wedge-shaped button eyes drilled after they were cast, in accordance with the manufacturing styles of the period between 1750 and - get this - about 1812 – the years immediately preceding the Battle of Medina!

Looking at the blue wing burial and artifacts, a strange feeling flooded over me, slowly at first, then more overwhelmingly. It was the slow and steady realization that after so much research, digging, and pleading, at long last here was something tangible from our much-studied Battle. Or not really something, someONE. We were looking at a person, a presumed participant in the Battle. This person had probably marched out of San Antonio with the rest of the Republicans, hopeful, inspired, sure of victory. He had perhaps sat in ambush behind a low row of brush, nervously awaiting the appearance of the first Royalist forces. He had pursued the Royalists through miles of the Encinal’s blackjack, sugar sand, hot, thirsty, and fatigued. And he had been there for that terrible moment when he and his comrades realized they had stumbled into a Royalist trap. Yeah, of course we couldn’t be 100% sure, but the remains of the twenty-something year old man wearing seven copper buttons from the early 1800’s with a lead cannon ball in his neck on the most likely road to and from the Medina battlefield were pretty suggesting of a casualty from the battle of Medina.

And yet, rather than feeling any sort of joy or fulfillment, as Cyndi boxed up the artifacts and took them away, I mostly felt an increased sense of frustration. The Blue Wing body proved that artifacts could and did exist into the present. So where were the rest of the artifacts from the battle itself, the artifacts that everyone living in the area claimed they had seen, and yet which no one could seem to lay hands on?

For the first time, our research group started analyzing why we might NOT be able to find artifacts. And here’s the best we could come up with.

First, armies at this time recovered as much as they could from a battle site to melt, recast, and reuse in the future. Even buttons and clothing would have had some value to the Royalist army which had just marched nearly naked one hundred and fifty miles through the South Texas brush. General Arredondo actually confirms in his post-action report that his troops did this.

Second, the Encinal de Medina is not conducive to preserving artifacts. The sandy soil lets in lots of oxygen and water: the enemies of metal artifacts’ longevity. Two centuries entombed in this environment could break down even a sizeable cannonball.

Third, almost every inch of the Encinal de Medina has been cleared and tilled at some point over the past two hundred years. Multiple times. Even on the off chance that tilling turned back up artifacts that were buried in previous growing seasons, any iron or lead found by local farmers would have been more valuable as scrap than as a historical artifact for most of those intervening years, and treated accordingly.

Fourth and last, long-active sand mines in the area may have entirely removed or obscured the top layers of soil. For almost 100 years parts of the sandy Encinal have been mined for aggregate and other materials. The hills seem to have been particularly attractive targets, and their removal has changed the topography of the area and presumably destroyed any artifacts embedded in them. These mines continue in operation today. Two of them, incidentally, lie right in the middle of our area of interest, covering several hundred acres just east of Old Pleasanton Road. They are the hills around the Charcos de Gallinas on the map we published for Episode 5.

And yet the Blue Wing body proved, if nothing else, that artifacts from the battle could exist into the present. That they did exist!

17:14 I had asked local resident Cathy Brown one time why she thought these artifacts had proven so difficult to lay hands on. Do you remember Cathy Brown from episode 3? She is a lifetime resident of Old Pleasanton Road, and the inventor of the chocolate tamales, which again you can and should order at www.chocolatetamales.net. In one of our first conversations, she had alluded rather tantalizingly to perhaps knowing where some artifacts in the area might be located. But she had warned me that locals were leery of revealing too much about the old treasures they had in the backs of closets and in cigar boxes passed down from grandma, leery lest unscrupulous scavengers, metal detectorists, or government agents should show up and try to claim them. I had assured her that I understood this and that in reality, I didn’t want the artifacts. It was true. The artifacts themselves weren’t that important to our search. Knowing WHERE people had found artifacts, however, and plotting those on a map, might provide vital evidence about these armies movements. And it might even reveal where they collided!

One day, out of the blue, Cathy sent me a text message. It was short and cryptic, just two lines: “Time for us to meet? You say when?” Absolutely, I responded. Had Cathy found something? I dare not believe she had and I didn’t want to scare her off by reacting too strongly at that moment. I resisted the temptation to ask what it was about, and simply proposed a date and time. “Perfect,” she responded. “You will enjoy.”

The Republican Army of the North’s Finest Hour

When Royalist Colonel Ignacio Elizondo offered the American volunteers in the Republican Army of the North free passage out of Texas in exchange for betraying their Tejano companions, it wasn’t the first time that Royalists had tried to turn Republicans against each other. During the siege of Goliad, Royalists had made a similar offer to Americans.¹⁵⁰ Surrounded and seemingly cut-off from reinforcements, the American commander at the time – Augustus Magee – had considered accepting the offer, but the rest of his men refused.¹⁵¹ When the tables turned and the Republicans later routed the Royalists at the Battle of Rosillo, the Royalist officers insisted on surrendering to the American officers, in an attempt to minimize Tejanos’ role in a revolt they had started. Once again, the Americans dismissed the gesture, and directed the surrendering Spaniards to the army’s commander-in-chief, Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara.

In June of 1813, Gutiérrez de Larawas at a new low, however. He was still theoretically the Governor and President of the newly declared free state of Texas, but following the execution of the Royalist officers and the launch of a smear campaign against him from a jealous rival in Louisiana, he had lost the confidence of many of his American volunteers. He had, subsequently, been removed from overall command of the Republican army in favor of American Colonel Reuben Ross. Then when Colonel Ross fled at the beginning of June, it left the Republican army leaderless just as Colonel Elizondo set up camp on Alazán Creek.

The Republicans convened a council of war. Being that this was a volunteer, citizen army, it should come as no surprise that most of the men in the army were in attendance. There’s something remarkable to this fact as well, that even in the presence of the enemy and on the heels of months of infighting, the factions of the Republican army were able to convene and consider their options in an open, democratic fashion. The acting commander of the American volunteers – one Major Henry Perry¹⁵²–opened the council by holding up the message that he had received from Elizondo. He revealed its contents to those gathered around, namely, that Elizondo had guaranteed the Americans their lives in exchange for handing over their Tejano brothers.

“What says el Senor Gutiérrez de Lara; has he any suggestions to offer?” Major Perry asked him.

Major Perry was clearly testing Gutiérrez de Lara. Would Gutiérrez de Lara demean himself by begging the Americans to stay? Or would he welcome the opportunity to get rid of the Americans, and thus recover command of the army he had raised? Fundamentally, what was more important to him: command and control over the army? Or the cause for which it was fighting?

Yet Gutiérrez de Lara saw through the test. He refused to panic and he refused to beg. He rose and appealed to the assembled veterans now not as their former commander, but as their comrade-in-arms, he said. His leadership of the Republican Army, after all, had never come from a commission, or a King, or even from the dead hand of Father Hidalgo, he reminded them. It came from his commitment to the cause of independence and the valor he had so unfailingly demonstrated in leading it. Despite the current sad state of relations within the Republican Army, Gutiérrez de Lara continued, and the suspicion that the contingents of that army seemed to hold toward each other at that moment, he had not forgotten what they – Tejanos, Native Americans, and Anglo-Americans – had suffered together, and what they had won together! If their enemies were trying to divide the Republicans now, it was because they feared what the men fighting beneath the green banner might be capable of united together! As such, he would not – could not – believe that such an insulting offer from such a known scoundrel as Elizondo would sway the noble and gallant Americans, Gutiérrez de Lara concluded, putting it back on Perry and the American volunteers.

Unbeknownst to Gutiérrez de Lara, Major Perry had actually already responded to Elizondo…rejecting his offer.¹⁵³ Carlos Beltran tells us what happened next:

“When Gutiérrez had finished speaking, Perry read aloud the reply he had sent to Elizondo, and for a moment, there was deep silence. The men stood in a line as if transfixed, then, fully realizing the import of their brave commanders’ courage, a cheer burst forth such as had perhaps never been heard in the old town of Bexar. Gutiérrez seized Perry’s hand and said: “We are more than ever convinced of the magnanimity and bravery of the American soldier, and in order to give you further proof of our loyalty, courage, and fidelity, we only ask that you allow us to lead the van in the coming battle.”¹⁵⁴

The two commanders – indeed, the two ethnic factions – had tested each other, only to be reminded of the other’s courage and of the spirit that had originally brought them together. Gutiérrez de Lara’s request to lead the vanguard was granted.¹⁵⁵ The Republicans then integrated their units, mixing Tejanos, Native Americans, and Anglo-Americans in order to improve unit cohesion, a particularly savvy move given the recent months of tension.¹⁵⁶On the wings, in command of the mounted units, Gutiérrez de Lara placed Lt. Colonel Miguel Menchaca, who had by this time become Gutiérrez de Lara’s most reliable ally. Menchaca had played a critical role as a mediator between the Tejanos and Americans in the previous months and probably helped pave the way for Gutiérrez de Lara’s return to favor. Menchaca had almost certainly also played a crucial role in winning over many of Gutiérrez de Lara’s native American allies, who had learned over the previous century of fighting, trading, and dealing with Menchaca’s to respect that name.¹⁵⁷ You can go back to Season 1 of this series to learn about the special relationship that the Menchacas developed with the Apaches in particular, dating back to the 1690s. Gutiérrez de Lara and Menchaca’s feat of uniting historically warring native American tribes was, in a sense, no less of an accomplishment than uniting the other factions of the army. Now, the Apaches, Tonkawas, and Comanches allied to the Republicans excitedly took up positions to the rear of Elizondo’s camp, delighted at their orders to stampede Elizondo’s horse herd and cut-off any potential retreat. They were promised their share of loot from the battle in proportion to the number of scalps they could claim.¹⁵⁸

Early on the morning of June 20, 1813, Gutiérrez de Lara along with Captain Antonio Delgado led the mixed infantry units into position, creeping to within 200 yards of Elizondo’s unsuspecting soldiers. Elizondo had camped on the east bank of Alazán Creek in a neighborhood whose street names today honor the men sneaking up on the Royalists that morning: Menchaca, Delgado, Ruiz. The Royalists awoke and gathered for morning mass. Just a mile or so away, they could see irrigated fields along San Pedro Creek transitioning into the smaller town plots of San Fernando de Bexar, San Antonio’s city center. Colonel Elizondo apparently thought very little of the threat posed by the nearby Republicans. When he had pitched his camp there, he apparently neither posted pickets nor sent out scouts. Perhaps he thought the town’s surrender was imminent, that the Americans would take his offer or that the republican army would dissolve before he could even get to it, and that he would that very morning be marching into San Antonio the great hero of New Spain, the man who had captured Father Hidalgo and the man who had crushed his revolt once and for all in the San Antonio River Basin.

The whistle of canister shot soon broke the stillness of the morning, followed by the reports of the cannons that had fired them. As the first Royalist casualties fell to the ground, Republican riflemen appeared on the edges of camp and began to pick off the confused Royalist congregants, who scrambled for their arms and tried to form up their lines. Their discipline served them well. Soon they were pushing back against the Republicans, using the favorably geography of the creek bed and the small rise on which they had camped to their advantage. The Republican infantry first pressed hard on the Royalist right, which yielded ground only begrudgingly.¹⁵⁹ Hand-to-hand combat soon followed, for several hours.¹⁶⁰ The Republican attack began to stall out.

For all of his flip-floppery, we shouldn’t underestimate Elizondo’s talents as a commander. His training took over, and he looked for ways to recapture the initiative in the battle. He sent a detachment of troops wide south to try to flank the Republican left.¹⁶¹ The Republicans noticed the movement however, and shifted to face it. Gutiérrez de Lara and Menchaca then noticed that Elizondo’s maneuver had created a vulnerability on his now-weaker left, where an artillery position had been knocked out of commission by Republican cannons.¹⁶²The Republican commanders rallied their mounted forces and charged now the Royalist left, which pulled back under the pressure and began to crumble.¹⁶³ Some units on Elizondo’s right tried to hold out, and dug into their positions, but soon saw their comrades on the left wavering. The Royalist line broke. The soldiers began to flee.¹⁶⁴ When they fled, however, they fled right into the blood-curdling cries of the Republicans’ native American allies.

It must have been a terrible slaughter.¹⁶⁵Perhaps as many as 300 Royalists were killed at the Battle of Alazán Creek, almost half of the fighting force, and another 150 captured, compared to a few dozen casualties for the Republicans.¹⁶⁶ Only a few hundred Spanish royalists escaped, including Colonel Elizondo who had two horses shot out from under him during his flight.¹⁶⁷ Behind him, he left behind 2,000 horses and mules, 4,000 pounds of flour, 350 muskets, two canon, 5,000 pounds of gunpowder, and some $35,000 in other goods and coin, critical supplies that made the Republican Army of the North stronger than ever.¹⁶⁸

It was Gutiérrez de Lara’s finest hour. He was now Don Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara “invicto,” undefeated. Yet the rumblings of discontent from across the Sabine were growing louder. There were rumors that the dashing young Spaniard who had so impressed Gutiérrez de Lara in Philadelphia - whom Gutiérrez de Lara had considered a faithful ally rallying resources to his cause - was conspiring against him. That dashing young Spaniard, José Alvarez de Toledo, had done everything he could to aggravate the dissension in the Republican ranks following the execution of Governor Salcedo and the other Spanish officers. And Toledo, allegedly, now boasted commissions from the US government or from a provisional congress in central Mexico or perhaps the Cortes in Cádiz appointing him as the legitimate commander-in-chief of the Republican Army of the North.¹⁶⁹ Gutiérrez de Lara understood the power of propaganda. It’s how he had begun his career as a revolutionary. And he must have sensed that despite his success on the battlefield, that he was losing the war of words. He dispatched loyalists back to Louisiana - including, perhaps, the ever-reliable James Gaines - to halt the flow of Toledo partisans into the province and to counter their smear campaign with his PR.¹⁷⁰ But it may have been too late.

Artifacts at Last!

Coup d’etat

On July 27, 1813, President-Governor Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara of the First Republic of Texas – who over the previous year had raised a multi-ethnic army, negotiated foreign backing for his cause, issued a Declaration of the Independence, promulgated a Constitution, and three times defeated a better-trained, better-equipped Royalist army, including as recently as a month ago at the Battle of Alazán Creek – was deposed. Worse, he was deposed by the junta he had personally appointed just a few months before!¹⁷¹The Junta was meant to perform the duties of a legislative branch and hold certain checks against executive authority, but the fact this Gutiérrez de Lara’s own appointees voted unanimously to remove him showed how quickly and how wildly the political situation had spun out of his control. The five San Antonians and two Americans replaced him with a dashing young Spaniard named José Alvarez de Toledo, whose principal service to the cause so far had been in the form of writing newspaper articles from East of the Sabine River.

So who in the world was Toledo? The thirty-five-year old Toledo came from a wealthy Spanish family in Cuba and had attended the Royal naval academy back in Spain. He briefly served on a Spanish frigate, but soon abandoned a military career to take a seat in the Spanish parliament. He struggled to find his faction in the turbulent world of Napoleonic Spain and fled around 1811 to the even more turbulent New World. He dabbled briefly in fomenting a separatist movement in Cuba, but soon decided that Texas was more fertile ground. Upon meeting Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara in the winter of 1811 in Philadelphia, he became – like many others who met Gutiérrez de Lara – a follower, and you will sometimes seem him described as his Chief-of-staff. When Gutiérrez de Lara crossed the Sabine with the Republican Army of the North in August of 1812, however, Toledo stayed behind, first in Philadelphia, then later in Natchitoches. At some point, he began to believe that Gutiérrez de Lara was unfit to command this uprising – or perhaps more accurately, Toledo began to believe that he himself was more fit for it, despite his having never commanded troops in battle or, as best I can tell, having ever set foot in Texas prior. From that point onward, he committed himself to writing letters and publishing newspaper articles critical of Gutiérrez de Lara’s every move. He played up the executions of Governor Salcedo and his officers; he claimed that Gutiérrez de Lara had no intention of ever paying his soldiers; and he made sure to highlight to the Americans Gutiérrez de Lara’s repeated affirmation of Texas’s independence from all foreign powers.¹⁷²

Toledo set out for San Antonio sometime probably mid-July of 1813. He sent ahead messages asserting his rightful place as the new commander of the Republican Army of the North, based on a commission letter he secured from a provisional Congress in central Mexico and on letters of support from U.S. agents.¹⁷³

When they first received these messages, the Texas junta stood by Gutiérrez de Lara. When they heard of Toledo’s approach to San Antonio, they placed several conditions on his entry into the city, most significant of which were that Toledo would serve under Gutiérrez de Lara’s command and that Toledo must take any soldiers accompanying him back to the United States once independence had been finally won.¹⁷⁴Displeased, Toledo began to intrigue. He highlighted his alleged credentials and endorsements from foreign governments; through messengers, he intimated to the American volunteers that he had the unlikely sum of two million pesos with which he would pay all the soldiers if we has allowed to take command; and he continued smearing Gutiérrez de Lara in print.¹⁷⁵ When that didn’t work, Toledo resorted to threatening the Junta that he would take all the American volunteers and artillery to the United States if Gutiérrez de Lara attempted to remain in command.¹⁷⁶

Something is missing from the historical record here to fully explain why it was so easy for Toledo to march in from afar and push aside the man who had led this army to victory so repeatedly over the previous year. If I’m being generous to Toledo, I should confess here that various different accounts all seem to indicate that he had a certain charisma of his own. That, of course, feels a little hard to square with his back-stabbing and backroom smear campaigns and it not a particularly scientific explanation of what happened, but the young man clearly had an aura. Gutiérrez de Lara had been seduced by it at their first meeting, describing him as a man of “great talents.” According to Carlos Beltran: “His elegant manners, stately military bearing and fine personal appearance won the respect and confidence of a major part of the troops.”¹⁷⁷ José Antonio Navarro similarly described Toledo as “affluent in speech, pleasing personality, skillful, of gentle manly demeanor and very obsequious. With this multitude of fascinating qualities, he immediately captured the hearts and goodwill of the army and the inhabitants of San Antonio.”¹⁷⁸ For all that the men of the Republican Army of the North despised gachupines, they were still easily impressed by them. It probably helped too that Toledo was extremely wealthy, and may have offered his own resources to the perpetually underfunded Republican cause.¹⁷⁹

Sometime around the first of August, the Revolutionary junta made their final decision, casting their lot with Toledo and deposing Gutiérrez de Lara as leader of their government. On August 4, Toledo entered triumphantly into San Antonio.¹⁸⁰In what was, perhaps, Gutiérrez de Lara’s final display of his commitment to the cause and the army he had raised, Gutiérrez de Lara didn’t fight the vote of his junta or stick around to cause problems for the Republican Army’s new commander. He accepted the decision, gathered his family, and by August 6th was on the road to Louisiana.

The change at the top was NOT uncontroversial, however.¹⁸¹ After meeting Toledo, Colonel Miguel Menchaca told Carlos Beltran, “Sus pensamientos indican perfidia!”¹⁸²Toledo’s first initiatives as commander did nothing to dispel this notion. Ever the Spaniard, he couldn’t resist the temptation to re-organize the army along strictly ethnic lines, splitting Tejanos and Americans into separate companies.¹⁸³ This sapped the cohesion of the army, which was already divided over the change in leadership and the political intrigue surrounding it.

In early August, word reached the Republicans that Arredondo’s Royalist army had rendezvoused with the remnants of Colonel Elizondo’s force and was marching north up the Laredo Road. By around August 10th, they had crossed the Frio River. Ignoring his officers’ recommendations, Toledo refused the entire time to harass the Royalists’ line of march, infuriating the Tejanos under his command who were accustomed to the quick strike tactics of plains’ warfare. General Toledo seemed to prefer to wait for Arredondo to come to him, perhaps even to fortify San Antonio and make his stand there. Eventually, as Arredondo’s army drew closer, Tejanos forced a council of war. In front of Toledo and all the officers of the Republican Army, Menchaca made his case for riding out to meet the Spaniards. He wasn’t going to let Arredondo bring the war to his people and their homes.¹⁸⁴ Plus, the Republican army had already defeated three Spanish armies in the field – without Toledo’s help, Menchaca might have noted – by taking the fight to the enemy, not by waiting for him. The commander of the American contingent – Major Henry Perry eventually came around as well, it seems. With his officers united now in their pleas, Toledo finally gave in. On around August 15, 1813, Toledo ordered the Republican Army of the North to march south and to set an ambush for the Royalists just the other side of the Medina River.

Cathy’s Canicas

In addition to having a lot in common with a love of history, working in the energy business also exposes one to some of the best food in South Texas. And Cathy Rodriguez Brown – in addition to her other entrepreneurial endeavors – ran one of the best burger joints south of San Antonio.

From the moment I met Cathy Rodriguez Brown back in episode 3 at her restaurant off of 281 called Home Plate Burgers, I could tell she was an impressive woman. In addition to being a licensed realtor, owner of a bookstore, and manager of a Geico insurance office, she is the inventor of Chocolate tamales, chocolatetamales.net. Her chocolate tamales were carried by dozens of restaurants, appeared on national television 8 times, and were favorites of Dolly Parton, Chubby Checker, Eva Longoria, and then-Governor George W. Bush.

As we also mentioned back in Episode 3, Cathy Rodriguez Brown counts Venustiano Carranza and Jose Antonio Navarro among her ancestors, many of whom have lived near the Bexar-Atascosa line now since at least the 19th century. In fact, during the course of this project, she learned that she is in fact a direct descendant of the Rodriguez’s that came over in 1731 from the Canary Islands. She lives today on the land that her grandfather purchased along Old Pleasanton Road more than one hundred years ago. Like other folks in the area, Cathy’s grandparents farmed their modest plot year-round, planting corn, watermelons, squash, onions, while experimenting occasionally with cotton, peanuts, and other more “exotic” crops. Cathy’s grandparents – Amá and Apá, they called them –raised their children on the land, and of course those children soon grew up and began to have children of their own. For Cathy’s entire childhood, her and her siblings and cousins would gather every Sunday, at Amá and Apá’s place to cook, eat, and play games, like cards and marbles, or “canicas” as they called them in Spanish. When they got too rambunctious, Apá would send them down to the bend in the creek that crossed the northern edge of their property, telling them to go “dig for Santa Anna’s gold.” He may have partly been joking, but he may not have been. The road running in front of Apá’s house - Old Pleasanton Road - is the modern incarnation of the old Lower Presidio Road, which Santa Anna almost certainly travelled up more than once in his life, either as a young lieutenant in General Arredondo’s army in 1813 or later as the commander of his own army in 1836. Though it seems unlikely that a man as grasping as Santa Anna would have ever let much gold out of his reach, other treasures surely slipped from the hands of the many travelers who made their way up the road over the centuries, or stopped to rest in the shade of a pair of ancient oak trees growing along the road where a creekbed crossed the northern edge of Amá and Apá’s property. Oh, and that creekbed, by the way, is our beloved and oft-mentioned Las Gallinas Creek.

It’s no surprise then that, according to Cathy, her and her brothers regularly found little treasures on their grandparents’ farm. Old flatware, buttons, and little iron balls. The little iron balls were especially sought after, because they absolutely dominated as canicas, or marbles. But over the years as Cathy and her siblings put away childish things, the little balls got put away too, split up amongst her scattered family members, lost, or tucked away into cigar boxes in the backs of closets.

One day, Cathy sent me a cryptic text message proposing to meet up. We kept in touch and talked regularly, so it wasn’t necessarily a surprise, but the tone of her text was definitely mysterious: “Time for us to meet? You say when? You will enjoy…” We set a date and met at Karolina’s restaurant on 281 south at around 3 PM on a Friday afternoon. We caught up a little bit – it had been a few months since we’d seen each other, and I always enjoyed hearing her stories. And then she pulled out her little bag of treasures.

First, she showed me some old newspaper articles about folks digging around for the Battle of Medina in the area. If the Battle has been forgotten by the Texas population at-large, the articles proved that it has never been far from the minds of residents of this area. She showed me an old wooden spoon she had found on her property. It looked hand carved for sure, but I had to remind her that I wasn’t an archaeologist and would have to bring someone down to weigh in on it. Then a jar of old buttons. I rustled through them a little looking for buttons like the ones we had seen on the Blue Wing body, but again, had to confess my limitations as an appraiser of buttons as well as spoons. Cathy produced an old survey map of her property. Then a first edition of Ted Schwarz and Robert Thonoff’s book “forgotten Battlefield,” signed by Thonoff, which she said she was thinking about posting on ebay, but talked herself out in front of me. Then she reached down for the last object.

From beneath the table, she lifted up an old Crown Royal bag, dust-covered and lumpy. It sagged unevenly toward the floor. I’ll be honest with you, it reminded me a little of those rather crass objects you sometimes find dangling from certain young men’s trailer hitches in our part of the world, representing that part of a bull that is most associated with his social standing. Which is my crude way of saying that the Crown Royal bag appeared to contain two, weighty, round objects inside of it.

Cathy handed me the bag. I was almost scared to take it. I took it gingerly, like a child being handed a gift they didn’t dare believe they would ever receive. Supporting the purple velvet in one hand, I loosened the gold draw string. And pulled out a white handkerchief wrapped around two hidden objects, each about an 1.5” in diameter and weighing maybe a half pound. I brought my eyes to within a few inches of the balled up handkerchief and carefully unwrapped it. Two black objects peeked out at me, one heavily pitted and slightly rusted; the other smooth, clean, and with a line around its circumference; but both perfectly spherical.

“Are these….?” I asked her, but stopped.

“They’re canicas,’”she responded with a smile. “Marbles.” At 7.9 and 9.6 ounces a piece, it was obvious she was joking. I was quite literally trembling with excitement. Thousands of mailers, hundreds of man hours, and a few dozen false leads had led me to become skeptical that our Battle of Medina research team would ever find anything related to the Battle…or for that matter, that artifacts might even still exist. Yet here in front of me were two iron balls that sure as hell looked like munitions, more specifically, like cannister shot. Cannister shot – you will recall from the Blue Wing burial –turned even a small cannon into a devastatingly large shotgun. Which is also why finding iron balls of this size was particularly interesting. A musket ball could have come from any number of sources, especially along a major road like the Lower Presidio Road, and wouldn’t necessarily be proof of a battle. But the last time cannon shot had flown around this part of the world in any material quantity had been around 1813…at the Battle of Medina.

As our lunch wrapped up, I hugged Cathy and thanked her. Not just for sharing her “canicas” with me, but for letting me feel at least once in this project the feeling that I think fuels the archaeologists and researchers I was imitating. The adrenaline that surged through me during that lunch with Cathy didn’t leave me for three or four days. I shared photos of the iron balls – which we’ve included on the Rivard Report webpage for this episode – with my wife, with my research team, with San Antonio Archaeologist Kay Hindes. Kay was the best at gently reminding me that two cannon balls doesn’t confirm a battle site. Others too had found isolated artifacts, she pointed out, which was actually news to me. Schwarz and Thonoff had found a rifle barrel; Robert Marshall had found a part of a bridle and a musket ball. Dan Arrellano had come across a larger iron ball on Edgar Ferguson’s property about four miles north of Cathy’s grandfather’s property. Kay Hindes herself even had what appeared to be a cannonball that the Encinal had produced years ago from an undetermined location, someone had just given it to her. Yet subsequent metal detecting surveys at each of the locations had failed to turn up any additional artifacts, much less the kind of concentration you would expect in a battle site.

I took these artifacts’ locations and plotted them on a map. Cathy’s canicas did seem pretty centrally located with respect to the other artifacts, which if you squinted your eyes could argue all fell with the watershed of Las Gallinas creek as well. But the more remarkable thing was the giant black hole of data sitting right on Cathy’s fence line. For almost 100 years, the Superior Silica and Espy sand mines located on the east side of Las Gallinas Creek and Old Pleasanton Road have produced aggregate, material for mixing with concrete, and frac sand. Covering several hundred acres each, the mining operations had flattened the hills and dug out a series of pits. Water now pooled in those areas where the sandy topsoil had been excavated down to denser, lower layers.

As I started focusing in more on the sand mines, I recalled a pair of anecdotes that I had collected in the course of my interviews. Former Bexar County Historical Commissioner and friend Fred Martinez told me one time how a rock-crusher over in Poteet, TX used to always spit out little lead and iron balls: “daimitos” Fred and his friends called them growing up, thinking they were little old Spanish dimes. Of course, Poteet was too far away of course to be a likely battle site, so Fred never put much stock in that memory. But I had also listened to an interview with Jerome Korus, a long-time local resident who passed away only a few years ago, where Jerome suggested that many decades ago, the production from the sand mines along Gallinas Creek was sent to the Poteet crusher!¹⁸⁵

Canicas, daimitos, and a handful of other artifacts were all pointing in one direction now: right toward the sand mines along Gallinas Creek which parallels Old Pleasanton Road through this part of the Encinal and which I should remind you is the modern-day incarnation of the 300-plus-year old Lower Presidio Road. But before we started publicizing our finds or making wild pronouncements about the battle site, San Antonio archaeologist Kay Hindes encouraged me to confirm the authenticity of the iron balls we had collected. They might be 200 year-old cannonballs…but they also might just be a bunch of old cast iron fence post caps.

Arredondo Marches North

On July 26, 1813 – the day before José Álvarez de Toledo launched his coup in San Antonio – General Arredondo began his march north from Laredo.¹⁸⁶

Arredondo’s army was perhaps the largest regular force that had ever set foot on Texas soil up to that time. Once Arredondo had rendezvoused with Elizondo and the other refugees from the Battle of Alazán Creek, his combined force consisted of eleven artillery pieces, 635 infantry, and 1,195 regular cavalry. Most were veterans of his suppression campaigns of the previous two years in Northern Mexico, in which Arredondo had been as unbeaten as the Republican Army of the North. Anxious to punish the Republicans after their victory at Alazán Creek, Arredondo drove these veterans relentlessly through the hot, prickly South Texas plains, reducing some of them to little more than rags by the time they closed in on the Encinal de Medina. The high proportion of cavalry suggests Arredondo’s awareness of the mounted nature of Texas warfare. Perhaps he had been advised by the handful of locals in his army, including Lt. Colonel Ignacio Pérez, Lt. Colonel Cristóbal Domínguez, chaplain José Darío Zambrano, and the Reverend Lt. Colonel Juan Manuel Zambrano.¹⁸⁷

Zambrano, recall, had led the counterrevolt that put down De las Casas’ first failed rebellion in Episode 2, yet he didn’t share his fellow citizens’ horror at Governor Salcedo’s subsequent retributions. Zambrano was an unrepentant Royalist and was far more horrified by the prospect of his town falling to radicals, foreigners, and indios barbaros. Zambrano had been the first of many Royalists to try and fail to stop Gutiérrez de Lara, just as he crossed the Sabine back in Episode 4. It’s unclear to me if he participated in the siege of Goliad or the Battles of Rosillo or Alazán Creek, but he re-appeared on the scene in July of 1813 with Arredondo’s approaching army. Arredondo welcomed Zambrano and the other San Antonians, rewarding a bunch of them with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, which might have been his way of acknowledging how important they were to him, given his own lack of local knowledge of the area. Republican scouts and their Native American allies had followed his every movement up the Laredo Road, and he knew that he could very well stumble into a trap if he wasn’t careful.

Zambrano, Cristóbal Dominguez, and the other San Antonians in-tow confirmed for General Arredondo that his current road– the old Laredo road –funneled through the encinal de Medina in a depression that sat one hundred feet or so below the surrounding terrain. Further ahead where the road crossed the Medina River itself, the topography was even more menacing. The banks of the River dropped fifty feet on either side and there were only two spots in which an army with wheeled artillery and baggage trains could reliably cross. It was unquestionably unfavorably terrain for an approaching Royalist army.

So, on the morning of August 18, 1813, after breaking camp near modern-day Pleasanton, TX, Arredondo issued a sudden change of orders, which you may remember from Episode 2 when we reviewed Arredondo’s account: “On the 18th of August I directed my march toward the Medina River, changing the course I was on to cross the River at a different point than the direct road, owing to the fact that there was a canyon on the direct road which would have offered substantial Benefit to the enemy, if he were to try to set an ambush there in the thick woods that covered it.” I confess, I’m still not sure which road Arredondo was on and which crossing he was now headed to. Unfortunately, neither were the Republicans camped just ahead of him.

The Battle of Medina Revisited

The Republicans Ambush the Royalists

On August 4, 1813, José Álvarez de Toledo took over command of the Republican Army of the North. That same day, news reached him that not one, but two Spanish Royalist armies were converging on San Antonio.¹⁸⁸The first army consisted of the remnants of Colonel Elizondo’s force, which the Republicans had convincingly whipped at the Battle of Alazán Creek back in June. The second, however, was the formidable and unbeaten “Veracruz Regiment” under Joaquín de Arredondo, the newly appointed Commandante for all of the northeastern provinces of New Spain.

In what amounted to a coup de etat, Toledo had in effect deposed the also-unbeaten Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara to win the appointment as commander in chief, a move that had severely strained relations in the Republican Army. Many openly suspected Toledo – himself a Spaniard, though born in Cuba – of being a Royalist plant, determined to hand over the Republican Army to the Royalists at the first opportunity.¹⁸⁹ Most vocal among these voices was that of Colonel Miguel Menchaca, commander of the mounted Tejano contingent of the Republican Army which made up 800-900 of Toledo’s 1,400 man Army. With Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara gone, Menchaca remained as the most tenured, visible, and feared Republican leader. The Royalist commander – Joaquín de Arredondo –went so far as to place a 1,000 peso bounty on Menchaca’s head in a laughable attempt to entice someone to betray him. Perhaps Arredondo didn’t appreciate what the name “Menchaca” meant to Tejanos, who had relied on Menchacas for nearly a century for their protection, or to the hundred or so Native Americans in the Republican ranks, who had been dealing or fighting with Menchacas since the 1690’s. Needless to say, the bounty bought Arredondo nothing.

Toledo, by contrast, remained an unknown to most of the men in the Republican Army. Many probably echoed the sentiments of one Sra Rodriguez: “Were Menchaca in command, we would be safe, but who is this Gachupin? ….Has he ever won a battle?”¹⁹⁰As we noted in the previous episode, there was no love lost between Menchaca and Toledo. Menchaca doubted Toledo’s motives, confiding to a friend that he believed him to be plotting some form of treachery.¹⁹¹ The longer Toledo sat on his hands in San Antonio, the more vocal Menchaca became.

Toledo convened a formal council of war on August 9th. Menchaca – accustomed to the hit-and-run tactics of warfare on the Texas plains – advocated riding out and harassing the Royalists on their march;¹⁹² Toledo dismissed the horse-obsessed Tejanos’ suggestions as thin cover for a horse-raiding expedition.¹⁹³ Yet there was more to Menchaca’s eagerness to ride out against the enemy than Toledo gave him credit for.¹⁹⁴ The Republican Army of the North had already defeated three Royalist armies in the field – without Toledo’s help, Menchaca might have added – by taking the fight to the enemy, not by waiting.¹⁹⁵ More to the point, Menchaca – a San Antonian - wasn’t going to sit by and just let the Royalists assault his town. The meeting dissolved into name-calling and no decision was made.

On the 10th Menchaca met with Toledo again and put the issue more bluntly:¹⁹⁶ he commanded the loyalty of two-thirds of the army, which at the end of the day, was going to follow him.¹⁹⁷By this point, even some of the American officers who had been sympathetic to Toledo began to question his leadership as well.¹⁹⁸Toledo ultimately realized that he had little choice but to go along, particularly as Arredondo grew nearer. Finally, on August 15th, 1813, after ten days of fits and starts and political infighting, the Republican Army of the North marched out of San Antonio, down the old Laredo Road.¹⁹⁹On August 17, they reached the Medina River and made camp.²⁰⁰ Arredondo and the Royalists, their scouts reported, were by then only a few miles away.

Despite all the infighting, when the Republicans marched into battle that next morning, “never was an army more sure of victory.”²⁰¹The Republicans had decided to ambush the Royalists. A company of sharpshooters under a Captain Joseph Taylor would trigger the ambush, supported at a short distance by the Republicans’ artillery.²⁰² Menchaca’s mounted Tejanos – the bulk of the force – would be held back in three massed columns to guard the various crossings of the Medina River,²⁰³ preventing any sort of Royalist end run into San Antonio and poised to charge at the first sounds of battle. Two regiments of American infantry – named the Washington and Madison regiments²⁰⁴ – were to frontally assault the Royalists and pin them down while the sharpshooters under Captain Taylor tried to flank the Royalists once the battle had commenced.²⁰⁵

Accordingly, before dawn on the morning of August 18th,²⁰⁶Captain Taylor and his company of sharpshooters marched down the Laredo Road to a forward position in a brush line a few miles south of the Medina River, just north of the thick Encinal de Medina. With hills on either flank and an open plain separating them from the Encinal, all of the commentators of battle agreed the Republicans had chosen an ideal spot to ambush the approaching Royalists.²⁰⁷

And by all of the commentators of the battle, I am Including Arredondo. The Royalist General, it seems, had been made aware of the funneling effect of a little “canyon” carved by the Laredo Road at this point. So on the morning of the battle, August 18, 1813, he ordered his 1,830-man-army off of the main Laredo Road to march cross-country toward a different crossing of the Medina River.²⁰⁸He sent ahead Colonel Elizondo with 180 cavalrymen to screen his movements and see if they might be able to draw out the Republicans a little, or at least determine their strength. By eight o’clock that morning, Elizondo’s men had penetrated nearly all the way through the thick Encinal.²⁰⁹They apparently decided to spread out to look for signs of the Republicans, whom they suspected of being nearby. One of Elizondo’s Royalist outriders– entirely separated from the rest of the force – rode out of the Northern edge of the Encinal onto a little plain. His horse probably would have been able to smell the Medina River just a few miles ahead. The rider trotted forward distractedly, noting nothing special about the terrain around him.

Only sixty or seventy yards in front of him, however, a company of Republican sharpshooters crouched with trembling trigger fingers. The enemy had at last appeared….sort of. They were laying in wait for the big kill, not some oblivious Royalist cavalrymen. Had he seen them? Was he just playing dumb so they wouldn’t’ fire on him, and so he could ride back and report their position to the rest of the Royalists? His presence meant that his comrades were probably nearby, of course, which meant that even a single rifle shot could give away their position to the larger Royalist force they still had a chance at surprising.

Nerves won out over prudence. Six or eight shots rang out.²¹⁰Nerves also apparently guided the sharpshooters’ aim: they all missed. The Royalist cavalryman wheeled his horse around and fled. The men in the ranks knew that their cover was blown, and now their adrenaline was pumping. Their aggressiveness had always been rewarded in battle, they saw no reason to abandon it now. The Washington and Madison regiments emerged from their hiding spots and started rushing after the retreating royalist cavalrymen. Menchaca’s mounted Tejanos some distance away responded to the shots just as quickly, and came storming forward. The American infantry, the Tejano Cavalry, and their Native American allies caught up with each other on the very northern edge of the Encinal, where in addition to a forest of old oak trees, they also collided with Colonel Elizondo’s 180-man force.

It’s a miracle the Republicans didn’t just overrun Elizondo right then and there. Perhaps the fact that the Republicans were expecting a larger Royalist force restrained them. Either way, Elizondo couldn’t hold out for long. Fortunately, Arredondo had foreseen this and pre-emptively ordered Elizondo to retreat at first contact and draw the Republicans back toward the rest of the Royalists.²¹¹ This time-- and unlike before the Battle of Alazán Creek --Elizondo listened to his commander. Of course, 800-900 sets of Republican hoofbeats and several hundred rifle rounds whizzing by him each minute probably helped him make the right decision as well.

Arredondo soon received a messenger from Elizondo alerting him to the presence of the republican enemy. From the sounds of battle, he could probably tell that Elizondo was badly outnumbered. To support Elizondo in his retreat, Arredondo sent two “cañoncitos” and 150 more cavalry under that most Royalist of San Antonians, the “Reverend Lieutenant Colonel Don Juan Manuel Zambrano.”²¹²

When Zambrano’s force reached Elizondo’s, some Republicans thought that they now had the entire Royalist force in front of them. This has to be taken as a testament to how well Elizondo and Zambrano and their men fought, that their 330 men fooled at least some of the Republicans into thinking they were facing a force they knew to be several thousand strong. The illusion wasn’t nearly enough to actually stem the Republican tide, of course. The Republicans soon took Zambrano’s little canons. They began then to encircle the entire Royalist troop. They tasted victory! The Royalists felt the noose tightening and began to pull back. The Republicans did not let up. They pursued more hotly now, deeper into the Encinal, horsemen moving forward, outstripping the riflemen, backtracking, realizing that their artillery was bogged down, stopping – the gachupines were getting away! - realizing that they themselves were now several miles from water, sweating, kicking up sand so fine that it filled the air around them like dust, obscuring further their visibility in the brushy Encinal, but charging forward still.

Toledo sensed that he was losing control of the battle. And he must have sensed that this was not the entire Royalist force. Like Arredondo, he had been trained at a Spanish military academy, albeit the naval academy, which of course begs the question as to how well-qualified a naval ensign was to command a land army. Still, it should have given him some sense of what sort of tactics to expect from Arredondo. It might also have been what kept holding him back. He ordered a general retreat, at which point Menchaca and the American commander “galloped violently up and down the lines countermanding the order.”²¹³ As logical as a pullback seemed to Toledo then and to his apologists later,²¹⁴by this point in the battle it probably would have been pointless. Arredondo had the jump on them, and may have considered refusing to give battle in favor of just racing into San Antonio around the Republicans.²¹⁵Remember, the Republicans had set their ambush on the wrong road and they still didn’t know where Arredondo’s main force was. Where exactly was Toledo proposing to pull back to?

Yet the more significant factor may have been that the Republican Army didn’t have “retreat” in their playbook. They had won at Goliad by attacking their besiegers; they had prevailed at Rosillo when they turned the tables on their would-be-ambushers; and they had triumphed at Alazán Creek against an enemy in a commanding position through sheer tenacity. The sources all agree on Menchaca’s position: Tejanos don’t retreat.²¹⁶Los Tejanos no se retiran! “Tell General Toledo that I never turn my back on a Gachupin.”²¹⁷Menchaca further resolved that “under no consideration would he…quit until he and his men had either died or conquered… If [the other Republican commanders] were men, they would act like men and follow him now!”²¹⁸

And so, lured along by Colonel Elizondo, mile after sandy mile, the Republicans continued in hot pursuit, their artillery and horses “atascandose” under the merciless August sun, the men so thirsty that they began to drink the filthy water used to clean the cannon bores.²¹⁹ Half a mile passed, or maybe 2, or maybe 4, it was hard to keep track.²²⁰ Somehow, some of the men got the impression that a stream lay just ahead.²²¹ At this point, thirst was even more motivating than bloodlust, and they pushed wildly now through a particularly dense line of oak trees and into an opening.

Perhaps as the sounds of the Republican pursuit grew near, Arredondo halted his march and ordered his men to take up a defensive position. They threw up wagons, logs, and pieces of luggage to create a “temporary breastworks.”²²² They drew themselves up into a U-shape, with their infantry in the center and their 9 remaining cannons on the flanks. Through the oaks of the Encinal, the first of Elizondo and Zambrano’s cavalrymen came into view. They rode full-gallop for the safety of Arredondo’s lines. Close behind them came the Republican Army of the North.

As the Encinal parted for the Republicans, however, it framed a horrible sight. Just across a stream that could have slaked their thirst,²²³ “we found the enemy well posted as they received us warmly as in their power.”²²⁴The first Royalist volley tore through the surprised Republicans’ ranks.²²⁵Here, the heavy oaks of the Encinal came to the Republicans’ rescue, shielding them in small measure and providing them cover to reform their lines. Once they had regrouped – to Arredondo’s surprise – the Republican infantry began to advance again, “strongly, with tenacious resolve.”²²⁶Soon, Republicans’ rifled arms began to pick off Royalist artillerymen, to good effect, though the Royalist fire never let up.²²⁷Republicans in the rear strained to pull their artillery into range. Royalist officers yelled at their men and kept them in the ranks even as their comrades began to fall.²²⁸

The mounted Tejanos and their Native American allies hadn’t missed a beat either. Upon discovering the Royalists, they had immediately, almost instinctively sought the Royalists’ flanks and rear.²²⁹Even through the thickly wooded Encinal, the Tejano and Native American horsemen were easy to follow as they charged forward in their flamboyant attire, no two men dressed alike, no two men colored alike even.²³⁰A few managed to get into Arredondo’s rear.²³¹ They saw the General mounted on a rise observing the battle. They had him! Some dismounted and took aim, others charged at a gallop. At the last second, a pair of alert Royalist guards, realized what was happening. In a fit of panic, they shuffled Arredondo to cover, and parried the Republican charge.²³²Arredondo called up more of his cavalry, repositioned his forces to better protect his rear and baggage train, and fought off the Tejanos, who were forced to pull back and regroup.

For three or four hours the armies traded fire, the Republicans’ all-green banner lashing out at the image of Nuestra Senora del Carmen under which the Royalists fought, as little as forty yards separating the poor infantrymen, while the mounted majority attempted to maneuver around each other.²³³The Royalists fired 950 cannon rounds in total, and thousands of smaller arms.²³⁴ The Republicans matched them rifle-shot-for-rifle-shot. It was a scene out of Dante: “The loose soil had been reduced to an impalpable powder; the clouds of dust and the smoke of burned powder formed a dense mantel made lurid by the glare of flaming guns,” one Republican later recalled.²³⁵Yet the Republicans began to feel their advantage. They had taken several of the Royalist cannons and advanced all the way to the initial line where the Royalists had been first posted.²³⁶Menchaca, the Tejanos, and their Native American allies mounted up again and rode out around the Royalist flanks. And the Republican riflemen pushed forward against their fate one last time.

Artifact Update

The moment of truth was upon our research team. Our year-long effort to identify and follow the Republicans’ trail had brought us to Cathy Brown’s house near the Bexar Atascosa County Line, the epicenter of the handful of artifacts that we had turned up during our search of the area. I use the term epicenter loosely, however. We could still pretty well count on two hands everything we had found that MIGHT be a battle of Medina artifact. Before we went any further, we decided, we needed to try to validate what we had found.

I felt a little bad overwhelming Cathy Brown with our seven-man crew that day we went down to her house, but she was actually all for it. She had recently expressed to me something that many I have encountered on this journey feel. Historically, the search for this Battlefield has been shrouded in secrecy, with many researchers keeping their work to themselves lest someone else jump their claim and find the Battle site before they do. This, in turn, has left many local residents and artifact-holders – like Cathy – uneasy around projects like ours. Researchers seem to come and go, disappearing as quickly and mysteriously as they had appeared, raising suspicion as to their motives, which makes people even less inclined to share what artifacts or stories they may have.

What Cathy told me, however, is something that I’ve also starting hearing from many of the Battlefield searchers as well: it’s time now to just figure this battle out. You can’t study the Battle of Medina and its aftermath, without being overwhelmed by the conviction that more people need to know about this stuff! And if finding definitive archaeological proof of the battlefield’s location is what its going to take to bring more attention to these events, then we need to work together to find it!

Cathy’s contribution to this effort was allowing us to invade her privacy and examine her old “canicas” – the 1.5” iron balls that she and her siblings had found in the creek on their grandparents’ property. San Antonio City Archaeologist Kay Hindes accompanied us that day and invited along Sergio and Melinda Iruegas. Sergio and Melinda’s firm, GTI Environmental, performs environmental assessments and impact statements for projects that require them, many of which have a historical bent to them. In particular, they own and are experts in the use of an X-ray fluorescence analyzer. An X-ray fluorescence analyzer (XRF for short) looks like a policeman’s handheld radar. You hold it about three inches away from the object you wanna analyze, pull the trigger, and let it work its magic. It’s non-invasive and astonishing really for the level of detail it can give you about the exact metallurgic composition of the object in question.

Of course, we were hoping to stump the XRF analyzer. We wanted our cannonballs to read out “No Match,” indicating that they were made of some kind of pre-modern, field-cast alloy that defied recognizable modern classifications.

While Sergio and Melinda warmed up their XRF analyzer, we laid out five objects to test that day. The first two were modern mild steel and cast iron balls that I had brought out as controls. The next was a three-inch ball that someone had supposedly found several miles north of Cathy’s house and turned in to Kay Hindes years ago. It sure looked like a cannon ball, and its proximity to Cathy’s artifacts gave it new relevance, so we decided to test it. The last two artifacts were Cathy’s “canicas:” the balls she and her siblings had found in Las Gallinas creek as kids.

So first we tested the XRF analyzer on the modern mild-steel and cast iron control balls. “LA-C”, the XRF screen read for the first ball, and nothing more, indicated that it was your basic, modern, low-carbon mild steel. Then the second ball. “LA-C” and “2.3% Pure Fe” the XRF read out, correctly detecting the 2% iron content that sets cast iron apart from plain mild steel. Boom, the machine seemed to be dialed in.

Next, we turned the XRF gun on Kay’s three-inch ball. The scan took a little longer than the other ones, making us think at first that the machine wasn’t working. Then, we began to hope that the XRF was simply struggling to identify the artifact’s composition! At last, the scan ended: LA-3115 and LA-86L20, it read out. What in the world did that mean? As I started excitedly googling the code, Sergio tamped down my expectations. That the XRF analyzer had found a match at all indicated that those were decidedly modern steel alloys. A google search quickly confirmed that he was right.

I was surprised, however. Since the moment Cathy had revealed her iron balls to us, I had been researching what other things perfectly spherical iron balls were used for, and I hadn’t come up with much. They aren’t usually used for ball bearings, which are generally stainless or chrome to prevent fouling from rust. And solid balls aren’t typically used for decorative purposes either, it’s much cheaper to use hollowed out balls. A railroad track ran parallel to Las Gallinas creek, but consultations with buddies in the rail business found no obvious uses for solid 1.5” steel balls in rail operations either. What else could a several inch diameter iron or steel ball be, though?

We turned at last to Cathy’s canicas. We picked up first the slightly smaller of her two balls. Measuring about 1.5” across and weighing 7.9 ounces, it didn’t’ look 200 years old: it was smooth, with no signs of pitting, and didn’t have the kind of seam around the circumference you would expect from something that had been cast. But maybe I was just jaded from the previous scan. We ran the XRF analyzer across Cathy’s smooth ball. After a couple of minutes, it read out: “LA-C, 2.6% Pure Fe.” Cast iron. Well, dang it. Now cast iron itself was around in the 1800’s, and occasionally used in munitions, so this didn’t rule it out entirely. But the XRF analyzer was pretty sure that the steel in this ball was modern, pretty well ruling out a Battle of Medina connection. Of course, the presence of an old, solid cast iron sphere in the middle of the Encinal made no more sense to me than a 3” mild steel ball did, but we had to trust our instruments.

All of our hopes now rested on Cathy’s last ball. Rusted, pitted, and weighing in at 9.6 ounces, it looked more promising, sort of like what a 200-year old cannon ball should look like. The XRF analyzer would tell us for sure. We pulled the trigger and waited. I massaged it in my hand like the least soothing stress ball you’ve ever felt. My expectations were low, but my hopes were high. The reading finally popped up: “No Match.”

“No match” was the best we could have hoped for! We knew starting out that the XRF analyzer wasn’t going to confirm whether any of our artifacts had definitively come from the Battle of Medina, but “No match” did suggest that the little ball sitting on Cathy’s table was pre-modern, like maybe 100 years old or so. There really wasn’t any industrial activity going on in the Encinal de Medina 100 years ago, I convinced myself, so that meant it had to be a munition. And Cathy assured me that her ball was just one of many that she and her siblings had found, and just like the balls that their neighbors and friends in the area were finding all the time. Plotted against the other handful of artifacts that other searchers had found, Cathy’s balls did seem relatively centrally located, even if there was several hundred acres of sand mines between her and the other artifacts. It all made for a compelling argument to really drill down on the Las Gallinas Creek watershed draining into the creek bed crossing Cathy Brown’s property. And it made for a compelling if not convincing argument that the Battle of Medina might – just might – have happened somewhere nearby.

And yet, as I pulled out of Cathy’s driveway that afternoon – with a fresh batch of Chocolate tamales in hand - I was uneasy about something. What in the world were the other, modern steel and cast iron balls that we had found? The Indian Jones in me tried to silence the questions, but the little fair-minded part of my brain couldn’t help asking: Could there some other reason that people living in the Encinal de Medina would all keep turning up these little balls? I pulled my truck off onto the side of road next to one of the sand mines bordering Cathy’s property, so I could pull out my computer. As I booted up Google Earth, I watched across the fence line as buckets dropped piles of ore and aggregate on conveyor belts, moving the material across the mine and up into 100 ft high silos, while other belts loaded product onto railcars. Giant drums rotated solemnly beside them all. Once I had opened Google Earth, I zoomed in on the Encinal and started going back in time as far as the imagery would let me. Things didn’t change quick in the Encinal. For example, the sand mine next to me had been in operation for as long as Google had imagery. I then recalled an interview with a local who claimed that this mine in particular had been in operation for almost 100 years.²³⁷

Parked there next to the mine, a horrible idea occurred to me. I opened up my internet browser and typed in: “Carbon Steel balls mining operations.” Within 0.64 seconds, I had 14,900,000 answers to the question I hadn’t wanted to ask.

When sand is mined out of the ground, it emerges in clumps, full of impurities and in some cases different sized grains. To breakdown this material for sorting into consistent batches, the sand is dumped into giant drums, like a big ol cement mixer, and rotated to crush and smooth the raw ore. These drums are called “tumbling” or “grinding” mills. And do you know what they put in these tumbling, grinding mills? Dozens, sometimes hundreds of carbon steel balls.

Like the sand coming out of the tumbling mills in front of me, I felt crushed. Every canica, every daimito, every iron ball that we or anyone else had found in this area over the last 100 years was now called into question. Even Cathy’s rusted, pitted ball that read out “No Match” on the XRF analyzer could have just been a 100-year old ball used in earlier mining operations on the site next to her property. And then I realized that there was a double tragedy at play here: if at any time over the last 100 years anyone working at those sand mines had found a legitimate iron cannonball, they would have been forgiven for thinking it was just another grinding ball. Most likely, they would have picked it up, tossed it into the tumbling mill, and never thought twice about it.

And as I zoomed out on the Google Earth image of the Encinal de Medina, I realized that the entire area was dotted with these mines. Absent a lot more information about early 1800’s Spanish munitions or finding an extreme concentration of pre-modern balls in one place, it could be almost impossible to distinguish 200 year old munitions from plain ol 100 year old grinding balls. The Encinal de truly has a way of swallowing artifacts! And as the Republicans were finding out, it swallows armies as well.

The Royalists’ Trap

Just around the moment that Menchaca rode off with his mounted contingent in one last push to turn the Royalist flank, a gust of hot wind blew in the from the southeast. The dust suspended in the air by thousands of pairs of trampling feet sandblasted the faces of the fatigued, sunburned men fighting in the melee. The wind cleared the dust and smoke from the battlefield, however, and Arredondo, situated on his perch above the fray, found his view of the battle markedly improved. The Republicans, he realized, were in a perilous position.²³⁸ Although their infantry was closing in on his lines, their casualties lay piled up all around them, and they were now separated from their cavalry. And he could read the weariness on their faces. They had been marching since before dawn that morning through the August sun, without water, and across sand that swallowed everything it touched.

There is a saying in Spanish that “El diablo sabe mas por viejo que por diablo.” (“The Devil knows more because he’s old than because he’s the devil.”) And the devil Arredondo had learned more than a few tricks during a career waging war throughout the world. He called for his buglers. He ordered them to sound out the notes of victory, a bugle call known as the “Diana.” When his soldiers heard the call of victory, they found new energy, and began to push forward.²³⁹By contrast, when the Republicans heard the notes of victory ring out from Arredondo’s bugles and saw the Royalists coming advancing, it confused them. In spite of all their losses, the Republicans thought they had been winning! They had disabled most of the Royalist’s nine cannons and the Spaniards’ shots now were few and far between.²⁴⁰ One Republicans believed that “fifteen minutes more” would have given them victory,²⁴¹ an opinion shared and echoed by many contemporary commentators of the battle.²⁴²Of course, it may have simply been that that they just didn’t know what it felt like to lose. Then they caught another stroke of bad luck. Somewhere on Arredondo’s flank, a piece of cannister shot found Colonel Miguel Menchaca’s neck.²⁴³ Severely wounded, the gallant San Antonian – “every inch a patriot, wise, brave, and a born leader”²⁴⁴ – tried to fight on. But he didn’t get far. He fell either there on the field, or according to his cousin, in Calaveras Creek just a few miles northeast.²⁴⁵

Aside: though the evidence suggests that the body found on Blue Wing Road in 1968 with a piece of cannister shot in its neck was too young to have been that of Colonel Menchaca, it is a little uncanny how well that body fits the traditional description of his death.

Lieutenant Colonel José Francisco Ruiz didn’t have time to contemplate these things, however. When he saw Menchaca hit, he took up his fallen banner and led the scattered Tejanos in two more charges.²⁴⁶Again, Ruiz and the mounted Tejanos made it to within pistol shot of Arredondo himself, but they just couldn’t quite dislodge him.²⁴⁷The Republicans’ Native American allies also rushed in to aid their imperiled comrades in the Infantry. “They stood by the Americans to the last…and shared their fate.”²⁴⁸The American officers similarly rallied their men and encouraged them to reform their lines for one last concerted push,²⁴⁹ as they had done so successfully at Rosillo and at Alazán Creek. The momentum of the battle had swung, however. Whereas before, when Republicans looked around, they saw their companions beside them, and the enemy in front. Now, it was all a jumble. Things began to fall apart. One-by-one, the Republicans began to pull back. First confusion, then panic swept through the Republican ranks. And with that, the Republican Army of the North - which until this moment had never known defeat - broke into full-blown retreat.

The next several hours witnessed a rout, a running massacre back to the Medina River and beyond.²⁵⁰Eighty Republicans were taken prisoner in the field, only to be executed later that evening, perhaps along the banks of the Medina River where Arredondo eventually made his camp.²⁵¹ Most captured Republicans were just shot on the spot, and some were dismembered, their body parts impaled on pikes and tree branches.²⁵²There’s not much else to tell in this respect: the Republicans – Tejanos, Native Americans, and Anglo-Americans– suffered more than a thousand dead in the next few hours, many killed while trying to surrender, compared to only fifty-five Royalists killed and a couple hundred wounded.

We don’t really know for sure, but it seems that maybe only a few hundred Republicans escaped the slaughter. Those who could– including José Francisco Ruiz²⁵³and Antonio Delgado²⁵⁴–fled, some to the plains to go live with the Indians, some to the east and the safety of the Sabine River. Yet Arredondo wouldn’t let them go so easily. Without allowing him even a day’s rest, Arredondo sent Elizondo in pursuit of the fleeing rebels with orders to visit Royal justice upon any he might capture.

In case you were worried, you’ll be glad to know that the Republican Commander in Chief, General José Álvarez de Toledo got away. When he realized the battle was lost, he rode back to Louisiana as fast as his horse could carry him. From there, his prospects improved rapidly. Validating Menchaca’s and others’ suspicions, within a few years Toledo was an active informant for General Arredondo in New Orleans, passing him reports on the activities of Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara and others who continued laboring for independence.²⁵⁵Toledo would ultimately return to Spain, where he provided testimony against his fellow former revolutionaries in exchange for immunity. He would die in his bed forty years later as a trusted advisor of the Spanish king in a cushy appointment in Switzerland, the thousands of dead Texans he left behind him presumably long forgotten.²⁵⁶

Unfortunately for San Antonians, General Arredondo wasn’t inclined to forget the past so easily. After taking a couple days to rest his men and bury his dead, he entered San Antonio,²⁵⁷ intent on teaching San Antonians a lesson they would never forget.

Terror in Texas(Explicit)

La Quinta

“It isn’t easy to put on paper what this town suffered or even to narrate with much certainty exactly what happened after the battle, because so many of those who could have borne true witness to those events have died and many of the rest took part in the oppression and tyranny of their own countrymen and thus will not tell the truth.”²⁵⁸ So begins the only Spanish-language contemporary account that we have of the Battle of Medina and its aftermath.

A warning before we begin: this is the only episode I have ever marked as explicit in this podcast’s history, which is saying something since I’ve covered already dozens of battles, tens of thousands of deaths, and a fair number of gruesome executions. This episode takes things to a different level, unfortunately, but I’d feel remiss not including it, because the aftermath of the Battle of Medina is probably more important than the battle itself. Indeed, I’d argue that Tejanos’ response to the horrors that followed the battle will come to define the course of Texas history, over the next generation, and beyond. So although I think most people SHOULD listen to this episode, if you’re listening with small children, be warned that it details some fairly shocking acts and contains some foul language quoted from the primary sources.

Following their rout at the Battle of Medina, Republican survivors scattered in all directions. Those with families rushed back to San Antonio as quickly as they could. There they gathered their loved ones and what belongings they could carry on their backs, and fled. San Antonio lost almost 1,000 inhabitants overnight.²⁵⁹Some sought refuge with their Native American allies in the Hill Country, where they knew Spaniards wouldn’t dare venture.²⁶⁰ Others – including the Navarros, Ruiz, Delgados, and Arochas – fled east to Louisiana.²⁶¹ The Navarros and Ruiz made it there; the Delgados and Arochas weren’t so lucky. Immediately after the battle, Arredondo had dispatched Colonel Elizondo to pursue the fleeing families. Elizondo and his troop caught up with the Delgados and Arochas as they were crossing the flood-swollen Trinity River. “Halt, rebels, traitors to your king!” the Royalists shouted as they surrounded the exhausted refugees. Before the refugees could respond, the Royalists fired. In particular, they seemed to concentrate their fire on a man they probably recognized as one of the principal officers of the Republican Army of the North and, more notoriously, as the executioner of the captured Spanish officers after the Battle of Rosillo. Their shots found their mark. Captain Antonio Delgado fell instantly to the ground, dead before he hit it. His mother rushed over to him, screaming at Elizondo, that her son should have been allowed to confess! “He can confess himself to the Devil,”²⁶² Elizondo responded. Delgado’s lifeless body was ripped away from his mother, stripped nude, and left for the beasts to consume. A general slaughter of another seventy or so republican refugees followed. Some threw themselves into the river to escape Royalist vengeance, but the record notes only three brave young women who survived that desperate measure.²⁶³Most were marched back to San Antonio in chains.

A couple of days after the Battle, call it August 20, 1813, General Arredondo and the main body of the Royalist army entered San Antonio. More accurately, his army sacked San Antonio. There was light resistance, at first: some of the women in particular who had stayed behind took potshots at the invaders with pistols.²⁶⁴ This may have only provoked the Royalists further, who even before arriving in San Antonio referred to the townsfolk as “canalla,” “scoundrels.” Several hundred San Antonio men holed themselves up in San Fernando Cathedral and tried to claimed sanctuary. Arredondo recognized no such concept for “traitors of God,”²⁶⁵ as he called the Republicans, and had them unceremoniously removed from the church. He then imprisoned them for the night in a small granary, where somewhere between eight and eighteen of them would die from suffocation.²⁶⁶ Once the town had been rendered defenseless, “Homes were invaded, and where resistance was offered, the defenders were butchered on their own threshold in the presence of their horrified families, the women and even tender girls, mere children, were outraged and in numerous instances, cruelly murdered and their nude bodies dragged into the street.” Sadly, this first “noche triste” as San Antonians would refer to it for decades after, marked only the beginning of their suffering. ²⁶⁷

It wasn’t long before the captured Delgados, Arochas, and other refugees from the Trinity River were marched into the now-subjugated city.²⁶⁸These sad captives must have surely known the fate that awaited them as they marched into the city center of there own town along streets lined with the limbs and heads of earlier Royalist vengeance. Still, as they entered the Plaza de Armas, they must have been surprised to see Arredondo himself awaiting them there, his eye patch and all. They must have been even more surprised when he started singing back to them a little camp ditty that they had composed in the heady months after they had routed Colonel Elizondo at the Battle of Alazan Creek:

“Hay biene el tuerto Arredondo

á pelear con los de Texas

Penzará que son obejas

De las que trajo Elizondo.”

Here’s comes ol one-eyed Arredondo

Come to mess with the Texans

He must think we’re sheep

Like the soldiers he sent with Elizondo.

Pordios, Arredondo said to them now, how Elizondo’s sheep had become lions! The original song apparently ended with a promise on the part of the singers to barbeque Arredondo’s balls and eat them. Arredondo offered a different option to the prisoners approaching him now: they could suck his balls raw right here, he told them.

These were among the last words these prisoners would hear before they were marched to confession, executed, dismembered, and their heads placed in iron cages in the Plaza de Armas for all to see.²⁶⁹ Yet even still this did not satisfy Arredondo’s bloodlust. He continued to ratchet up the horror. Each morning, he ordered three men yanked from prison, lined them up against a wall, and shot them, presumably to try to elicit information from them about their compatriots. It apparently didn’t work. He repeated this gruesome ritual for nearly three months!²⁷⁰ By his own account, he executed 327 civilians during this period.²⁷¹

Yet at least death came quick and clean for the men. A different, crueler fate awaited the women. As soon as he entered San Antonio, Arredondo had rounded up the wives and children of known Republicans and imprisoned them in the largest building in town, known as La Quinta. There, he forced them to grind twenty-four bushels of corn each day to make tortillas for the very soldiers who were daily murdering their men. He worked them from two in the morning until 10 at night, every night.²⁷² They hulled boiled corn until their feet blistered and their toenails fell out, “their living blood mixing with the corn they hulled.” When they prayed to God for mercy, their jailer would taunt them, “I am your God, putas, I am the God of whores.”²⁷³

Yet the women fought back. Some had perhaps participated in the battle itself: Gertrudis de los Santos, Petra Benitez, Josefa Ynojosa, Juana de la Garza, Gertrudis Montes, and Josefa Santos are all listed amongst “insurgents” on a property-confiscation list published by Arredondo soon after the battle, though we aren’t told the exact nature of their participation in the “insurgency.”²⁷⁴The women continued engaging in small-scale acts of defiance while imprisoned in La Quinta, until Arredondo and his jailers raised the stakes. They ordered all the imprisoned children cast out into the streets, without food, without shelter, yet within earshot of their anguished mothers. The details of these pitiful children’s suffering really is almost awful too awful to imagine. The banished children huddled around the perimeter of the building, whimpering and weeping, inadvertently doubling their mothers’ suffering. They asked the imprisoned women through the walls what they should do to survive. All their mothers could say was to go Beg for alms, and to pray for the mercy of strangers. Yet even sympathetic townsfolk who they had considered friends were too intimidated by Arredondo’s program of terror to openly help them.²⁷⁵One breast-feeding baby died within sight of its mother, who was forbidden to feed it.²⁷⁶

And of course, the women were insulted, assaulted, and systematically raped on a daily basis. When one night they tried to resist their jailors’ nightly visits by locking arms with each other, the chief jailer dragged the organizer of the resistance out in the street, stripped her bare, and indulged his appetites in front of the entire town.²⁷⁷

And yet still the women continued resisting, “sufriendo nuestras heroinas con firmeza y constancia”.²⁷⁸ As Brian Stauffer, my co-translator of this anonymous Spanish-language account, pointed out to me, the author of this account repeatedly returns to this type of language, referring to these women as heroic, firm, and constant; patriots, insurgents, and citizens even, words typically reserved for menin this period. By contrast – but also as confirmation - these Tejanas’ jailers mocked these women for their toughness by ascribing it to a lack of femininity, citing in particular their penchant for shooting pistols at Royalists and for straddling pommeled saddles instead of riding side-saddle.²⁷⁹One day, the still-unimprisoned Josefa Arocha of the prominently republican Arocha family told Arredondo to his face that she would skin his belly and make a drum out of it.²⁸⁰ When as a consequence he ordered her off to the horrors of La Quinta, she accused him of being too cowardly to just shoot her.²⁸¹ When Arredondo struck another woman with the broadside of his sword for complaining about her plight, she “sprang at him like a tigress” and demanded a sword of her own to duel Arredondo to the death. He declined. She repeated her offer, this time proposing that she do it with her hands behind her back to make it fair.²⁸²

These were unimaginably tough women. For fifty-four days, they endured the ordeal of La Quinta. At last, sometime in late October we suppose, General Arredondo ordered the women of La Quinta released. It would still be many more months –May of 1814, and only after the pleading of the of the otherwise not-particularly-soft-hearted Zambrano brothers – that Arredondo allowed locals to even bury the body parts still strung up around Main Plaza.²⁸³

The trauma that this episode inflicted on the citizens of San Antonio can’t be overstated. Dan Arrellano calls it a form a collective “post-traumatic stress disorder,” something which Bradley Folsom covers at-length in his recently-published biography of Arredondo.²⁸⁴ Yet the really unfathomable part is that this was but the opening of a nearly decade long parade of misfortunes that befell San Antonio. To start with, Arredondo had of course confiscated all Republican San Antonians’ possessions, some 62,642 pesos worth of assets,²⁸⁵the better part of the private wealth of San Antonio. A series of droughts and pestilences in 1814 combined with the burden of supporting Arredondo’s occupying Royalist force then created acute food shortages.²⁸⁶By 1817, San Antonians were eating rats and leather just to survive.²⁸⁷And with San Antonio’s civilians disarmed by Arredondo and his soldiers uninterested in patrolling the plains, Indian attacks proliferated. Arredondo eventually ordered the ranches outside of town abandoned, because he didn’t care to expend the effort to defend them.²⁸⁸ The untended and unprotected ranches and fields surrounding San Antonio were soon “putrid” with the flesh of livestock slaughtered by Indians.²⁸⁹Though these attacks seemed suspiciously concentrated on Royalist targets, the environment of fear and scarcity ultimately affected everyone. Then, as if to prove that when it rains it pours, on June 5, 1819, San Antonio suffered one of the worst floods in its history.²⁹⁰ Floodwaters swept away fifty-five dwellings and killed nineteen inhabitants.²⁹¹

San Antonio was collapsing in on itself, like the decaying carcasses and rotting produce in its fields. By 1819, the non-Indian population of Texas had fallen to its lowest level in more than half a century. When the Spanish Viceroy ordered Arredondo to re-form a government for San Antonio, he responded matter-of-factly that there were no men left to fill the offices. The issue wasn’t raised again.²⁹²

Accounts from after the Battle of Medina

Despite our challenges today in finding the so-called “forgotten” battlefield of Medina, Arredondo in 1813wanted to make sure that San Antonians would never forget it. For almost a decade, he forbade the families of the Republican dead from burying the bones of their loved ones which decorated the Laredo road south of the Medina River like morbid highway markers.

But maybe Arredondo’s last revenge can help lead us to the battlefield. Maybe instead of trying to deduce subtle topographical clues from the muddled, adrenaline-obscured, and possibly mis-remembered accounts of men writing in some cases fifty years after the battle, we should instead look to the more casual observations of those who saw the unmistakeable evidence of the battlefield in the years that followed. A thousand corpses scattered over the space of a league makes for a pretty-readily identifiable landmark. And we actually have at least five people claiming to have SEEN the battlefield location after the battle:

The first is Stephen F. Austin and second is Pedro Walker, both of whom we discussed at length in episode VI. Both Austin’s maps and Walker’s diary indicate a concentration of bones at roughly seven miles south of the Medina River along the Laredo Road. We’re still not perfectly clear which road is the Laredo road, but we do know more or less which were the main two crossings of the Medina, and, incidentally, when you draw 7 mile arcs from each of these crossings, they do end up in about the same place.

The third source José Antonio Navarro, a teenager at the time of the Battle. As a contemporary and a frequent traveler, he would have known for certain where the battle had occurred, and asserted as much, claiming that the battle ended with a running massacre for “six miles” back to the Medina River. That puts his location at about 6 miles from the Medina, which is pretty close to Austin and Walker’s seven miles.

Fourth, we actually have another account that makes reference to the field of battle being six miles from the Medina. Do you remember James Gaines? He was one of the first and most reliable recruiters of men to Gutiérrez de Lara’s cause. He had led the Native American contingent during the Battle of Rosillo and was later sent by Gutiérrez de Lara back to Louisiana to try to counter Toledo’s smear campaign against him there. Following Gutiérrez de Lara’s ouster, Gaines never made it back to the Republican Army of the North, thus sparing him the fate of his comrades.

He did return to Texas, however, in 1819, and soon thereafter was elected Alcalde of Nacogdoches. He was also present in 1822 with the new Mexican Governor, Trespalacios, when they ventured out to finally bury the bones of the Republican fallen. Gaines tells the story as follows, in the third-person:

“In 1822 when coming to St. Antonio at the head of Durango Regt to take possession as Govr, [Governor Trespalacios] was accompanied by Capt Gaines when at the Lake 6 miles from Madina where the Patriots were defeated in 1813, [Trespalacios] asked Capt. Gaines if he would assist in doing honor to the bones of his brave countyymen”

So there’s that six miles again, just like Navarro had said and awfully close to Austin and Walker’s number. But notice what else Gaines says. He refers to a “lake” 6 miles from the Medina, where the Patriots were defeated.[footnote for the other reference to the lake as well: He actually also referred to it earlier in his description of the battlefield as well: “[Arredondo] now advanced to a small lake where he fortified distent about 6 miles from Madina.”]

This is the first time we’ve heard of this “lake…” or is it?

I’ll ask you to recall here the fifth contemporary account of the battlefield, which we reviewed in Episode V, written by Antonio Menchaca, a cousin to the commander of the Tejano forces in the battle, Miguel Menchaca. Menchaca summarized Arredondo’s movements before the battle as follows: “Arredondo also coming to a place he considered advantageous to his purpose, stopped at the water holes called "Charcos de las Gallinas" on the hill this side of the Atascoso creek and about five miles from the Medina River.” “Charcos” in Spanish means like little ponds, or watering holes, places in a creek bed for example where water pools. Gaines’ calls it a lake, Menchaca calls it a Charco, but I think they’re talking about the same place! There’s just not that many places in the incredibly sandy Encinal de Medina where water collects and stays on the surface.

Everything in San Antonio history comes back to water, so it’s no surprise that we should be returning to it now. Water dictates where and how armies march through South Texas. Arredondo wouldn’t have deviated too far away from water on the day of the battle. The Republicans, by contrast, paid dearly for straying too far from it. Several of the battle accounts make it sound like they were making one last push toward a known or suspected waterbody when they stumbled into Arredondo’s force, waiting for them perhaps right along a streambed from which they could have easily drawn water to cool their cannons and water their horses. It would have been as good a place as any for Arredondo to have made his stand before a thirsty oncoming Republican horde.

And so where is that spot today? It’s in the middle of a sand mining operation, just a couple miles upstream of where Cathy Brown and her siblings used to fish their little iron marbles out of Las Gallinas Creek.

The Fight Goes On

Those Tejanos who fled after the Battle of Medina didn’t give up the fight for independence just because they were in exile. Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara settled in New Orleans where he participated on January 8, 1815 in another young republic’s fight against her old mother country. He tried twice more – in 1817 and in 1819 – to organize uprisings against Spanish rule in Mexico, yet was never able to recreate the success he had realized in 1812-13, The Ruiz and Navarro clans settled in Natchitoches, Louisiana, where they began funneling weapons to Native Americans and fostering alliances between historic enemies like the Comanches and Apaches to harass the Royalist forces now trying to occupy Texas.²⁹³José Francisco Ruiz – one of the commanders of Republican Cavalry at the Battle of Medina - actually spent many of the years following the Battle living with the Comanches and other plains Indians, learning their language, customs, and even tracking techniques. A later observer accompanying Ruiz on a buffalo hunt admired how he could tell could tell whether an unknown rider was armed or not – and even what hand he carried his weapon in! – just by studying his horse’s tracks.²⁹⁴ Ruiz became known to both Spanish and American governments as the go-to intermediary between Native and non-native worlds, and would later write the authoritative tract on Texas Indians during the period.²⁹⁵

And in truth, it was Native Americans who carried on the fight most effectively against the Royalists in Texas during the years following the Battle of Medina. If before the Battle of Medina, Texas was an “essentially Indian domain,”²⁹⁶ after the Battle of Medina, it was decidedly so. Spanish settlement in Texas retreated back into the starving towns of Nacogdoches, Goliad, and San Antonio. We’ve explored already why Tejanos and why Americans took up arms against Spain in 1812 and 13: now we should ask the same question of Native Americans. What made them take up arms against Spanish rule and continue the fight long after their Tejano allies seemed to have been defeated? Many of these tribes had been the benefactors of regular tribute payments and favorable trade agreements with the Spanish, why were they willing to throw those away to help a bunch of outcast, homeless refugees?

Art Martínez Vara has detailed a series of misunderstandings and provocations in 1811 and 1812 between Spanish authorities and some of the principal Comanche chiefs in Texas at the time that may have helped drive them into the arms of the insurgents.²⁹⁷ And ironically, the insurgency in Texas between 1811 to 1813 may have interrupted the flow of tribute to Native Americans in the province, furthering prejudicing Texas Indians against the Crown.²⁹⁸The best I can come up with is that Texas Indians and Tejanos had come to – if not trust – at least understand one another. It was Tejanos who had in many cases fought Native Americans to a favorable peace and it was Tejanos with whom they had long traded, to the mutual benefit of each. And Texas Indians also knew that when this fight was over, the Spaniards would go back home. The Tejanos would remain. They had proven as much over the last 100 years.

Then again, it might have been simpler than that. Texas Indians might simply have been fighting for their freedom from a distant power attempting to claim authority over them. Which, again, makes them not terribly dissimilar to their Tejano allies.

When Mexico finally won her independence in 1821, it was a deeply unsatisfying event for Mexican Republicans. Mexican independence came about not as the result of any great victory by a revolutionary army, there was no Mexican Yorktown for example, but rather as the result ofthe appropriation of the cause of independence by the Mexican Royalist faction when their beloved monarch back in Spain became too liberal, too republican. Mexican Royalists simply replaced the Spanish king with a homegrown Mexican emperor, Agustín Iturbide. Independence thus triumphed; self-government, however, did not.

This further meant that there would beno day of reckoning for the old opponents of Mexican independence. After ten years of costly and savage civil war, the new Mexican Empire could ill-afford an uprising from recalcitrant Royalist generals, particularly ones with independent power bases. And so, in the name of unity and peace, General Arredondo – along with many other royalist officers of the old regime –was allowed to hold on to his old post, in exchange for simply pledging his allegiance to the new, independent Mexican Empire.

Even after Mexican revolutionaries in Morelos and Veracruz had laid down their arms, however, one place remained stubbornly unpacified. Republican refugees and their Native American allies in Texas showed little inclination to make peace with their old enemies, no matter what the new, supposedly independent Mexican government said. Tejanos had little reason to expect the grievances they had raised in their 1813 Declaration of Independence would be addressed by the new government, particularly when the most visible representative of that new government in Texas was the same man who had been their most aggressive persecutor for most of the previous decade.

The new Mexican government finally ordered Arredondo to seek peace along the frontier, however, whatever it took. In an attempt to convince Republican refugees to return to Texas and lay down their arms, Arredondo slowly and begrudgingly began to issue pardons to old Republicans. The Veramendis, Navarros, and Seguins came back. So too did many Arochas and Delgados. None of them would ever recover all of the property taken from them by the Royalists, despite the fact that the cause that they had been fighting for had – nominally – prevailed.

There was one man, however, whom Arredondo could not bring himself to pardon: José Francisco Ruiz. Sometimes when we tell the story of the Battle of Medina, we tell it as though it marked the end of the battle against Spanish rule in Texas. Ruiz’s example reminds us how the fight went on. And by 1822, Ruiz had been making Arredondo’s life hell now for almost a decade by helping coordinate native American raids against the Spanish in Texas. At one point, he had placed a bounty on Ruiz’s head, though to no effect!²⁹⁹Ruiz was the problem that Arredondo couldn’t ignore and couldn’t seem to work around. At last, he swallowed his pride, and reached out to Ruiz with an offer: Arredondo promised Ruiz a pardon and a commission in the regular Mexican army if he could negotiate a peace with the Apaches and Comanches.

It took Ruiz less than a year to do what Arredondo hadn’t been able to do for almost a decade. In the second half of 1822 and first half of 1823 Ruiz lead separate delegations of Apaches and Comanches to sign peace treaties in far away Mexico City – away from Arredondo’s center of power in the North of Mexico, it should be noted. These treaties – signed two years after the War of Mexican Independence had concluded – formalized the end of the war of Mexican independence in Texas.³⁰⁰

Once peace had been established, however, the new central government returned to the old central government’s approach to governing Texas by neglecting it. In 1825, San Antonio took over responsibility for its own defense, because it had to. Most of the regular army forces had been pulled back into the center and the conscripts that the government sent them were more often than not convicts seeking to avoid jail time.³⁰¹ By the late 1820s, the unit stationed in the Alamo was composed almost entirely of San Antonians. Too often, the unit had to be funded entirely by San Antonians as well,³⁰² as in 1822 when the unit’s new commander – Lt. Col. Jose Francisco’s Ruiz, had to reach out to his cousin, José Antonio Navarro, to form the first bank in Texas to help cover the payroll of his soldiers.³⁰³

All that being said, by 1824, some sense of normalcy was returning to Texas. There was even cause for optimism, as Republican rebels integrated themselves back into the mainstream of society. José Antonio Navarro, was back to importing goods from Louisiana, speculating in land, and getting himself elected to various city, state, and federal offices.³⁰⁴His brother Ángel Navarro – who had initially held a commission in the royalist army before being run off because of the rest of his family’s known republican sympathies, had been restored to good standing and emerged as a leading citizen of San Antonio. Their brother-in-law and fellow refugee Juan Martin de Veramendi, won election as an alternate to the 1823 Mexican constitutional convention, and as a delegate to the Coahuila constitutional convention of 1827, beginning his ascent through the ranks of Coahuilan politics that would see him made governor in 1832. And the San Antonio city council – essentially the only government in the entire province of Texas³⁰⁵ – selected rancher and former rebel Erasmo Seguín to represent the state at the 1823 Mexican Constitutional Convention. His charge was brief, broad, and unequivocal: to ensure a “federal, republican form of government.”³⁰⁶

Yet just a decade later, in 1834, Tejanos’ dream of self-government and of moving past the trauma of 1813 would be dashed again by yet-another tyrant who had actually learned his craft as an officer in Arredondo’s army in 1813.

Is this the Battlefield of Medina?

Burying the Republican Dead

In the summer of 1822, a group of San Antonians marched south of town to greet the new Governor of Texas. It should have been a festive occasion: this was the first governor to have been appointed by a newly independent Mexican government, free of Spanish control, a goal for which San Antonians had sacrificed so much. Yet as they crossed the Medina River and the South Texas prairie gave way to a live oak forest, half-buried, partial skeletons began to appear in the sandy soil, as if trying to dig their way out of their graves, sobering the mood of all present. Most of these dead – many of them family and friends of the San Antonians marching down the Laredo Road now – had, in fact, never known a grave, by the order of the same General Arredondo who had defeated them at the Battle of Medina and who hoped that their corpses might serve as grim reminders of the cost of disloyalty.

The irony was that by 1822 General Arredondo was technically aligned with the cause that his enemies had died to advance. He (along with many other Mexican royalists) had abandoned his loyalties to the Spanish king in 1821, when that king had been forced to accept an overly republican constitution back in the home country.³⁰⁷ By pledging his allegiance instead to the emperor of a newly independent Mexico, Arredondo had been allowed to retain his position as military governor of the northeastern part of Mexico. In 1822, the new Mexican government decided to check his authority, however, through the appointment of a new civil governor. Unlike Arredondo, this new governor, José Felix Trespalacios, boasted genuine rebel bonafides, having actively fought for Mexican independence since at least 1814, before it was cool to do so. He was no stranger to the war of independence in Texas either, having been imprisoned at one point with some of Gutiérrez de Lara’s accomplices and later serving at the head of several later uprisings in Texas and northeastern Mexico, which aimed at finishing what the Republican Army of the North had come so close to achieving in 1813.³⁰⁸

As Governor Trespalacios marched to meet the San Antonians who had come out to welcome him, he was accompanied by an American – an American-Mexican, I suppose would be the term since he was in fact a resident of Mexican Texas and had been for some time. James Gaines, you may recall from Episode IV, was one of the earliest American converts to Gutiérrez de Lara’s cause in 1811 back in Louisiana. He rose to become one of Gutiérrez de Lara’s most trusted captains, crossing the Sabine with him in August 1812, enduring the siege of Goliad that winter, riding in before the Battle of Rosillo at the command of several hundred native American allies, and traveling back to Louisiana to help counter José Álvarez de Toledo’s smear campaign against Gutiérrez de Lara following the Battle of Alazán Creek. When Toledo succeeded in his coup, however, Gaines saw little reason to return to the Republican Army, and so was spared the fate of his companions on August 18, 1813.

Unlike Toledo, however, Gaines never gave up on Texas, and certainly never forgot about it. By 1819, he was back on the Texas side of the Sabine river, and would soon be elected Alcalde of the Sabine district of Nacogdoches and later sheriff of Nacogdoches under the new Mexican government.³⁰⁹I’m not sure how he and Trespalacios knew each other, but it’s clear they ran in similar circles and shared similar ideals. Trespalacios had asked Gaines to travel with him from the altiplano of central Mexico up into San Antonio, perhaps just as a guide, but also perhaps because the new governor wanted his first official act to be a unifying, healing gesture, a nod toward the sacrifices of the past and the hopes of the new Republic’s future. To that end, he wanted representatives of San Antonio’s community as well as Gaines to be with him for this great act. Here’s Gaines, describing what happened next in the third-person: “At the Lake 6 miles from Madina where the Patriots were defeated in 1813, [Trespalacios] asked Capt. Gaines if he would assist in doing honor to the bones of his brave countyymen. They fell said Trespelacios in our cause in defence of Mexican liberty & Independence, & it is not right that their bones should lie thus unburied.” Gaines demurred, and suggested only that an Our Father be said. Once this was done, “Trespalacios now gathered all the bones of the Americans, leaving those of the Gachupines and forming his army in a solid square he addressed them in a pathetic and patriotic speech lauditory of the Americans who fell there, and then buried them in one common grave on the Battle Ground. It was the bones of the Body only that were buried here; the sculls were taken on 6 miles further to Madina where at the foot of a pecan tree he buried them in the honors of war.”³¹⁰

To be accurate, it wasn’t just the “Americans” that Trespalacios interred that day. It was all of the Republican dead. Of course, after nine years laying in the Encinal de Medina, there would have been little way to distinguish Tejano, Native American, and American corpses. Though the skulls according to Gaines were buried under a pecan tree along the Medina, José Antonio Navarro tells us that that bodies were buried beneath an oak tree along the Laredo Road. In marking this final resting place, Tejanos did not miss the opportunities to slip in an anti-monarchical jab. They hung a sing on the oak tree, commemorating their fallen dead and comparing them to the Spartans at Thermopylae:

“Here lie the Mexican heroes who followed the example of Leonidas

Who sacrificed their wealth and lives

Ceaselessly fighting against tyrants.”³¹¹

The experience of the previous decade had made most San Antonians – most Tejanos, we should probably say - republicans, or “federalists” as they came to call themselves in the new Mexican Republic. By contrast, their opponents – many of them former Royalists – took on the “Centralist” label, supporting, the creation of a powerful central Mexican state to replicate many of the features of the old Spanish government, just without the Spaniards. Centralism never really had much of a chance in remote, frontier San Antonio,³¹²however, where support for more devolved, local control was a relatively moderate position to a citizenry who had long suffered from central government neglect and who had long used the title “republicano”³¹³ as a title of respect.

And yet Tejanos’ sacrifices in the War of Mexican Independence went largely unheralded by the new Mexican Republic. Here’s Navarro years later: “The noble citizens of Bexar sacrificed their lives and property, performing prodigies of valor in the year 1813. They left to their descendants no other inheritance than the indifference and ingratitude of the Mexican Republic.”³¹⁴It hurt Tejanos that their state was not accorded “her rightful place alongside Guadalajara, Valladolid, Zacatecas, Oaxaca, Puebla, Veracruz, and others for her role in liberating her glorious Patria”³¹⁵(that’s the anonymous Republican Tejano account) and why the deeds of the Republican Army of the North didn’t rank alongside those of “Morelos, Matamoros, Victoria, Bravo, Guerrero” in the traditional pantheon of Mexico’s heroes of independence (that’s Gutierrez de Lara in his memoirs).³¹⁶

The fact was that many at the center of power in Mexico inherited that old Spanish suspicion of Tejanos, of anyone willing to live in such a distant and merciless place as Texas. To them, Tejanos’ boldness in declaring their independence before the rest of Mexico and the readiness with which they allied themselves with indios barbaros and foreigners gave their revolt a distinctly different flavor than the insurrections of Morelos, Matamoros, Victoria, Bravo, and Guerrero.³¹⁷Valorizing Tejanos’ already-pronounced independent streak threatened the fragile national identity that the new Mexican nation – fractured already by centuries of class and caste divisions – was so desperate to construct. Of course, this refusal to acknowledge what Tejanos suffered for Mexican independence only left them feeling doubly aggrieved by what had happened in 1813.³¹⁸

But when Mexico adopted a federalist, call it Republican constitution in 1824, it was suddenly cause for real hope. No one embraced the possibilities of self-government more energetically than Tejanos; go listen to my Episode 12 of the first season of this podcast for details. And Tejanos’ initial enthusiasm for the Mexican constitution of 1824 helps explain the intensity of their reaction to its total repudiation in 1834. Worse, they knew well the man who had just repudiated the Constitution of 1824 and conferred all authority on himself. This man had visited San Antonio in 1813 as a young lieutenant in General Arredondo’s army, where he was actually cited for bravery during the Battle of Medina. Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón – or Santa Anna, as most of us know him – had learned from his experience in the Medina campaign to distrust the rebellious and independent citizenry of Texas. He had internalized well the lessons of his old one-eyed General. In particular, he had learned the effectiveness of brutality in – temporarily, at least – subduing a population.

Despite all that Tejanos had suffered from “tyrants” in 1813, however, they would be among the first to rise up in open revolt against the tyranny of 1834. When José Antonio Navarro resolved in 1835 that “Texas, absolutely all of Texas should first be reduced to ashes rather than live in slavery under a despotic government,”³¹⁹ he wasn’t just spouting empty rhetoric. Navarro had actually seen his town in ashes two decades before, blood pooling in the streets, the heads of friends and relatives in iron cages strung up around the Plaza de Armas. He and most of the rest of the residents of Texas in 1835 weren’t cowed by this memory, however. They seemed to be emboldened by it. This time, instead of waiting for tyranny to march on them, they decided to take the fight to the tyrant. In early 1835, forty-eight San Antonians under the command of 28-year-old Juan Seguín defied the local Centralist political chief and invited Santa Anna’s wrath by marching on his newly appointed state government in Coahuila.³²⁰ Centralist reinforcements sent north by the new dictator soon overran Coahuila, however, and when Seguín’s expeditionary force retreated back into Texas, Centralist forces were now hot on their heels. Seguin rallied Texans of all backgrounds to the town of Gonzales, where a self-proclaimed Revolutionary Army of Texas army came together, and then marched on the Centralist Forces that had occupied San Antonio. In December of 1835, the Centralists surrendered and were forced to abandon the state. Tejanos knew that the fight wasn’t over, however. When in February of 1836, Santa Anna himself crossed the Rio Grande, his army’s officer ranks overflowed with former Royalists, men like Generals Jose de Urrea and Vicente Filisola, and some like Domingo Ugartechea who had been with him at the Battle of Medina. Tejanos immediately recalled the drumbeats of Arredondo’s executioners. They knew before anyone else that the battle for Texas could only end in Victory or Death.

Conclusions

The place where Old San Antonio has held out the longest is along the Medina River near the area of the Battle of Medina. Here, you are most likely to find land owned by descendants of the original grantees: Herrera, Ruiz, Losoya, Martinez, Perez. Here, you will find the plots laid out perpendicular to the river in old Spanish fashion. And here, you will find land has been farmed in recent memory by its owners, who congregated occasionally in unincorporated communities like Losoya, which to this day resist annexation by the larger cities around them. Maybe it’s a vestigial memory of the bloodshed near here that has kept outsiders away, or maybe it’s the fact that the Medina marked a sort of no-man’s land, sitting at the historic boundary between Texas, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas. It is, frankly, where I feel most connected to the past that I’ve been rediscovering during this series.

The people who have supplied me information for this project are additional reminders of the continuous, unbroken connection that we have to our past in this part of the world. Our pilot from Episode V, Alberto Muzquiz, descending from one of the wing commanders from the Battle of Medina; Sergio Roblesgil Gutiérrez also from Episode 5, passing me journals and diaries from his ancestor Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara; the voice of this series, Joe Arciniega, reading for us the words of his forefathers who led Texas’s first attempt at independence in the first bonus episode; Cathy Rodriguez Brown, descendant of the first Canary Islanders to settle San Antonio in 1731, and possessor of an iron ball that may or may not be a cannon ball from the battle; and former Bexar County Historical Commissioner Fred Martinez, on whose family lands, so much of the action of the battle may have occurred and a man fighting as hard as any to make sure that his ancestors’ sacrifices during this period will not soon be forgotten.

I, on the other hand, feel like I am failing this part of the world and failing all the people who have helped me on this journey, by admitting to you now that I have not found definitive proof for the Battlefield of Medina. In a part of the state that has been plowed, disced, tilled, dug up for tanks, and prospected for oil, the absence of evidence for this battle is downright weird. It leads me to believe we could be missing something big still. Notwithstanding all this, I have my theories. And it would be a cop-out on my part not to publish them now.

On the Rivard Report webpage for this episode, I’ve posted a heat map, highlighting what I believe to be the most likely area where most of the fighting occurred during the Battle of Medina. Here’s my methodology: I’ve mapped out all the contemporary descriptions of the battlefield by those who came along AFTER the battle, free of adrenaline and agendas, with an added 10% fudge factor to their distances. More specifically, I’ve overlain Stephen F. Austin’s annotations on this maps, Pedro Walker’s 7-8 miles, Navarro’s 6 miles, Gaines’s 6 miles, and Menchaca’s 5 miles, and tried to see where they would overlap. I’ve also plotted the Las Gallinas Creek watershed where Cathy Brown’s artifact was found and a one-mile radius around El Carmen Church. There’s clearly some cultural memory of something having happened around El Carmen Church, and if this project has taught us nothing else, it is the importance and credibility of cultural memory. In validation of this, I’ll share with you one last surprise that former Bexar County Historical Commissioner Fred Martinez had for me: a photo from the San Antonio Light from May 9, 1937, featuring three respectable old Daughters of the Republic of Texas standing around the original 1936 Historical marker – at its original location between El Carmen church and my lovely little hay farm. Though not quite a contemporary-to-the battle clue, our suspicion has long been that local cultural memory or perhaps even a few scattered artifacts had been the impetus for siting the 1936 memorial where they did. It’s another interesting clue to plot on the map, if nothing else.

And so, taking it all together, I feel like the evidence suggests that the main clash of infantry and artillery during the Battle of Medina occurred somewhere in the vicinity of the Superior Silica sand mine on Old Pleasanton Road, where even today Las Gallinas Creek pools in small little watering holes, “charcos” as we would call them in South Texas. That’s the red spot on the map. Maybe the yellow spot southwest of there is where Arredondo was perched observing the battle, and where Menchaca and Ruiz leading the mounted Tejanos clashed with Royalist cavalry in their effort to kill the general. Maybe the yellow spots to the northeast represent the running slaughter as Republicans fell back toward the future spot of El Carmen Church, where Arredondo would bury his dead that night. Maybe. Who really knows…

And frankly, after studying this battle for so long now, I can’t help but ask the question: Why do we still care? What would finding the Medina battlefield even mean at this point? We KNOW what happened on August 18, 1813; I can see these brave men and women as clear as day, charging across the Medina River, weaving in and out of the oak trees, dragging their cannons through the sand, hot, thirsty, disorganized, brown faces, red faces, white faces indistinguishable beneath a sweat-streaked layer of black powder and dust, fighting side-by-side for something that was apparently more important than all the things that differentiated them. And of course, we KNOW what happened afterward; 1,000 or so republicans dead, hundreds of San Antonio men executed, dozens of San Antonio women assaulted and worse, and Texans so deeply traumatized that would never really again trust any power emanating from anywhere outside their own borders.

The events of 1810-1813 in Texas – the events of this series – prove nothing less than the fact that the notion of Texan apartness, of Texan uniqueness is so much older than 1836. Indeed, the protagonists of 1836 inherited it from the heroes of 1813 and the heroes of 1813 frankly inherited it from their ancestors who had carved for themselves a place on the inhospitable Texas frontier through so much hardship. I don’t know that you can find any clearer or nobler embodiments of Texan identity than men like Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara and Miguel Menchaca, or women like Josefa Arocha and all the tejanas who suffered defiantly the horrors of La Quinta. And we don’t need a battlefield marker to honor these men and women. Indeed, we shouldn’t wait for one. We should make the effort every August 18thto recall their noche triste, when it all came crashing down, a night which old San Antonians certainly never could forget.

Something else that I think we should advocate for is that these same men and women should be restored to their proper place in Mexico’s heroic pantheon. I’m not the first to argue this. Recall that the author of the anonymous memoir of the Sack of Bexar upheld his account as an object lesson for all “true Mexicans,” encouraging them to listen to his tale and “learn how to suffer for liberty and independence.”³²¹What they suffered was indeed no less than what the communities of Guadalajara, Morelos, Zacatecas, Oaxaca, Puebla, Veracruz, and others did.³²²Historically, however, the problem for most Mexicans in honoring the events of this series is that retroactively, Gutiérrez de Lara’s army and Texas’s declaration of independence in 1813 feels like the vanguard of a later North American invasion of Mexico.³²³ That’s unfair to the men and women in 1813 though, whose primary goal – and chief accomplishment, I’d say – was to keep alive the flames of Father Hidalgo’s revolt in the dark years between his death and the rise of the great revolutionary captains of Central Mexico. What if Arredondo’s formidable regiment had remained in Veracruz – where his regiment was supposed to be based – to face off against Guadalupe Victoria in 1815 or 1817?The war for Mexican Independence could have turned out very differently.

San Antonians used to know their city’s place in Mexico’s history. Well into the twentieth century, in fact, 16 de septiembre was actively celebrated in San Antonio, so much so that the president of Mexico in 1941 gifted San Antonians a statue of Father Miguel Hidalgo, which resides today in Romana Plaza across from the Central Library. Francisco Madero certainly knew San Antonio’s place in Mexican history when he took up residence here in 1910 to write the Plan de San Luis Potosi, which led to the toppling of another autocrat a century later. San Antonio isn’t just the cradle of Texas liberty. It’s the cradle of Mexican liberty as well. Indeed, the group El Grito San Antonio in conjunction with the local Mexican Consulate, the San Antonio Mexico-Friendship Council, the City of San Antonio International Relations Department, and the Cortez family of Mi Tierra’s fame have revived the tradition of the grito each 15 of September in Market Square, and only plan to grow the event going forward. And we don’t need a Medina battlemarker to remind us of the significance of this day in San Antonio’s history.

And yet, I do understand that at the end of the day, we as humans need a place to go toto perform our rituals of remembrance. We believe that a place is invested with power because of the presence or even suffering of those who came there before us. It’s why people spend thousands of dollars on gravesites and tombstones, and why something like 3 MM people a year visit that tiny little humpbacked mission in downtown San Antonio. But with respect to the Battle of Medina, I’ve come to the conclusion that even if tomorrow we DO find a concentration of munitions near someone’s water tank on the Bexar-Atascosa county line, that still may not be the BEST place for us to honor this battle.

On July 13 of this year, 2019, I attended mass at El Carmen Church at the invitation of Padre Pancho Puente. El Carmen Church, recall, is the site with the oldest claim to a connection with the Battle of Medina. It was, in fact, the first site that we mentioned in this entire podcast back in episode 1. Fred Martinez sent me the speech of the bishop in 1856 who inaugurated a new chapel there. This bishop makes casual but conspicuous mention of a battle that was fought nearby, which since that time had apparently retained a connection to Nuestra Senora del Carmen, “whose image was blazoned upon the flag of the army by order of the General.”³²⁴ Do you know which saint General Joaquín de Arredondo took as his personal protector? I’ll give you two hints: his son and daughter’s names were Joaquín del Carmen and María del Carmen born in 1817 and 1818 respectively –from which years we also have letters written by General Arredondo from a spot along the Medina River known as the Campamento de Nuestra Señora del Carmen.³²⁵

The battlefield of Medina may have been forgotten, but the battle hasn’t been. El Carmen Church is the place where for two hundred years, congregants have gathered to commemorate the Battle. Ironically, it is over the graves of the Royalist dead that the descendants of many old Tejano republicans have convened for two hundred years to commemorate the battle, yet that small irony seems almost appropriate, given the messiness of the events of 1813. El Carmen Church is the place that brought together victor and vanquished and forced them to accommodate some kind of workable solution, even if only in death. Which is all to say that to the extent we feel like we need a place to honor the battle of Medina, I think we already have it.

Ultimate Victory

The victory of the Royalists at the Battle of Medina helped ensure that Centralism would remain the prevailing political philosophy of the Mexican state. This is because the Royalists never really lost the War of Independence. They eventually just reached an accommodation with a few of the principal rebel chiefs in Central Mexico and agreed to lay down their arms. This is why Mexico’s independence when finally achieved was so unsatisfying to Mexican republicans. Many at the center of power in the Valley of Mexico doubted that truly democratic, federalist institutions could work in Mexico. Santa Anna – who was actually technically a federalist when he said it – probably spoke for more than a few power brokers in the capital when he said that “A hundred years from now, [Mexicans] will still not be fit for liberty,” and that “A despotism is the proper government for [Mexico].”³²⁶ Even when Mexico’s new national legislatures promulgated liberal, republican constitutions and reforms, they were seen as aberrations from the cultural traditions that many in Mexico’s ruling class sought to preserve.

Meanwhile, Arredondo’s “ethnic cleansing” campaign in Texas, to use Donald Chipman and Harriet Joseph’s term,³²⁷had the unintended side effect of driving many of Texas’ most prominent citizens to seek refuge in the United States of the North. There, their commercial and personal bonds with their neighbors to the east only grew stronger, while their experience living in the vibrant new country only reaffirmed their republican convictions. When they were finally allowed to return to Texas in the 1820’s, the brought with them a new vision for their province. They would make of Texas, in the words of Lorenzo de Zavala, a “combined regime of the American system and the Spanish customs and traditions” which would represent the triumph of the New World over the tired ideas of the Old. Lorenso de Sabala had actually been one of the principal architects of the Mexican Constitution of 1824, the constitution that Santa Anna would later repudiate, and would go on to become the first Vice President of a truly independent Texas.

Achieving that independence wouldn’t be easy, however. Another great conflict awaited Texans, and they carried into that fight all the trauma and lessons learned in the battles of the First Republic of Texas in 1813. One out of three Tejano men would take up arms in the Texas Revolution of 1835-6, as compared to only one out of seven Anglos, who lacked the same context for the fight.³²⁸ Yet Anglos too would be inspired by the example of 1813. Recalling perhaps the grave marker for those “imitators of Leonidas” who fell at the Battle of Medina, a militia unit in Gonzales in 1835 would quote the same Spartan King and challenge their own tyrannical oppressor to “Come and Take” their weapons. And the final stand of 187 men at a crumbling old mission in San Antonio in March of 1836 would be immediately compared to the sacrifice of those same Spartans at Thermopylae.

At the time, however, the defeat of Texas federalists at the Alamo gave Santa Anna and his generals every reason to believed that they were on course to repeat Arredondo’s success. Santa Anna and his generals would have chief generals – men like Urrea and Filisola had been As they made camp on the San Jacinto River on April 20, 1836, they seemed poised to do what even the ruthless Arredondo had pulled up short on: complete and total extermination of the dream of Texan self-government.

The commander opposing them, however, also knew the story of 1813. General Sam Houston had made a point to remind his commanders not to be drawn out ahead of their lines, as had happened to Toledo at Medina.³²⁹There were many in his ranks, however, who didn’t need reminding. Get this: Half of the known American survivors of the battle of Medina had returned to Texas by 1836 and were living there as Mexican Citizens.³³⁰ At least two sons of American veterans of the battle of Medina stood in Houston’s ranks. And the Senator from the Sabine District in the provisional Texas government was none other than Gutiérrez de Lara’s ever-reliable recruiter, James Gaines, who had just helped write his second Texas Declaration of Independence a month earlier.³³¹

Yet there were twenty men in his army that he DEFINITELY did not need to remind about 1813. These twenty men had the unique honor of having been present at almost every moment of the Texas Revolution of 1835-36. I’m talking of course, about Juan Seguin’s ranging battalion, who had been the first to rise up in arms against Santa Anna’s usurpation of power. They had marched into Coahuila in March of 1835, rallied Texans to Gonzales in October that same year, stormed San Antonio in December 1835, foraged, scouted, and fought at the Alamo in February and March of 1836, covered the Runaway Scrape the following April, and tracked Santa Anna’s army all the way to where it had made camp on the San Jacinto.

And listen to this statistic: if my rudimentary genealogical research is correct, of the twenty men in Seguin’s company,³³² including himself, 17 of them had a direct family member on a list published by Arredondo just after the Battle of Medina, listing the most prominent insurgents whose property he ordered confiscated.³³³And frankly, I just don’t have enough info about the other three to know their family tree, though I can tell you that two of them were born in San Antonio in 1806 and so almost certainly had personal memories of 1813 as well. But there’s more: At least 7 of Seguin’s twenty-man unit were direct descendants of members of Gutiérrez de Lara’s inner circle and Ruling Junta.³³⁴What’s my point here? Seguin’s unit wasn’t just a casual collection of romantics who suddenly showed up on the banks of the San Jacinto: these were the most dyed-in-the wool, long-suffering, pedigreed republicans in Texas.

Don’t forget either that one of the highest ranking Tejanos in the Republican Army of the North – José Francisco Ruiz – probably would have been leading Seguin’s unit had not he been sent to represent San Antonio in the new provisional Texas government, where he had been the 2nd man to sign the 1836 Texas declaration of Independence.

All of which is to say, that for the men of Juan Seguín’s company, the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, wasn’t a new fight against a new foe. It was a revenge match. Remember the Alamo. Remember Goliad. Remember Medina. Like the parishioners at El Carmen Church, they had never forgotten what had happened in 1813. Each of the them could list friends and loved ones who had suffered and died during that tragic year. If the rest of Mexico would never quite have the opportunity to redeem the tragedies of the War of Mexican Independence, these twenty Tejanos, on this day at least, would.

Bibliography

Archives Consulted

Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Mexico

Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

Houghton Library, Harvard University, Harvard, MA

National Archives, Washington, D.C.

State Department Manuscripts

Texas General Land Office, Archives and Records Program, Austin, TX

Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Austin, TX

Univeristy of Texas Libraries, Austin, TX

Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection

Dolph Briscoe Center for American History

Published Primary Sources

De La Teja, Jesús F., ed. A Revolution Remembered: The Memoirs and Selected Correspondence of Juan N. Seguín. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2002.

Gutiérrez de Lara, José Bernardo. Breve apología que el Coronel D. José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara hace de las imposturas calumniosas que se le articulan en un folleto intitulado: Levantamiento de un general en las Tamaulipas contra la República, o Muerto que se le aparece al gobierno en aquel estado. Monterrey, Mexico: Ymprenta del Ciudadano Pedro González y Socio, 1827.

Jackson, Jack, ed. Imaginary Kingdom: Texas as Seen by the Rivera and Rubí Military Expeditions, 1727 and 1767. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1995.

Martínez De Vara, Art., ed. The José Francisco Ruiz Papers. Von Ormy: Alamo Press, 2014.

McDonald David R., and Timothy M. Matovina, eds. Defending Mexican Valor in Texas: Jose Antonio Navarro’s Historical Writings, 1853-1857. Abilene: State House Press, 1995.

Matovina, Timothy, and Jesús F. de la Teja, eds. Recollections of a Tejano Life: Antonio Menchaca in Texas History. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.

Menchaca, Antonio. Memoirs (San Antonio: Yanaguana Society, 1937), reproduced on the Sons of DeWitt’s Colony website, accessed September 9, 2019, http://www.sonsofdewittcolony.org/menchacamem.htm.

Navarro, José Antonio. “The Memoirs of José Antonio Navarro, Originally Appearing in the San Antonio Ledger in 1853,” Sons of DeWitt Colony website, available at http://www.sonsofdewittcolony.org/adp/history/bios/navarro/navarro3.html.

______. “Autobiography of José Antonio Navarro,” 1841, Mirabeau B. Lamar Papers, Archives and Information Services Division, Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Austin, TX.

Ruiz, José Francisco. Report on the Indian Tribes of Texas in 1828, ed. John C. Ewers. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.

Sánchez, José María, and Carlos E. Castañeda. “A Trip to Texas in 1828,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly Vol. 29: No. 4 (April 1926), 249-288.

“The Diary of José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, 1811-1812, I,” trans. Elizabeth H. West, The American Historical Review Vol. 34: No. 1 (October 1928), 55-77.

The Papers of Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, Edited from the Original Papers of the Texas State Library. 6 Vols. Austin: A. C. Baldwin Printers, 1921-1927.

Walker, Henry, ed. “William McLane's Narrative of the Magee-Gutierrez Expedition, 1812-1813.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 66: no. 4 (April 1963), 569-588.

Secondary Sources

Alessio Robles, Vito. Coahuila y Texas en la epoca colonial. Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, S.A., 1978.

Bernsen, James A. “Origins and Motivations of the Gutiérrez-Magee Filibusters,” M.A. Thesis, Texas State University, 2016.

Chipman, Donald E. Spanish Texas, 1519-1821, revised ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010.

Cox, I. Waynne. "Field Survey and Archival Research for the Rosillo Creek Battleground Area, Southeast San Antonio, Texas." Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State. Vol. 1990, i-39.

De la Teja, Jesús F. San Antonio de Béxar: A Community on New Spain's Northern Frontier. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

Donovan, James. The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo – and the Sacrifice that Forged a Nation. New York: Little Brown and Co., 2012.

Fehrenbach, et. al. The San Antonio Story. Tulsa: Continental Heritage, Inc., 1978.

Folsom, Bradley. Arredondo: Last Spanish Ruler of Texas and Northeastern New Spain. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017.

Garrett, Julia Kathryn. Green Flag over Texas: A Story of the Last Years of Spain in Texas. Dallas and New York: The Cordova Press, Inc., 1939.

Guedea, Virginia. “La declaración de independencia de la provincia de Texas (6 de abril de 1813),” in Alfredo Ávila, Jordana Dym, and Erika Pani, eds., Las Declaraciones de independencia: Los textos fundamentales de las independencias americanas. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 2013.

Hardin, Stephen L. Texan Iliad: A Military History of the Texas Revolution, 1835-1836. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Hunter, John Warren. “San Antonio’s First Great Tragedy,” Frontier Times Vol. 3: No. 1 (October 1925), 41-48.

_______. “The Battle of the Alazan: Continuing the Narrative of Beltran,” Frontier Times Vol. 3: No. 2 (November 1925), 41-48.

_______. “The Battle of Medina: Continuing the Narrative of Mr. Beltran,” Frontier Times Vol. 3: No. 3 (December 1925), 9-16.

Jarratt, Rie. Gutiérrez de Lara, Mexican-Texan: The Story of a Creole Hero (Austin: Creole Texana, 1949).

Long, Jeff. Duel of Eagles: The Mexican and U.S. Fight for the Alamo. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1990.

Pérez, Aminta Inelda. “Tejano Rangers: The Development and Evolution of Ranging Tradition, 1540-1880.” PhD Dissertation, University of Iowa, 2012.

Porter, Charles R. Spanish Water, Anglo Water: Early Development in San Antonio. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011.

Poyo, Gerald Eugene, and Gilberto M. Hinojosa, eds. Tejano Origins in Eighteenth-Century San Antonio. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.

Schwarz, Ted, and Robert H. Thonhoff. Forgotten Battlefield of the First Texas Revolution: The Battle of Medina, August 18, 1813. Austin: Eakin Press, 1985.

Texas State Historical Association. The Handbook of Texas Online. Tshaonline.org/handbook

Tijerina, Andrés. Tejanos and Texas under the Mexican Flag, 1821-1836. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1994.

Yoakum, Henderson K. The History of Texas, 1685-1846, Vol. 1 (Loschberg, Austria: Jazzybee Verlag Yürgen Beck, [n.d.])

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Footnotes

1. Vito Alessio Robles, Coahuila y Texas en la época colonial (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1978), 629. ↩
2. Tijerina,Tejanos and Texas under the Mexican Flag, 1821-1836 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1994), 71. ↩
3. Stephen L. Hardin, Texan Iliad: A Military History of the Texas Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 249. ↩
4. Jesús F. de la Teja, San Antonio de Béxar: A Community on New Spain’s Northern Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 99. ↩
5. Carlos Beltrán’s memoir puts it this way: “…[o]ur men felt fully assured that a still greater triumph awaited them on the morrow.” See John Warren Hunter, “The Battle of Medina: Continuing the Narrative of Mr. Beltrán,” Frontier Times Vol. 3: No. 3 (December 1925), 12. ↩
6. Beltrán again: “The Mexican contingent was commanded by a brave, patriotic Mexican by the name of Menchaca, a native of San Antonio, as were also most of his men.” See John Warren Hunter, “San Antonio’s First Great Tragedy,” Frontier Times Vol. 3: No. 1 (October 1925), 45. See also José Antonio Navarro’s account of the battle, originally published as a series in the San Antonio Ledger between 1853-1857 and republished in Defending Mexican Valor in Texas: José Antonio Navarro’s Historical Writings, 1853-1857, David R. McDonald and Timothy M. Matovina, eds.(Austin: State House Press, 1995), 17-18: “On the 18th of August and not on the 13th, as it has been stated, Toledo opened battle at Medina. This general had 1,500 men including 600 American volunteers. Arredondo had 4,000 men. The battle was fought with great military skill on both sides. The American volunteers formed the regiment of infantry and the company of artillery was composed of nine cannon from four to eight inches in caliber. The Cavalry consisted of inhabitants of San Antonio and vicinity and of certain individuals from Tamaulipas and the Rio Grande.” ↩
7. Jesús F. de la Teja, ed., A Revolution Remembered: The Memoirs and Selected Correspondence of Juan N. Seguín (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2002), 9. ↩
8. Jack Jackson, ed., Imaginary Kingdom: Texas as Seen by the Rivera and Rubí Military Expeditions, 1727 and 1767 (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1995), [Page number?]. ↩
9. De la Teja, San Antonio de Béxar, 24. ↩
10. Ibid., 143. ↩
11. Alessio Robles, Coahuila y Texas en la época colonial, 595. ↩
12. Tijerina, Tejanos and Texas, 27. ↩
13. Alessio Robles, Coahuila y Texas en la época colonial, 609. ↩
14. Jeff Long, Duel of Eagles: The Mexican and U.S. Fight for the Alamo (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1990), 17; Charles R. Porter, Spanish Water, Anglo Water: Early Development in San Antonio (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011), 89; and Tijerina, Tejanos and Texas, 36-7,. Charming misspellings of words like “arbitrios” as “advitrios” may also be windows into local pronunciation patterns. ↩
15. Gerald Eugene Poyo and Gilberto M. Hinojosa, eds., Tejano Origins in Eighteenth-Century San Antonio (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 322; Tijerina, Tejanos and Texas, 48. ↩
16. Alessio Robles, Coahuila y Texas en la época colonial, 528. ↩
17. Ibid., 613. ↩
18. I am, of course, using these terms in their classical sense, with no relation to their modern American usages. ↩
19. Donald E. Chipman, Spanish Texas, 1519-1821, revised ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), Kindle, Loc 3414 of 5000. ↩
20. Handbook of Texas Online, Laura Caldwell, "CASAS REVOLT," accessed September 17, 2018, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/jcc02. ↩
21. Caldwell, “CASAS REVOLT.” ↩
22. Navarro’s memoirs: At dawn, January 22, 1811, they offered this army to the Captain of Militia of Nuevo Santander, Juan Bautista Casas, who accepted the command ordered him and was place at the head of 1500 men. Casa marched them in columns to Military Plaza; they accompanied him as delegate of citizens Gavino Delgado, Francisco Travieso and Vicente Flores. Almost at the break of dawn, the rebels formed in closed ranks before Military Plaza. Captain Casas, with his staff, entered and made prisoners of Governor Salcedo, Herrera and other Spanish officials who still slept in the peaceful slumber of the morning twilight, confident that no one would dare to attempt any offense against their omnipotent persons. This memorable day of January 22, 1811 was the first time the Mexicans of San Antonio de Bexar had made public their desire to break forever the chains of their ancient colonial slavery.” See José Antonio Navarro, “The Memoirs of José Antonio Navarro, Originally Appearing in the San Antonio Ledger in 1853,” reproduced on the Sons of DeWitt Colony website, available at http://www.sonsofdewittcolony.org/adp/history/bios/navarro/navarro3.html, accessed on September 2, 2019. ↩
23. Chipman, Spanish Texas, Kindle, Loc 3447 of 5000. ↩
24. Navarro, “The Memoirs of José Antonio Navarro.” ↩
25. Caldwell, “CASAS REVOT.” ↩
26. Chipman, Spanish Texas, Kindle, Loc 3451 of 5000. ↩
27. McDonald and Matovina, eds., Defending Mexican Valor, Kindle, Loc 587 of 7817. ↩
28. Navarro, “The Memoirs of José Antonio Navarro.” ↩
29. Henderson K. Yoakum, The History of Texas, 1685-1846, Vol. 1 (Loschberg, Austria: Jazzybee Verlag Yürgen Beck, [n.d.]), 66. Beltrán also seems to refer to Captain Antonio Delgado as “a son of the Colonel Delgado who was executed by Salcedo, and whose head was still exposed on a pole at the Alamo crossing.” See Hunter, “San Antonio’s First Great Tragedy,” 45. José Antonio Navarro, however, points out that that Captain Antonio Delgado’s father, however, was actually named Manuel, whom the anonymous author of “Memoria de las cosas mas notables que acaesieron en Bexar el año de 13 mandando el Tirano Arredondo,” [n.d.], 1813, Carton 45, Folder 22, BANC MSS C-B 840, Bolton Papers (hereafter, BP), The Bancroft Library (hereafter, BL), University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, describes as having been executed after the Battle of Medina. ↩
30. Julia Kathryn Garrett, Green Flag over Texas: A Story of the Last Years of Spain in Texas (Dallas and New York: The Cordova Press, Inc., 1939), 62. ↩
31. Alessio Robles, Coahuila y Texas en la época colonial, 640. ↩
32. Even more than a year later, with a new Republican force pressing down upon him, his primary tool of motivation was to remind citizens that they owed it to the crown to remove the “stain on their honor” arising from their participation in the “shameful conduct in the Casas revolution” “by crushing every revolutionary tendril that appeared.” See Garrett, Green Flag Over Texas, 131. ↩
33. Ibid., 77. ↩
34. He might also too have heard how Ignacio Aldama and other envoys of Hidalgo had spent time in the town and evaded arrest on their way to the United States with a not insubstantial amount of silver. Ibid., 52, 58. ↩
35. Chipman, Spanish Texas, Kindle, Loc 3463 of 5000. ↩
36. Yoakum, The History of Texas, Vol. 1[?], 66, seems to be the source for Colonel Antonio Delgado figure, whom I should note is discounted entirely by other contemporary sources, including José Antonio Navarro, who points out that Captain Antonio Delgado’s father was actually named Manuel Delgado, and that he would die shortly after the Battle, not in the lead-up to it. ↩
37. Rather tragically corrupted to “Liomero” on some of the early Texian maps. ↩
38. An anonymous account published in the Lexington Reporter also refers to the area as “Los positos.” See [Anonymous], “Señor Edictor,” translation into Spanish of a letter appearing in the Lexington Reporter, n.d., forwarded by Toledo, New Orleans, n.d. Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla, Indiferente General de Nueva España, 136-7-9, Transcript, Box 2Q162, Vol. 170, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, 9. Also phone interview with Judge Robert Thonoff mentions a pozito at the intersection of Old Pleasanton Road and Bruce Road. ↩
39. Scott Huddleston, “East Side Historical Site Discovered,” San Antonio Express News, October 21, 2016, accessed September 2, 2019, https://www.expressnews.com/news/local/article/East-Side-historic-site-discovered-10078017.php. ↩
40. Beltrán: “Colonel Delgado and Bernardo Gutiérrez were with Hidalgo at the time of his capture…” See Hunter, “San Antonio’s First Great Tragedy,” 44. ↩
41. Ted Schwarz and Robert H. Thonhoff, Forgotten Battlefield of the First Texas Revolution: The Battle of Medina, August 18, 1813 (Austin: Eakin Press, 1985), 33. ↩
42. Handbook of Texas Online, Jack Jackson, “MENCHACA, MIGUEL,” accessed August 30, 2018, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fme15. ↩
43. Garrett, Green Flag Over Texas, 65. ↩
44. Ibid. ↩
45. March 11, 1811. See José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, Breve apología que el Coronel D. José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara hace de las imposturas calumniosas que se le articulan en un folleto intitulado: Levantamiento de un general en las Tamaulipas contra la República, o Muerto que se le aparece al gobierno en aquel estado (Monterrey, Mexico: Ymprenta del Ciudadano Pedro González y Socio, 1827), 6. March 16, 1811 according to Garrett, Green Flag Over Texas, 64, 85. ↩
46. He describes himself in 1827 as a man of “more than average” resources, all of which he had offered and sacrificed for the cause of liberty. Gutiérrez de Lara, Breve apología, 30. ↩
47. Ibid., 59. ↩
48. “The Diary of José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, 1811-1812, I,” trans. Elizabeth H. West, The American Historical Review Vol. 34: No. 1 (October 1928), 57. ↩
49. Ibid. ↩
50. Author’s inference based on Gaines’s knowledge of some intimate details of Gutiérrez’s journey to Washington D.C., including his escape from an ambush laid upon him along the Natchez trace. See Schwarz and Thonhoff, Forgotten Battlefield, 8. ↩
51. Garrett, Green Flag Over Texas, 91. ↩
52. ”The Diary of José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara,” 76. More properly, in accordance with Spanish naming customs we should refer to him as “Álvarez de Toledo.” He is so frequently and widely referred to as “Toledo” in the literature and also in contemporary accounts of him by men like Henry Adams Bullard and even Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, that I have decided to stick with the convention. ↩
53. Chipman, Spanish Texas, Kindle, Loc 3487 of 5000. ↩
54. Handbook of Texas Online, Jack Jackson, “JOSÉ MENCHACA,” accessed on August 30, 2018, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fme11 (). ↩
55. Antonio Menchaca, Memoirs (San Antonio: Yanaguana Society, 1937), reproduced on the Sons of DeWitt’s Colony website, accessed September 9, 2019, http://www.sonsofdewittcolony.org/menchacamem.htm. Gaines’ account indicates he was captured and beheaded. See “Information from Capt. Gaines,” in The Papers of Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, Edited from the Original Papers of the Texas State Library (hereafter, Lamar Papers), Vol. 1, edited by Charles Adams Gulick, Jr. and Katherine Elliott (Austin: A. C. Baldwin Printers, 1922), 284. Gutiérrez de Lara actually claims he went over to the Royalist cause. See “J.B. Gutiérrez de Lara to the Mexican Congress. Account of Progress of Revolution from Beginning,” in Lamar Papers, Vol. 1, 11. ↩
56. Four miles south of a place called “Rodeo de la Espada” and nine miles north of Arredondo the night before the battle. Bruce Moses places Rodeo de la Espada near or around the same latitude as modern day Mitchell lake, which is of course manmade, but may have been created to augment certain natural water collecting features of the spot that show up in maps all the way back to 1764. See Bruce Moses, “The Texas Revolution that Didn’t: Commemoration,” The Alamo Studies Forum, accessed September 3, 2019, http://alamostudies.proboards.com/thread/354/texas-revolution-commemoration?page=2. ↩
57. Henry P. Walker, “William McLane's Narrative of the Magee-Gutierrez Expedition, 1812-1813,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 66: no. 4 (April, 1963), 474-5. ↩
58. Schwarz and Thonhoff, Forgotten Battlefield, 19. ↩
59. Garrett, Green Flag Over Texas, 165. ↩
60. Garrett, Green Flag Over Texas, 93, referring to a different document: “The manuscript reveals diplomatic skill, a knowledge of the meddling of the European powers in Spanish colonies, and an understanding of the Anglo-American mind in terms of Mexican commerce.” ↩
61. “Proclamation of José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara,” original in Herald Extra Alexandria (Louisiana), August 31, 1812. Reproduced on Sons of DeWitt Colony website, accessed September 8, 2019, http://www.sonsofdewittcolony.org/adp/archives/documents/declare.html ↩
62. See “Information from Capt. Gaines,” in Lamar Papers, 286; and “J.B. Gutiérrez de Lara to the Mexican Congress,” in Lamar Papers, 12. ↩
63. Gutiérrez de Lara, Breve apología, 6. ↩
64. Villars, McLane, and others also refer to “Bernardo” as the ultimate authority. See “Information Derived from John Villars, Native of Kentucky,” in Lamar Papers, Vol. VI, 149; and Walker, “William McLane's Narrative,” 574, 578.. ↩
65. Alessio Robles, Coahuila y Texas en la época colonial, 656. ↩
66. Menchaca, Memoirs; Henry Adams Bullard, “Mexico and Texas,” A.MS. (unsigned); [n.p., 1836], North American Review, North American Review papers, 1831-1843, MS Am 1704.10 (9), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.; and Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” respectively. ↩
67. Garret, Green Flag Over Texas, 183, discusses U.S. diplomats’ obsession with “French intrigue” in Texas. ↩
68. See the copies of Gutiérrez de Lara’s proclamations of 1813 remitted to royal officials by Arredondo, Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter, AGN), Historia, Operaciones de Guerra, Brigadier José Joaquín Arredondo, Tomo 4. ↩
69. Garrett, Green Flag Over Texas, 44. ↩
70. See James A. Bernsen, “Origins and Motivations of the Gutiérrez-Magee Filibusters,” M.A. Thesis, Texas State University, 2016. ↩
71. See Walker, “William McLane's Narrative,” [INSERT PAGE NUMBER]. ↩
72. Bernsen, “Origins and Motivations.” ↩
73. The Diary of José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, 1811-1812, I,”, 59. ↩
74. See Gutiérrez de Lara, April 1813 proclamations, AGN, Historia, Operaciones de Guerra, Vol. 4. ↩
75. “Proclamation of José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara,” original in Herald Extra Alexandria (Louisiana), August 31, 1812. Reproduced on Sons of DeWitt Colony website, accessed September 8, 2019, http://www.sonsofdewittcolony.org/adp/archives/documents/declare.html ↩
76. Gutiérrez de Lara, Breve apología, 32. ↩
77. Bernsen, “Origins and Motivations,” 91. ↩
78. “J.B. Gutiérrez de Lara to the Mexican Congress,” in Lamar Papers,, 16. ↩
79. Chipman, Spanish Texas, Kindle, Loc 3064 of 5000. ↩
80. Garrett, Green Flag Over Texas, 116. ↩
81. Ibid., 78. ↩
82. Porter, Spanish Water, Anglo Water, 127. ↩
83. See Elizabeth West’s introduction to “The Diary of José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, 1811-1812, I,”, 62. ↩
84. Garrett, Green Flag Over Texas, 171, tells of him tending the forge during the siege, citing Hatcher. In Beltrán’s words: “By trade, he was a blacksmith.” See Hunter, “San Antonio’s First Great Tragedy,” 44. ↩
85. “Information from Capt. Gaines,” 286. ↩
86. “Information Derived from John Villars,” 146. ↩
87. “Information Derived from John Villars,” 146. McLane indicates that a Tejano from San Antonio came out and told them about Salcedo’s plans as they were crossing the Colorado. See Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” 246. ↩
88. Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” 247. ↩
89. Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” 249. ↩
90. Ibid., 250. ↩
91. Ibid., 458. ↩
92. “Information Derived from John Villars,” 148. ↩
93. Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” 250; "Information Derived from John Villars," 148. ↩
94. “Information Derived from John Villars,” 148. ↩
95. Alessio Robles, Coahuila y Texas en la época colonial, 656. ↩
96. “Information from Capt. Gaines,” 286. ↩
97. “Information Derived from John Villars,” 150. ↩
98. Art Martínez de Vara, ed., The José Francisco Ruiz Papers (Von Ormy: Alamo Press, 2014), 28. Villars would also indicate that regular communication was maintained at this time between Tejanos in the Royalist force and Republican commanders. See “Information Derived from John Villars,” 150. ↩
99. Gutiérrez de Lara, Breve apología, 33. ↩
100. “Information Derived from John Villars,” 150. ↩
101. See generally, Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” 251. ↩
102. Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” 457. ↩
103. Gutiérrez de Lara, Breve apología, 31. ↩
104. Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” 462; and Menchaca, Memoirs. Garrett says “Indians killed fifty-five persons, had stolen 5,000 sheep, and 10,000 head of horses and mules.” See Green Flag Over Texas, 176. ↩
105. Garrett, Green Flag Over Texas, 172. ↩
106. Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” 459. ↩
107. “Information Derived from John Villars,” 150. ↩
108. I. Waynne Cox, "Field Survey and Archival Research for the Rosillo Creek Battleground Area, Southeast San Antonio, Texas," Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State, Vol. 1990, 19; Garrett, Green Flag Over Texas, 176-7; “Information Derived from John Villars,” 151. ↩
109. “Information Derived from John Villars,” 150; Martínez de Vara, ed., The José Francisco Ruiz Papers, [INSERT PAGE NUMBER]. ↩
110. See Cox, "Field Survey and Archival Research for the Rosillo Creek Battleground Area.” ↩
111. “William McLane’s Narrative,” 461. ↩
112. “Information Derived from John Villars,” 151; and Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” 462. ↩
113. “William McLane’s Narrative,” 461-2. ↩
114. “Information Derived from John Villars,” 151. ↩
115. Handbook of Texas Online, Robert H. Thonhoff, "ROSILLO, BATTLE OF," accessed August 24, 2019, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/qfr02. ↩
116. Chipman, Spanish Texas, Kindle, Loc 3495 of 5000. ↩
117. “Information Derived from John Villars,” 151. ↩
118. Gutiérrez de Lara, Breve apologia, 34. ↩
119. See Appendix for the text of the document. ↩
120. Garrett, Green Flag Over Texas, 236. ↩
121. Handbook of Texas Online, "GUTIERREZ DE LARA, JOSE BERNARDO MAXIMILIANO," accessed May 08, 2019, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fgu11. ↩
122. “Information from Capt. Gaines,” 280, seems to suggest a thirteen member junta, but he may be thinking of Gutiérrez de Lara’s entourage. The Declaration itself calls for seven members, Gutiérrez de Lara’s 1815 report to the Mexican congress (“J.B. Gutiérrez de Lara to the Mexican Congress,” Lamar Papers, Vol. 1, 17) also recalls seven. Menchaca’s memoirs states that they were all Arochas and Delgados. ↩
123. See Appendix D. ↩
124. T. R. Fehrenbach, et. al., The San Antonio Story (Tulsa: Continental Heritage, Inc., 1978), Kindle, Loc 495 of 4313, in discussing the Constitution notes its reference to the State of Texas being an “inviolable part of a Mexican Republic.” Rie Jarratt put it this way: “While it showed the influence of French Rousseau and Anglo-American Jefferson, it also clearly proclaimed its Spanish heritage and the ideas of Hidalgo.” See Jarratt, Gutiérrez de Lara, Mexican-Texan: The Story of a Creole Hero (Austin: Creole Texana, 1949), extract reproduced on the website “Sons of DeWitt’s Colony in Texas,” accessed September 9, 2019, http://www.sonsofdewittcolony.org/dewitt.htm.; Guedea, meanwhile, declares that “[e]l discurso utilizado por Gutiérrez de Lara y Álvarez de Toledo para promover su empresa…es el de los republicanos estadounidenses y no el de los insurgentes novohispanos.” See Virginia Guedea, “La declaración de independencia de la provincia de Texas (6 de abril de 1813),” in Alfredo Ávila, Jordana Dym, and Erika Pani, eds., Las Declaraciones de independencia: Los textos fundamentales de las independencias americanas (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 2013), 3 [331?]. ↩
125. “El dro. natural de la conservacion propia”; referring to all legitimate authority residing in the people “a quien solamente pertenece este derecho”; and desiring laws based in “dro. Natural.”See Junta de Béxar, “Nos el pueblo de la provincia de Texas,” AGN, Historia, Operaciones de Guerra, Brigadier José Joaquín Arredondo, Tomo 4. See also Gutiérrez de Lara’s 1813 proclamations in the same volume, where he talks specifically about the acts of Spaniards contravening “todo derecho natural.” ↩
126. “Information from Capt. Gaines,” 280. Of course, Gaines also says the junta numbered 13, though most other accounts (including “J.B. Gutiérrez de Lara to the Mexican Congress,” 17) stick with seven. ↩
127. Garrett, Green Flag Over Texas, 184, implies that a land office was opened here to administer these claims, which would be, I suppose, a spiritual predecessor to the General Land Office. ↩
128. “Information from Capt. “Gaines,” 280. ↩
129. McLane believed Goliad (La Bahía), because of insufficient provisions in San Antonio. See Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” [INSERT PAGE NUMBER]. Beltrán says Havana. See Hunter, “San Antonio’s First Great Tragedy,” 46-47. Gaines says Mexico (New Spain). See “Information from Capt. Gaines,” 280. ↩
130. Beltrán: “The army reached the Medina on the evening of the 17th…thus abandoning a strong and almost impregnable position to court defeat and utter annihilation.” See Hunter, “The Battle of Medina,” 12. ↩
131. Navarro, “The Memoirs of José Antonio Navarro.” ↩
132. Quoted in Hunter, “San Antonio’s First Great Tragedy,” 47. Emphasis mine. ↩
133. This detail is also repeated in “The Memoirs of José Antonio Navarro.” ↩
134. José Antonio Navarro’s memoir, quoted in McDonald and Matovina, eds., Defending Mexican Valor, Kindle, Loc 639 of 7817. ↩
135. Chipman, Spanish Texas, Kindle, Loc 3499 of 5000. ↩
136. Quoted in Hunter, “San Antonio’s First Great Tragedy,” 48. ↩
137. “Information from Capt. Gaines,” 281. See also Hunter, “San Antonio’s First Great Tragedy,” 48; and Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” 465, indirectly. ↩
138. A textual note: Antonio Delgado, Sr., may never have existed. Indeed, census records and a later account suggest that Captain Antonio Delgado’s father was named Manuel, and was executed only after the Battle of Medina many months later. See Anonymous [INSERT FULL CITATION]. Beltrán alone provides the above speech from the younger Antonio Delgado. Yoakum in 1855 claimed that Antonio simply claimed Gutiérrez de Lara had told him to do it, though repeats the claim that it was partly in revenge for the murder of his father, Colonel Antonio Delgado. See Yoakum, The History of Texas, Vol. 1[?] 75. ↩
139. Gutiérrez de Lara, Breve apología, 39. ↩
140. Gaines claims that he was charged with making the “necessary explenation" of what had happened. See “Information from Capt. Gaines,” 281. Beltrán as the mouthpiece of Antonio Delgado quoted here sure sounds sympathetic, which suggests to me he might have advocated on Delgado’s behalf to the American volunteers. ↩
141. Quoted in John Warren Hunter, “The Battle of the Alazan. Continuing the Narrative of Beltrán,” Frontier Times Vol. 3: No. 2 (November 1925), 42. McLane too notes the “indolence” into which the Americans fell. See Walker, “The Narrative of William McLane,” 472. ↩
142. Navarro, “The Memoirs of José Antonio Navarro.” ↩
143. In March, Elizondo had apparently made overtures to American diplomats about coming over to the side of the rebels. On April 6th, Gutiérrez had invited him to flip-flop as well, forcing Elizondo to very publicly decline the offer, and perhaps baiting the Spaniard to advance on Gutiérrez before he could be reinforced by his commanding officer, Arredondo. Gutiérrez de Lara, Breve apología, 8. ↩
144. See generally Bradley Folsom, Arredondo: Last Spanish Ruler of Texas and Northeastern New Spain (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017). ↩
145. [Anonymous], “Señor Edictor,” Translation into Spanish of a letter appearing in the Lexington Reporter, n.d., forwarded by Toledo, New Orleans, n.d. Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla, Indiferente General de Nueva España, 136-7-9, Transcripts, Box 2Q162, Vol. 170, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin. TX, 10-11. ↩
146. Prieto appears in Beltrán’s narrative. See Hunter, “The Battle of the Alazan,” 43, 48. ↩
147. Beltrán: “the American troops gave themselves up largely to every form of dissipation – cards, horses, wine, and women.” See Hunter, “The Battle of the Alazan,” 42. ↩
148. Navarro, “The Memoirs of José Antonio Navarro.” ↩
149. “J.B. Gutiérrez de Lara to the Mexican Congress,” 17; “Information from Capt. Gaines,” 282; “Information Derived from John Villars,” 152. ↩
150. “J.B. Gutiérrez de Lara to the Mexican Congress,” 12. ↩
151. Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” 250. ↩
152. The anonymous writer in the Lexington Reporter and Beltrán both call him a colonel, though TSHA and most other sources have him as a Major at the battle. See, respectively, [Anonymous,] “Señor Edictor;” Hunter, “The Battle of the Alazan,” 46; and Handbook of Texas Online, Margaret Swett Henson, "PERRY, HENRY," accessed June 18, 2019, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fpe42. ↩
153. “Information from Capt. Gaines,” 282. ↩
154. Quoted in Hunter, “The Battle of the Alazan,” 45=. Even the account of Villars, which is more disparaging of Tejano contributions, concedes that they fought with uncommon valor in the upcoming battle. See “Information Derived from John Villars.” ↩
155. Beltrán’s account tells us that Gutiérrez de Lara and Menchaca were in the heat of the battle, along with Antonio Delgado. See Hunter, “The Battle of the Alazan,” 47. Villars is less clear, but also suggests he was in the thick of it. See “Information Derived from John Villars,” 152. McLane is alone in placing him in the rear, “where he could view the field.” See Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” 470. ↩
156. Martínez de Vara, The José Francisco Ruiz Papers, 33. Hinted at in Beltrán referring to attaching American officers to Tejano units: “American officers were detailed to proceed with each company of the Mexicans and the Indians.” See Hunter, “The Battle of the Alazan,” 46. ↩
157. Poyo and Hinojosa, eds., Tejano Origins, Kindle, Loc 2288 of 4665. ↩
158. Beltrán: “When they put in their claims for their share of the spoils, they offered in evidence of their valor and prowess a large number of scalps.” See Hunter, “The Battle of the Alazan,” 48. ↩
159. Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” 471. ↩
160. Gutiérrez de Lara, Breve apologia, 35, says four hours. ↩
161. Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” 471. ↩
162. Ibid., 470. ↩
163. Beltrán: “Immediately combining the forces…Finally the Spaniards gave way…” See Hunter, “The Battle of the Alazan,” 47. ↩
164. Schwarz and Thonhoff, Forgotten Battlefield, 52. ↩
165. Una “carnicería” says Gutiérrez de Lara in his Breve apología, 35. ↩
166. Casualty numbers are hard to square up for this battle. Ruiz claims single-digit casualties for the Republicans, yet Beltrán’s account of the battle references hours of hand-to-hand fighting and at least three dead just from his unit. He counts 76 Republican dead. See, respectively, Martínez de Vara, The José Francisco Ruiz Papers, 34; and Hunter, “The Battle of the Alazan,” 48. Gaines claimed 14 killed. See “Information from Capt. Gaines,” 282. Gutiérrez de Lara later claimed 22 dead Republicans to some 400 dead Royalists “including some prisoners.” See Gutiérrez de Lara, Breve apologia, 35. A contemporary report article in the Columbian Centinel dated August 25, 1813 claimed 274 royalist dead. McLane claimed 300. See Walker, “The Narrative of William McLane,” 471. Menchaca claims “forty or fifty.” See Menchaca, Memoirs. ↩
167. Schwarz and Thonhoff, Forgotten Battlefield, 53-4. ↩
168. Ibid., 54. ↩
169. “J.B. Gutiérrez de Lara to the Mexican Congress,” 18. Beltrán: “About the middle of June courier from La Bahia arrived bearing a message from the Mexican Congress, then sitting at Apatzingán, announcing that General José María Álvarez de Toledo was then on his way from the United States with strong reinforcements, and would succeed General Gutierrez in command of the Republican Army of the North.” See Hunter, “The Battle of Medina,” 9. ↩
170. Author’s inference. For some reason, Gaines leaves around this time that many other Americans leave. Unlike the other Americans who would later cite the execution of the Spaniards as the justification for their departure, however, Gaines would later actively defend their execution, and recounts how he was charged with justifying the act to the Americans in San Antonio. And Gutiérrez de Lara had dispatched Gaines before on recruiting missions, see Episode 6; and “Information from Capt. Gaines,” 281. ↩
171. Schwarz and Thonhoff, Forgotten Battlefield, 59. ↩
172. Handbook of Texas Online, Timothy Palmer, "TOLEDO Y DUBOIS, JOSE ALVAREZ DE," accessed September 18, 2018, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fto10. ↩
173. Beltrán: “About the middle of June…and would succeed General Gutierrez in command of the Republican Army of the North.” See Hunter, “The Battle of Medina,” 9. Gutiérrez de Lara claims that Toledo represented to people at the time that he had also been sent “from the Cortes of Cadiz with [the title of general] by the representatives of Mexico.” See “J.B. Gutiérrez de Lara to the Mexican Congress,” 18. ↩
174. Garrett, Green Flag Over Texas, 219. ↩
175. “J.B. Gutiérrez de Lara to the Mexican Congress,” 18. ↩
176. Gutiérrez, Breve apología, 41; Garrett, Green Flag Over Texas, 218. ↩
177. Quoted in Hunter, “The Battle of Medina,” 10. ↩
178. Navarro, “The Memoirs of José Antonio Navarro.” ↩
179. Beltrán: “In his tender of service he pledged his own fortune, which in ready cash consisted of $80,000.” See Hunter, “The Battle of Medina,” 9. ↩
180. [Anonymous,] “Señor Edictor,” 4. ↩
181. Ibid., 4, 6-7. Even after appointing him, the Junta seemed to have second thoughts. On both August 4th and August 9th, the President of the Junta (Tomás de Arocha) communicated their dissatisfaction with Toledo’s strategy and that they apparently openly worried that he was in cahoots with the Royalists. Toledo seems to have chalked up this intrigue to “Gutiérrez de Lara’s satellites.” ↩
182. Quoted in Hunter, “The Battle of Medina,” 12. ↩
183. “Information from Capt. Gaines,” 282, 283. ↩
184. Bullard, “Mexico and Texas,” 17. ↩
185. Interview with Jerome Korus, University of Texas at San Antonio: Institute of Texan Cultures: Oral History Collection, UA 15.01.12, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections. ↩
186. Folsom, Arredondo, 87. ↩
187. In addition to holding a cushy sinecure within the Church, the Reverend Lt. Colonel Juan Manuel Zambrano was also one of the wealthiest, most “amorous,” and – if we are to believe José Antonio Navarro’s description – most obnoxious men in town. Navarro described him as “endowed with a gigantic frame,” “enormously fat,” as well as “arrogant, as restless as quicksilver and suspicious by nature.” See Navarro, “The Memoirs of José Antonio Navarro.” Another later writer records his “fair hair floating in the wind, his shirt open at the collar, and a cavalry sword strapped to his waist.” A future Spanish governor confirmed that “no one is free from his continual insults either by acts or words, not excepting priests, military officers, or whoever has the misfortune to deal with him, or even his own brother - who is a priest!” See Folsom, Arredondo, 181 ↩
188. [Anonymous,] “Señor Edictor,” 4. ↩
189. Note that even Henry Perry gets taken up by the rumor of Toledo’s planned treachery and refused to ride out with him on an earlier mission, “por q. sabia q. el General obraba de acuerdo con el enemigo.” Ibid., 6. ↩
190. Quoted in Hunter, “The Battle of Medina,” 12. ↩
191. As Beltrán put it: “Sus pensamientos indican perfidia!” See Hunter, “The Battle of Medina,” 12. ↩
192. Beltrán: “…Menchaca begged Toledo to allow the latter (Menchaca) to head 200 or more of his Mexicans in the direction of the Nueces for the purpose of harassing the enemy.” See Hunter, “The Battle of Medina,” 11. ↩
193. [Anonymous,] “Señor Edictor,” 9. ↩
194. Here’s where I should note that the anonymous writer in the Lexington Reporter and Bullard both claim that it was Toledo – not Menchaca – who was most anxious to ride out and meet the Royalists. Beltrán and McLane serve as counterpoints to this view. At its root may have been more of a disagreement over leadership of the army rather than any particular tactics. ↩
195. Beltrán, quoting Menchaca’s speech from before the Battle of Alazán Creek. See Hunter, “The Battle of Medina,” 12. ↩
196. [Anonymous,] “Señor Edictor,” 7. ↩
197. Both the anonymous account in the Lexington Reporter and Bullard actually make it sound like it was Toledo wanting to ride out sooner than later, not Menchaca. Another comment in the Lexington Reporterpiece suggests that maybe Menchaca’s contention was that they should all ride out behind the Tejanos or not at all. See [Anonymous,] “Señor Edictor,” 7. ↩
198. Referring here to Perry’s refusal to ride out with Toledo at one point for fear he was “working with the enemy” and to Gaines’ depiction of Kemper refusing Toledo’s orders later during the battle, ↩
199. See William Shaler [James Wilkinson?] to James Monroe, September 5, 1813, Despatches from Special Agents of the Department of State (hereafter, SP): William Shaler, National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter, NARA), Washington, D.C. Note that many of the accounts make small errors on that dates here, owing presumably to their distance in time from the events in question. The Shaler [Wilkinson?] account, however, was written just a few weeks after the battle, and the Aug 15th date seems credible. [Anonymous,] “Señor Edictor,” 7, seems to confirm. ↩
200. Bullard, “Mexico and Texas, 17. Though Bullard gives the date as the 13th, he and Beltrán do agree that camp was made the night before the battle on the Medina River, a reliably flowing river sufficient to water 1,400 men and horses. ↩
201. Quoted in Hunter, “The Battle of Medina,” 12. ↩
202. Walker, “The Narrative of William McLane;” [Anonymous,] “Señor Edictor,” 11. ↩
203. [Anonymous,] “Señor Edictor,” 11, lists the cavalry “a la espalda de la linea y sobre los flancos en columna de maza.” Beltrán similarly says that they were guarding “three fords”. See Hunter, “The Battle of Medina,” 12. ↩
204. [Anonymous,] “Señor Edictor,” 5. ↩
205. Ibid., 10. ↩
206. Ibid., 9, says “four in the afternoon” but clearly means “four in the morning,” since his next mention of them is “between eight and nine”. ↩
207. Ibid., 9 (sumamente satsifechos), 8 (sumamente ventajosa); Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” Arredondo as well. ↩
208. Arredondo: “en vista de el, el 18 antes de emprehender mi marcha q.e la dirígia al Rio de Medina, habiendome propuesto extrabiar camino p.a pasarlo por diferente paso q.e el recto, en atención á ser este un cañon q.e faciltaba demaciadisima bentaja al enemigo, si este intentaba emboscarse en la espesa arboleda que lo cubre.” See Joaquín de Arredondo to Viceroy Félix María Calleja, September 13, 1813, Historia, Operaciones de Guerra (hereafter, OG), Arredondo, Vol. 4, 180v, AGN, Mexico City, Mexico. ↩
209. Arredondo says the lone outrider was fired upon around 8 AM; the anonymous writer in the Lexington Reporter says only that the ambush was set by 8 or 9 AM. ↩
210. Shaler [Wilkinson?] to Monroe, September 5, 1813, SP, NARA, 1. ↩
211. Arredondo: “Hice salir con ciento ochenta hombres de caballeria al Teniente Coronel D. Ygn.o Elizondo, previniendole á este Xefe fuese con la mayor precaucion y vigilancia hasta avistar al enemigo, haciendo en lo posible una escrupulosa obersvacion de su numero, no empeñandose en accion alg.a a menos de q.e se juzgase suficiente para escarmentarlo, y de no, 2a solo [stricken] 1- fuese manteniendo el fuego en retirada, dandome pronto aviso para mis disposiciones, advirtiendole el rumbo que tenia dispuesto para pasar el Rio de Medina y cam.o q.e cortaba á fin de q.e lo siguiese en su retirada para reunirseme.” See Arredondo to Calleja, September 13 1813, OG, AGN, 181. ↩
212. Arredondo: “remitiendole ciento cinquenta hombres de caballeria y dos cañoncitos del calibre de libra.” “Subdiacono Teniente Coronel D. Juan Manuel Zambrano.” See Arredondo to Calleja, September 13, 1813, OG, AGN, 182. ↩
213. “Information from Capt. Gaines,” 283. ↩
214. See [Anonymous,] “Señor Edictor,” 13. ↩
215. There’s a line in Arredondo’s post-action report make it sound like he considered something like this: “decistiendo de mi proyecto anterior y resuelto a atacar a la canalla.” See Arredondo to Calleja, September 13, 1813, OG, AGN, 182v. ↩
216. Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” 475. Menchaca’s memoirs also have Menchaca saying “he would not turn back.” See Menchaca, Memoirs. According to Gaines, “Kemper and Monchack galloped violently up and down the lines countermanding the order and swearing that there should be no retreat.” See “Information from Capt. Gaines,” 283. ↩
217. Quoted in Hunter, “The Battle of Medina,” 13. ↩
218. Menchaca, Memoirs. ↩
219. Ibid. ↩
220. José Antonio Menchaca (Memoirs) says 0.5 miles, Bullard (“Mexico and Texas,” [insert page number]) claims 2-3 miles, McLane (Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” [insert page number]) claims 4 miles. ↩
221. Shaler [Wilkinson?] to Monroe, September 5, 1813, SP, NARA: “but it being ascertained there was water just ahead”. McLane describes the Republicans “approaching a thick chaparral, skirting the next stream of water.” See Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” 476. ↩
222. [Anonymous,] “Memoria de las cosas,” BP, BL. ↩
223. [Anonymous,] “Señor Edictor,” 12, refers to “un Arroyo donde el Regimiento de Ynfanteria de Veracruz se parapetó.”. ↩
224. Shaler [Wilkinson?] to Monroe, September 5, 1813, SP, NARA. ↩
225. Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” 476. ↩
226. Arredondo, “tan fuerte y tenas resistencia.” See Arredondo to Calleja, September 13, 1813, OG, AGN, 183v. ↩
227. Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” 477 ↩
228. Arredondo, “dirigidos por los bizarros comand.tes y oficiales q.e los mandaban comenzaron a hacerle un bibisimo sobstenido y bien ordenado fuego.” See Arredondo to Calleja, September 13, 1813, OG, AGN, 183v. ↩
229. Shaler [Wilkinson?] to Monroe, September 5, 1813, SP, NARA: “The action as I before observed was commenced by our Spanish Cavalry and Indians.” ↩
230. Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” 477. ↩
231. Arredondo, “trató su excomulgado Xefe Jose Albarez de Toledo sorprehendernos p.a los costados de dra, izquierda y retaguardia, pero no fué tan pronto en su disposicion, quanto lo fui en mandar formar el martillo por ambos costados, y q.e abanzase un piq.te considerable a la retaguardia para la custodia de carg.s y caballada.” See Arredondo to Calleja, September 13, 1813, OG, AGN, 184. ↩
232. Arredondo. “Al Sarg.to de la 1.a Comp.a Vte Tiburcio Garcia, y cabo de Milicias del Nvo Santander Mateo Sotelo, quienes me libertaron de perder la vida, pues como yendo mis ordenanzas hivan á mi Espalda, y obserbaron q.e uno de los enemigos dirigia asia mi la punteria y abisandome al momento p.r cuyo abiso mude de sitio.” Ibid., 191. ↩
233. Arredondo “quarenta pasos.” Ibid., 183v. Gaines (“Information from Capt. Gaines,” 283) says forty yards. Beltrán (Hunter, “The Battle of Medina,” 13) says fifty yards.. ↩
234. Arredondo: “pues en las quatro horas que duró la accion se tiraron nobecientos cinquenta tiro.” See Arredondo to Calleja, September 13, 1813, OG, AGN, 189v. ↩
235. Quoted in Hunter, “The Battle of Medina,” 13. ↩
236. Shaler [Wilkinson?] to Monroe, September 5, 1813, SP, NARA: “At this period, we had gained on the enemy and had taken one or two pieces more of their artillery and were fighting them on the ground they at first occupied.” ↩
237. Interview with Jerome Korus, University of Texas at San Antonio: Institute of Texan Cultures: Oral History Collection, UA 15.01.12, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections. ↩
238. Walker, “William McLane’s Narrative,” 477. I should note, here, that two sources (“Information from Capt. Gaines,” 283; and Bullard, “Mexico and Texas,” 18) attribute the Republicans defeat to Tejano Wing Commander Ramón Múzquiz defecting over to the Royalists and revealing to Arredondo the Republicans’ weakness. Arredondo mentions nothing of the sort, however, who attributes his victory to the ruse that follows. ↩
239. Arredondo, “en cuya vista mandé tocar la Musica y a mi Tambor una Diana, causando esto un tanto efecto en mi Tropas q.e les reanimo de tal suerte q.e pareció comenzaban á operar, y de consig.te entró ya la confusion en el enemigo.” Arredondo to Calleja, September 13, 1813, OG, AGN, 184-184v; [Anonymous,] “Memoria de las cosas,” BP, BL; Navarro, “The Memoirs of José Antonio Navarro.” ↩
240. [Anonymous,] “Señor Edictor,” 10, says four cannons had been disabled. ↩
241. Shaler [Wilkinson?] to Monroe, September 5, 1813, SP, NARA. ↩
242. See José María Sánchez and Carlos Castañeda, “A Trip to Texas in 1828,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly Vol. 29: No. 4 (April 1926), 256: “and the Spanish General Joaquín Arredondo would have been defeated if the inexperience of the rebels had permitted it.” ↩
243. Menchaca, Memoirs. ↩
244. Quoted in Hunter, “The Battle of Medina,” 10. ↩
245. Ibid., 13, Beltrán suggests he fell in the battle: “Scarcely had he uttered these words than he fell from his horse, mortally wounded.” Arredondo later reports seeing his body after the battle: “los q.e me participaron estar cubiertos de cadaberes, cuyo número fué el de un mil mas q.e menos, la mayor parte Americanos, y entre estos el hijo del General Wbilquinson, Coronel Menchaca, y otros barios Gefes de la farza y con otros muchos heridos como se ha justificado por diferentes partes.” See Arredondo to Calleja, September 13, 1813, OG, AGN, 185. José Antonio Menchaca, however, would later record that he fell in Calaveras Creek northeast of the field. ↩
246. Martínez de Vara, ed., The José Francisco Ruiz Papers, 35. ↩
247. Ibid., 35. ↩
248. “Information from Capt. Gaines,” 283. ↩
249. [Anonymous,] “Señor Edictor,” 12. ↩
250. Navarro, “The Memoirs of José Antonio Navarro;” “Information Derived from John Villars,” [page number?]. ↩
251. Arredondo: “llegando esta hasta el Rio de Medina.” See Arredondo to Calleja, September 13, 1813, OG, AGN, 184v. Menchaca claims 250 killed there on the banks of the Medina. See Menchaca, Memoirs. ↩
252. Martínez de Vara, ed., The José Francisco Ruiz Papers, 36. ↩
253. “Information Derived from John Villars,” [page number?] ↩
254. See his later appearance on the Trinity River in [Anonymous,] “Memoria de las cosas,” BP, BL, though I can’t tell if this is actually him. ↩
255. Folsom, Arredondo, 159. ↩
256. Handbook of Texas Online, Timothy Palmer, “TOLEDO Y DUBOIS, JOSÉ ÁLVAREZ DE,” accessed August 30, 2018, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fto10. ↩
257. Villars says two or three days. See "Information Derived from John Villars," 153. ↩
258. [Anonymous,] “Memoria de las cosas,” BP, BL. ↩
259. [Anonymous,] ”Memoria de las cosas,” BP, BL; Garrett, Green Flag Over Texas, 228. ↩
260. Beltrán: “Go to your friends, the Comanches!”…”Our course lay northwest…” See Hunter, “The Battle of Medina,” 14-15. ↩
261. Autobiography of José Antonio Navarro, 1841, Mirabeau B. Lamar Papers, Archives and Information Services Division, Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Austin, TX; McDonald and Matovina, eds., Defending Mexican Valor, Kindle, Loc 709 of 7817. See also [Anonymous,] ”Memoria de las cosas,” BP, BL. ↩
262. [Anonymous,] “Memoria de las cosas,” BP, BL. Also “Information Derived from John Villars,” 153. ↩
263. Candida y María Josefa Delgado and Antonia Rodríguez, according to [Anonymous,] “Memoria de las cosas,” BP, BL. ↩
264. See the later taunt in [Anonymous,] “Memoria de las cosas,” BP, BL: “Como no la [verganza] tenian para andar con las pistolas matando gente?” ↩
265. Folsom, Arredondo, 99. ↩
266. Menchaca (Memoirs) gives 8; Navarro (“The Memoirs of José Antonio Navarro”) 18. See also “Information Derived from John Villars,” [Page number?]. ↩
267. Beltrán: “…for many years afterwards the people of San Antonio spoke of that awful night as ‘La Noche Triste’.” See Hunter, “The Battle of Medina,” 15. ↩
268. [Anonymous,] “Memoria de las cosas,” BP, BL. ↩
269. [Anonymous,] “Memoria de las cosas,” BP, BL. ↩
270. Folsom, Arredondo, 96. Menchaca, Memoirs, says three every third day, totaling forty. Navarro, (“The Memoirs of José Antonio Navarro”) indicates Main Plaza. ↩
271. This is incorrect. Arredondo claims he captured 112 prisoners during the conflict, which were executed the same day or the next. Then an addition 215 were captured and executed in San Antonio, the strong implication being that they had been combatants as well. ↩
272. [Anonymous,] “Memoria de las cosas,” BP, BL. Folsom, Arredondo, 96. ↩
273. [Anonymous,] “Memoria de las cosas,” BP, BL. ↩
274. ”Expediente instruido sobre el embargo, avalúo, y remate de los bienes de los individuos que tomaron partido con los insurgentes,” Cuartel General, October 13, 1813, Archivo General del Estado de Coahuila, CF, 27, E 54, ff. 11-12. ↩
275. [Anonymous,] “Memoria de las cosas,” BP, BL, story of the Spaniard denying the little girl. ↩
276. Ibid.. ↩
277. Folsom, Arredondo, 96 ↩
278. [Anonymous,] “Memoria de las cosas,” BP, BL. ↩
279. “precentadas a cabeza de silla.” See [Anonymous,] “Memoria de las cosas,” BP, BL. ↩
280. Menchaca, Memoirs. ↩
281. Folsom, Arredondo, 99. ↩
282. Ibid., 261. ↩
283. I’m supposing this based on a later letter from Zambrano requesting permission to bury the heads hung in Military Plaza. Cox, “Field Survey and Archival Research for the Rosillo Creek Battleground Area,” 9, quoting Zambrano. ↩
284. Folsom, Arredondo, 108. ↩
285. Ibid., 97. ↩
286. McDonald and Mataovina, eds., Defending Mexican Valor, Kindle, Loc 770 of 7817. ↩
287. Folsom, Arredondo, 175. ↩
288. Ibid., 103. ↩
289. Ibid. ↩
290. McDonald and Mataovina, eds., Defending Mexican Valor, Kindle, Loc 1017 of 7817. ↩
291. Poyo and Hinojosa, eds., Tejano Origins, Kindle, Loc 498 of 4665. ↩
292. Chipman, Spanish Texas, Kindle, Loc 3528 of 5000. ↩
293. Martínez de Vara, ed., The José Francisco Ruiz Papers, 10, 47. See also Handbook of Texas Online, Bernice Strong, “RUIZ, JOSÉ FRANCISCO,” Accessed on September 8, 2018, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fru11..). Rumors have also long persisted of their participation or support for Andrew Jackson’s forces at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. They would not have been the only refugees from the First Republic of Texas to have done so. Former President Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara’s active participation in the battle is well-documented. See Handbook of Texas Online, “GUTIÉRREZ DE LARA, JOSÉ BERNARDO MAXIMILIANO,” Accessed on September 8, 2018, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fgu11. Footnote to the footnote: Gutiérrez would go on to not only serve as the future governor of Tamaulipas, but as the Comandante of the Provincias internas – Arredondo’s old post – under the new Mexican government. ↩
294. Martínez de Vara, ed., The José Francisco Ruiz Papers, 80, 83. ↩
295. José Francisco Ruiz, Report on the Indian Tribes of Texas in 1828, ed. John C. Ewers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), [page number?]. ↩
296. Chipman, Spanish Texas, Kindle, Loc 3528 of 5000. ↩
297. Martínez de Vara, ed., The José Francisco Ruiz Papers, 40, 42. ↩
298. Ibid., 41. ↩
299. Ibid., 46. ↩
300. Ibid., 53-56. ↩
301. Poyo and Hinojosa, eds., Tejano Origins, Kindle, Loc 342 of 4665. ↩
302. Tijerina, Tejanos and Texas, 11. ↩
303. Poyo and Hinojosa, eds., Tejano Origins, Kindle, Loc 412-6 of 4665. ↩
304. McDonald and Matovina, eds., Defending Mexican Valor, Kindle Loc 847 of 7817. ↩
305. Poyo and Hinojosa, eds., Tejano Origins, Kindle, Loc 393 of 4665. ↩
306. Tijerina, Tejanos and Texas, 97. ↩
307. McDonald and Matovina, eds., Defending Mexican Valor, Kindle, Loc 1106 of 7817. ↩
308. Handbook of Texas Online, "TRESPALACIOS, JOSE FELIX," accessed August 24, 2019, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/ftr09. ↩
309. Handbook of Texas Online, Ingrid Broughton Morris and Deolece M. Parmelee, “GAINES, JAMES TAYLOR," accessed August 24, 2019, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fga04. ↩
310. “Information from Capt. Gaines,” 285. ↩
311. Navarro, “The Memoirs of José Antonio Navarro.” ↩
312. Chipman, Spanish Texas, Kindle, Loc 3529 of 5000. ↩
313. De la Teja, San Antonio de Béxar, 142. ↩
314. Navarro, “The Memoirs of José Antonio Navarro.” ↩
315. [Anonymous,] “Memoria de las cosas,” BP, BL, 2. ↩
316. Gutiérrez de Lara, Breve apología, 59. ↩
317. “Cuando se establece en Nueva Orleans, no da pruebas de patriotism, reclutando filibusteros y solicitando, no solo la ayuda, sino la invasion…” See José L Cossio, “Prologue,” in Gutiérrez de Lara, Breve apología, 14. ↩
318. [Anonymous,] “Memoria de las cosas,” BP, BL, 2. “because so many of those who could have borne true witness to those events have died and many of the rest took part in the oppression and tyranny of their own Countrymen and thus will not tell the truth, and indeed, in many cases, have conspired for years to obscure it.” Navarro’s “germ of discontent.” See Navarro, “The Memoirs of José Antonio Navarro.”. ↩
319. Navarro memoir, quoted in McDonald and Matovina, eds., Defending Mexican Valor, Kindle, Loc 2476 of 7817. ↩
320. De la Teja, ed., A Revolution Remembered, 23, 76, 136. ↩
321. [Anonymous,] “Memoria de las cosas,” BP, BL, last page. ↩
322. Alluding to the Anonymous account’s complaint, in Ibid. ↩
323. Gutiérrez de Lara occupies a complicated place in Mexican history, something that I realized the first time that my employee, Sergio Roblesgil Gutiérrez, ever-so-timidly asked me about him. In conventional Mexican histories, he is in fact most remembered there his execution of the first ruler of Mexico, ex-Emperor Agustín de Iturbide, in 1824, when Gutiérrez de Lara was serving as the first governor of Tamaulipas. Nevermind that the new Mexican congress had actually proscribed death for Iturbide should he ever set foot again on Mexican soil, having been exiled in 1823. There was something in his execution to offend everyone: to Mexican conservatives, Gutiérrez de Lara had murdered the symbol of the institutions they had so cherished and desired to preserve in their new nation; to Mexican liberals, he had murdered the man who had effected the independence of Mexico from Spain. ↩
324. Bishop Jean-Marie Odin, Remarks delivered at the dedication of the Church of Nuestra Señor del Carmen, [n.d.], 1856, document in possession of the Fred Martínez. ↩
325. Joaquín de Arredondo to Interim Governor of Texas [Antonio Martínez], June 9, 1817, Box 2S120, Bexar Archives, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX. ↩
326. James Donovan, The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo – and the Sacrifice that Forged a Nation (New York: Little Brown and Co., 2012), 37. ↩
327. Chipman, Spanish Texas, Kindle, Loc 3524 of 5000. ↩
328. Aminta Inelda Pérez, citing Tim Todish, claims that 1 out of 3 Tejanos participated compared to 1 out of 7 Anglos. See Aminta Inelda Pérez, “Tejano Rangers: The Development and Evolution of Ranging Tradition, 1540-1880,” PhD Dissertation, University of Iowa, 2012, 14. ↩
329. Schwarz and Thonhoff, Forgotten Battlefield, 125. ↩
330. Bernsen, “Origins and Motivations,” 92. ↩
331. Martin Allen, William Shaler Stillwell. Other sons of Battle of Medina veterans fought at the Siege of Bexar and the Alamo, including Charles Despallier and John Gladden King. Two actual veterans of the battle – Warren D.C. Hall and James Gaines – served in roles with the Texas Provisional Government during the war. See James Aalan Bernsen, “The Gutiérrez-Magee Expedition” blog, accessed ????, http://gutierrez-magee.texhist.com/2,017/01/return-to-texas.html. José Antonio Menchaca was the nephew of Miguel Menchaca. And, of course, José Francisco Ruíz represented San Antonio at the convention of the Texas Provisional Government in Washington-on-the Brazos, where he was the second man to affix his name to the 1836 Texas Declaration of Independence. See Bernsen, “Origins and Motivations,” 93, Table 3: Known Survivors and their Later Connections to Texas. ↩
332. List from De la Teja, ed., A Revolution Remembered, 136. ↩
333. Through father’s side: J. Seguín, I. Seguín, M. Flores, A. Menchaca, N. Flores, A. Rodríguez, A. Cruz, J.M. Arocha, E. Ramírez, L. Enríques, M. Curbelo, A. Curbelo, M. Arocha, M. Tarín, C. Carmona, J. Peña, N. Navarro. Pedro Herrera was also related to the Menchaca’s and married a Flores. I don’t have enough genealogical information to connect Simón Arriola, Andrés Varcenas, or Tomás Maldonado. ↩
334. Menchaca, José María Arocha, Manuel Arocha, Matías Curbelo, Antonio Curbelo, Manuel Tarín, and Antonio Cruz Arocha. ↩