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Goliad
Nov 15, 2008 6:12:12 GMT -5
Post by stuart on Nov 15, 2008 6:12:12 GMT -5
Part 1
The 1836 battle for the Alamo is now regarded as the defining point of the Texan Revolution, but at the time it was widely seen as a disaster, soon followed by an even greater defeat at the Encinal del Perdido – the wood of the lost souls.
While Santa Anna was besieging the Alamo most of the Texan Army was at Goliad, 100 miles to the south, where they had assembled for an expedition against the Mexican town of Matamoros, at the mouth of the Rio Grande. This was intended to trigger a Federalist uprising in the Mexican interior, but factional infighting meant it never got underway and instead it was hoped that the 4-500-odd men might reinforce the Alamo, but as it turned out they were facing enough trouble of their own, for a second Mexican army was advancing up the Atascosita Road directly towards them. At first their commander, Colonel James W. Fannin decided to dig in, but then came news of the fall of the Alamo and on March 11 the Texan commander in chief, Sam Houston immediately sent Fannin unambiguous instructions to evacuate Goliad and retreat to the line of the Guadalupe. There is some uncertainty whether Fannin received these orders on the afternoon of March 13 or the morning of March 14, but in either case they found him in an unenviable position for Captain Amon B. King’s Paducah Volunteers had earlier been sent down to Refugio to evacuate the colonists there. It should have been a straightforward enough operation, but instead King got himself sucked into an unnecessary fight with some Mexican irregulars and had to barricade himself into the old church. Alerted to his plight, Fannin then sent off Lieutenant Colonel Ward with the Georgia ‘Rattlers’, numbering about 150 men, to rescue him. Thus by the time Houston’s messenger arrived nearly half of Fannin’s men were absent and he was in no position to march anywhere. In the meantime, Ward’s battalion reached Refugio at about 3 pm on March 13, but then got into a pointless argument with King over who was to be in command of the united force. Ward was obviously the ranking officer, but a belligerent King was reluctant to acknowledge the Lieutenant Colonel’s authority and went off to attack a party of Mexicans camped at the nearby Lopez Rancho.
The fight was swift and decisive; the whole thing settled in a matter of minutes by a couple of volleys blasted into the unsuspecting backs of men huddled around their campfires. Unfortunately, in the meantime, Brigadier General Juan Jose Urrea’s advance guard, led by Captain Pretalia, turned up at Refugio shortly before first light on March 14. Pretalia only had a single company of cavalry, together with a flock of irregular scouts and even some local Karankawa Indians, but they were enough to keep Ward pinned inside the church and King in a wood on the other side of the river until Urrea himself came up with his infantry later in the morning. An initial attempt to carry the church at a rush failed and afterwards the Americans claimed to have beaten off at least three attacks with accurate rifle fire. After those first clashes, however, Urrea was pretty content to leave both parties where they were for the eventual outcome could never be in doubt. As it was, while Texian accounts claimed hundreds of Mexican dead, Urrea allowed a much more convincing total of 11 killed and 37 wounded, including those lost in King’s ambush at the Lopez Rancho.
Having started off with just 36 rounds of ammunition for each man, Ward also knew that he had to get out that night or surrender in the morning. King of course was in the same situation and both parties separately tried to escape under cover of darkness. At first all went well, but King’s remaining ammunition was soaked when his men crossed the river and with the coming of daylight he was forced to surrender. The survivors were then roped together, dragged straight back to Refugio and shot out of hand. Ward at first did rather better by avoiding the direct road back to Goliad and after vainly trying to rendezvous with Fannin at Victoria, eventually got within two or three miles of the depot at Dimitt’s Landing. There some of Urrea’s cavalry, led by Captain Jose Irracta, finally caught up with him on March 22. Starving, exhausted and out of ammunition, the Georgia ‘Rattlers’ had no alternative but to surrender
As a result Fannin at Goliad lost three precious days before he was simultaneously informed of the capture of Refugio and of the approach of a second force of Mexican regulars under Colonel Morales and after the obligatory hasty council of war, orders were given to march early next morning. By dawn on March 18 they were ready, but first light discovered a Mexican reconnaissance party just outside the fort, so Colonel Albert Horton and his Matagorda Volunteers were sent to deal with them. Horton’s cavalrymen duly galloped straight towards the Mexicans, who immediately fell back towards a belt of trees, hotly pursued by the excited Texians. Unfortunately, the Mexicans were only retiring on their supports – regular infantry belonging to Morales’ command - and Horton soon came tumbling back again. Pressed hard, he and his men were forced to take refuge in the old mission, which lay on the opposite side of the San Antonio River, before being in turn rescued by Jack Shackleford’s men. The Alabama Red Rovers were so keen to get into the fight that they waded straight across the San Antonio with the water up to their armpits, and then found themselves on the Mexicans’ flank. Shackleford afterwards insisted they would have routed them too if only the gunners at the fort had not given the game away by opening up at that point. Alerted just in time Morales thereupon withdrew his men into the timber. Nevertheless, it was all pretty exciting stuff and better still no-one on either side admitted to having gotten hurt, but the skirmishing stretched through the day and all the while the draught oxen were left hitched to the transport without food or water. By the end of the afternoon neither they nor Horton’s jaded and exhausted horses were capable of going anywhere without being rested, and so Fannin once again called a council of war. All of them recognized that time was running out, since Urrea must be close at hand and so resolved to break out under cover of darkness that very night. Unfortunately when Horton was sent to secure the upper ford he discovered that there were already Mexican troops on the other side – worryingly aggressive ones who threatened to charge when he tried to get a closer look. However the lower ford was still unguarded, but understandably enough no-one by this time was very keen on the idea of striking out across country in the dark so once again they postponed moving until daylight.
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Goliad
Nov 15, 2008 6:13:44 GMT -5
Post by stuart on Nov 15, 2008 6:13:44 GMT -5
When the sun eventually rose on March 19 1836, there was no sign of the Mexicans - or anyone else - since the whole area was blanketed in dense fog, but there was still the same fatal lack of urgency. Instead of moving at once, Fannin waited until his men had eaten their breakfast and had destroyed all the supplies they couldn’t haul away. They also then went about setting fire to what was left of Goliad and it was not until nine or ten o’clock in the morning that they finally got going. However, as a German volunteer named Ehrenberg complained: ‘The number and size of the provisions and ammunition wagons that we took with us were too large and the power to move them was too small so that before we had gone half the way was strewn with objects of all kinds and here and there a wagon that was left standing or knocked to pieces. The rest of the baggage remained standing a mile from Goliad on the romantic banks of the San Antonio, or was dropped in haste into the clear water to the river. Chests filled with muskets provisions or the belongings of the soldiers disappeared in the waves. All the horses and oxen were used to transport the above named artillery, two wagons and the powder magazine. In this way we went slowly forward without even getting to see an enemy.’ Rather more picturesquely, Dr. Joseph Fields commented that everything was ‘drawn by Mexican oxen, in Mexican carts. Not being well broke, nor understanding the language and manners of English drivers, many of them as they issued from the fort, run furiously into the prairie, and were unmanageable. Others would go no way but backwards.’
As none of the animals had been properly fed or watered for over 24 hours and few of the Americans had any real experience of driving them in any language, it was hardly surprising that they should be so balky and unmanageable, or that it would take over an hour to get the guns across the San Antonio river. So slow was their progress that on encountering a patch of fresh grass a mile beyond Manehuilla Creek, Fannin called a halt, ordered the oxen out-spanned and allowed them to graze. Shackleford and a number of other officers remonstrated with him, ‘and urged the necessity of first reaching the Coleto, then about five miles distant’ but it undoubtedly seemed like a good idea at the time. As any real teamster could have told Shackleford, those oxen needed to be fed and rested if they were going to get anywhere at all. In any case there was no sign of Urrea and to all appearances the Americans had succeeded in breaking contact, so in the circumstances Fannin’s decision was a reasonable one, but the the very absence of the irregulars should have been suspicious in itself.
Urrea may in fact have been deliberately hanging back; waiting to make sure the Americans were well away from the Goliad defences before he struck. At any rate he was now closing in fast and Fannin’s cavalry, who should have detected him, were nowhere in sight, for Horton had pushed well ahead, vainly scouting the Coleto woods and the road to Victoria for any sign of the Mexicans. Just two men watched either flank, while four, including Ehrenberg, brought up the rear… Cheerfully oblivious to the approaching danger, Fannin had rested his command for about an hour, and was barely started off again when the first Mexican scouts appeared, and Ehrenberg and his companions came dashing up with a belated warning. For once, Fannin acted decisively. Coleto Creek and its sheltering timber was now only two miles away, so he ordered his artillery to drop trail and act as a rearguard while the rest of the column pressed on. Now that the fight was upon him, he was confident enough and as the weary oxen could still not be prodded into moving at any speed, he ordered his men to move slowly and deliberately, partly to keep pace with the wagons and avoid spooking the animals and partly to preserve their own formation. Providing they maintained a steady front, he declared, the Mexican skirmishers would not dare to interfere with them. Unfortunately it soon became clear that the scouts were backed up by regulars. Those riders who had first arrived on the scene were still hanging back out of range of Fannin’s artillery but now larger bodies of Mexican troops were starting to appear to the north as well as to the west. In the face of this growing threat Fannin halted, recalled his artillery and re-formed his men into a square formation with two or three guns at each corner.
At this point he would appear to have mustered some 300 officers and men, exclusive of Horton’s cavalry who were now effectively cut off from him, and the front of the square (which of course faced back towards the enemy rather than forward to the Coleto woods), was formed with Shackleford’s Red Rovers on the right and the San Antonio Greys, commanded by Captain Samuel Pettus, on the left. The right, or north flank was formed by the Mobile Greys under Lieutenant McManomy, while Ira Westover’s regulars stood on the left and the fourth side of the square was composed of Captain Burr Duval’s company together with a handful of Refugio militia and anyone else not otherwise accounted for.
They found themselves in a terrible place to fight a battle; ‘The prairie, here,’ reported Shackleford, ‘was nearly in the form of a circle. In front was the timber of the Coleto about a mile distant; in the rear, was another strip of timber, about six miles distant; whilst on our right and left equi-distant, four or five miles from us, there were, likewise, bodies of timber.’ There was no water and no natural cover, other than the high prairie grass which favoured the attacker more than the defender. Had they known it, the field also had some other very unfortunate associations.
Although they never actually reached it, American accounts refer to the engagement as the battle of Coleto Creek, but their Mexican adversaries knew it as the Encinal del Perdido – the wood of the lost souls - for on June 19 1817, a now forgotten little battle was fought in the woods just a mile to the north of Fannin’s present position, between the forces of Colonel Antonio Martínez, the last Spanish Governor of Texas, and a Mexican Republican ‘army’ on its way to capture Goliad. The Republicans had 42 men under Colonel Henry Perry and Major James H. Gordon, both former U.S. officers, and veterans of the 1815 Battle of New Orleans. Despite being outnumbered by three to one, Perry and Gordon refused to surrender and in the fight that followed were killed along with more than half their men. Now Urrea’s men used those same woods for cover and to conceal their movements as they prepared to destroy another army of filibusters.
Fannin, having formed his hollow square, determinedly resumed his march towards the nearest point of the Coleto woods, but Urrea was determined to stop him and had more than enough men to do it. He had two battalions of regular infantry belonging to Colonel Juan Morales’ brigade, comprising the Jimenez Permanente Batallon and San Luis Potosi Activos. These new arrivals were all veteran infantrymen who had just helped storm the Alamo. Tough and confident, their casualties there had been relatively light and while the Jimenez was about 300 strong, the San Luis Potosi boasted more than 400 men in the ranks, which meant that Urrea now outnumbered Fannin by over two to one in infantry alone, and thanks to the addition of a couple of detachments which had accompanied Morales, had over 300 regular cavalry and an unknown number of irregulars besides. It was these cavalrymen who began the battle proper by pushing rapidly forward on either side and interposing between the Americans and the woods. Finding himself effectively surrounded and with no alternative but to stand and fight on the spot, Fannin tried to make the best of his situation by heading for a low rise a short distance to the south east, but both luck and the inexperience of his teamsters was against him. Just as he had feared, the increased pace only resulted in the remaining carts and wagons becoming scattered as the long-suffering oxen finally decided they’d had enough. The hospital wagon became entirely separated from the rest of the troops and worse still, explained Shackleford, ‘in endeavoring to reach a commanding eminence in the prairie, our ammunition cart broke down, and we were compelled to take our position in a valley, six or seven feet below the mean base, of about one-fourth of a mile in area.’ At least however they preserved their square formation, and as the Mexicans approached, Fannin had those 500 additional muskets broken out and distributed amongst the men in the front ranks, giving three or four extra to each of them. Urrea for his part saw no reason to hang about, for he had the Americans right out in the open where he wanted them: ‘The method of preparing the charge was to divide the troop into four columns’ he reported, ‘one on the left under the command of Colonel Morales composed of the cazadore companies, another on the right under the command of General Urrea himself with companies of grenadiers and the first of San Luis, and the rest of the Jiménez battalion with Colonel [Mariano de] Salas at the head in the center, placing Lieutenant Colonel [Gabriel] Nuñez with the rearguard cavalry to charge when necessary’
And so they went forward with Salas’ battalion moving slowly and deliberately; and halting periodically to fire volleys ‘to detract the attention of the enemy while we surprised the flanks.’ The first two volleys were pretty ineffective, but the third caused a surprising number of casualties, including Fannin himself who took a bullet in the thigh. Notwithstanding, the Americans coolly held their own fire until the Mexicans were within 100 metres and then at last Fannin gave the order. This first phase of the battle was by all accounts short and extremely violent. Urrea confessed that ‘our column was obliged to operate in guerrillas (detachments in loose formation) in order to avoid, as far as possible, the withering fire of the enemy’, but nevertheless all three columns pressed forward and in the end it was only those additional loaded muskets which enabled the Americans to stop them in a blistering hail of lead. Gamely, the Mexican infantry fell back only a short distance and dropped down into the long grass, from where they maintained a steady harassing fire on the Americans and wrought a sorry havoc amongst the gunners in particular.
Next Urrea attempted a cavalry charge against the rear face of the square ‘and placed myself at the head, convinced that the most eloquent language and the most imperious order is personal example.’ It also helped of course that the Cuautla Permanente was his old regiment, but, he complained, ‘our horses were in very poor condition and ill-suited for the purpose…’ Shackleford was certainly unimpressed and wrote how ‘a body of cavalry, from two to three hundred strong, made a demonstration on our rear. They came up in full tilt, with gleaming lances, shouting like Indians. When about sixty yards distant, the whole of the rear divisions of our little command, together with a piece or two of artillery, loaded with double cannister filled with musket balls, opened a tremendous fire upon them, which brought them to a full halt and swept them down by the scores’. Those heavy casualties were probably more illusory than real, although Urrea certainly took a bullet through his hat, and in John Duval’s opinion the cavalry came dangerously close to breaking the American lines. They might have succeeded too but for the startling amount of firepower brought to bear on them: ‘… in addition to our rifles,’ he explained, ‘each man in the front rank was furnished with a musket and bayonet to repel the charge of cavalry. Besides my rifle and musket I had slung across my shoulders an escopeta, a short light blunderbuss used by the Mexican cavalry, which I had carried all day in expectation of a fight, and which was heavily charged with forty "blue whistlers" and powder in proportion.’ Duval’s blunderbuss and its ‘blue whistlers’ notwithstanding, ‘they nearly succeeded in breaking our lines at several places, and certainly they would have done so had we not taken the precaution of arming all the front ranks with the bayonet and musket.’ Repulsed, the Mexican cavalry retired a short distance, then dismounted and commenced a fusillade of their own with carbines and escoptas. Ineffective though it was, this firing served its purpose by holding Fannin’s command where it was. Nevertheless, Urrea soon began to get concerned about his ammunition supply and in any case, as a cavalryman who had honed his skills in Indian fighting, he chafed at the inactivity and so decided to try to mount another assault. This time he intended to attack on all four sides of the square at once ‘to see if I could disconcert the enemy before the sad moment arrived when we would be entirely without ammunition.’ The attacks were co-ordinated by bugle calls and predictably enough Urrea again insisted on personally leading his cavalry, but once again the Mexicans only advanced to within forty or fifty paces of the square before being brought to a halt by musketry and by artillery fire poured into the flanks of his assault columns. This fire, he complained; ‘was very lively, making itself all the more noticeable in proportion as ours died out for lack of ammunition. In these circumstances, I ordered all our infantry to fix bayonets and to maintain a slow fire with whatever powder remained.’ When he ordered his men to fix bayonets, Urrea plainly feared a counter-attack, but not realising that the Mexicans had effectively run out of ammunition, the Americans were content to stay where they were. John Duval merely commented that; ‘being very poor marksmen, most of their bullets passed harmlessly over our heads’ but one particular group of Urrea’s men were a different proposition altogether. Duval identified them as Cerise Indians from the Rio Grande, while Ehrenberg thought them to be Caranchuas and Lipans, but it is equally likely that they could have been Colonel Morales’ Baker rifle-armed cazadores. At any rate whoever they were, Duval complained that they; ‘boldly advanced to the front, and taking advantage of every little inequality of the ground and every bunch of grass that could afford them particular cover, they would crawl up closely and fire upon us, and now and then the discharge of their long single barrel shot guns was followed by the fall of some one in our ranks. Four of them had crawled up behind some bunches of tall grass within eighty yards of us, from whence they delivered their fire with telling effect. Capt. D-, who was using a heavy Kentucky rifle, and was known to be one of the best marksmen in his company, was requested to silence these Indians. He took a position near a gun carriage, and whenever one of the Indians showed his head above the tall grass it was perforated with an ounce rifle ball and after four shots they were seen no more’. That was all well and good, but what no-one seems to have realised until too late was that the Mexicans were not only targeting those unwary enough to stick their heads up, they were also picking off the remaining horses and oxen to ensure there would be no breakout.
This low level skirmishing went on for another hour or so before the fading light and mutual exhaustion brought it to a close. Nevertheless, indolent was not a word that could ever be applied to Juan Jose Urrea and during the night, he tells us, he ‘closed the circle formed by our advance guards and moved our scouts forward until they could observe the slightest movement in the other camp… harassing the enemy and keeping them awake with false bugle calls’.
Even without this, the Americans can have got little sleep that night and as the Mexicans withdrew, they broke formation and congregated in the centre to count the cost and argue over the consequences. On the plus side they had handsomely held their own against superior numbers and in tactical terms could claim at least a partial victory. Fannin is said to have announced that, ‘we beat them today and we can do it again tomorrow’, but whether they believed him or not, no-one felt much like celebrating The worrying fact of the matter was that despite losing some 50 killed and 140 wounded, those Mexicans had not obligingly run away, but were still out there, still surrounding them and so far as anyone could tell still full of fight. On the other hand at least 10 of the Americans were dead and as many as 70 badly wounded, while no-one bothered counting those who were hurt but still on their feet. Like the Mexicans they had also shot away a lot of ammunition and although they had not yet run short, there was real doubt as to whether they had enough for a second day’s battle. Food was equally short and worse still there was no water for man or beast – not even for the many wounded.
Unsurprisingly a breakout was uppermost on everyone’s mind, but so many of the horses and oxen had either been killed or strayed that it would mean abandoning the artillery, which all were agreed was the only thing which had so far saved them from defeat. Worse still it would also mean abandoning all those wounded. Fannin set out the situation plainly. The only sensible course open to them was to leave as soon as it was dark enough to conceal their movements, and cut their way through the Mexican lines to reach the temporary sanctuary of the timber on the Coleto. The Mexicans, he asserted, would be too demoralised to stop them, but he said nothing about how they would fare the next day without their artillery and with a rapidly dwindling supply of small-arms ammunition. In the end of course it was the wounded who swayed the discussion. Although the San Antonio Greys and Mobile Greys were still game for fighting their way out, Jack Shackleford for one declared that he would not agree to any course of action that involved leaving his wounded behind, and so ‘it was unanimously determined not to abandon our wounded men, but to remain with them and share their fate, whatever it might be.’
Instead then, they dug in where they stood and as Dr. Barnard recorded; ‘the entrenchment was made around us as we then were, and did not enclose a fourth part of the ground we occupied in the battle. We went to work with our spades and dug a ditch, two or three feet in depth.’ The spoil from the trench was thrown outwards and this miserable fortification improved by piling up the remaining wagons and carts, and even the carcases of the dead horses and oxen. Those men not actively employed in digging were issued with two muskets apiece in readiness against a Mexican attack but all the while they were blanketed in a cold drizzle which, according to Ehrenberg, made their weapons useless.
All that sustained them through the night was an illusory hope that Horton and his missing cavalry might return from Victoria with reinforcements of some kind, but at daybreak Urrea prepared to resume the battle. Unlike the Americans his men were well fed and at 6.30 that morning a long awaited ammunition column came up, escorted by 100 more infantry and better still two cannon and a howitzer, which he placed on the high ground, protected by cazadores.
A couple of rounds fired into the American position were sufficient to convince the filibusters that the game was up and after a hurried consultation with his officers, Fannin raised a white flag. The capitulation that followed was a controversial one. Encouraged by a Mexican Colonel named Holzinger, Fannin understood that after surrendering, his men would be marched either to Copano, or perhaps Matamoros, and then repatriated to New Orleans. Indeed when the 234 Americans did surrender, Dr. Barnard remembered that Holzinger exclaimed; ‘Well gentlemen, in ten days, liberty and home…’ and that as they handed over their weapons, ‘our officers were called to put theirs by themselves, which we did, in a box that was nailed up in our presence, with an assurance that they should be safely returned to us on our release, which they flattered us would shortly take place.’ Each sword even had a ticket attached; bearing the owner’s name, but afterwards Urrea flatly denied ever offering anything better than an unconditional surrender. Indeed as Santa Anna himself firmly reminded him, he had no authority to do so, since a Circular de la secretaria de Guerra of December 30 1835 expressly instructed that all such prisoners were to be executed.
It fell in the end to Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas Portillo of the Yucatan Activos to carry out the orders. A few individuals were spared for a variety or reasons or pretexts, but the great majority of them pulled on their knapsacks and marched out of Goliad in three groups on the morning of March 27. It was Palm Sunday and they were told they were marching to Copano and the ships that would carry them home to New Orleans. Instead, a short distance down the road they were halted and ‘ordered to sit down with their backs to the Guard. Young [Robert] Fenner… rose on his feet, and exclaimed "Boys, they are going to kill us - die with your faces to them, like men!" At the same moment, two other young men, flourishing their caps over their heads, shouted at the top of their voices: "Hurra for Texas!" Then the firing began. In the confusion a number of men, including Herman Ehrenberg and John Duval, managed to escape but at the end of the day the best estimate is that 342 men were murdered in cold blood, including Fannin himself and all the other wounded.
Once the last of them had been finished off with lance and bayonet the bodies were stripped of their knapsacks and clothing, then piled up and burned on great funeral pyres. The dense black smoke of those fires provided a dramatic finale to the ill-fated Matamoros expedition, but just a month later they would be avenged at San Jacinto when the last Texan army charged into battle shouting ‘Remember the Alamo… Remember Goliad!
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Goliad
Dec 15, 2008 14:51:46 GMT -5
Post by mustanggray on Dec 15, 2008 14:51:46 GMT -5
Stuart,
Interesting stuff on Goliad. I was curious as to where you got your research to flesh out the little details of the battle at Coleto creek? Also, I've been wondering about the muskets Fannin brought up and discussed this with a friend this summer. In your posting here you said "At least however they preserved their square formation, and as the Mexicans approached, Fannin had those 500 additional muskets broken out and distributed amongst the men in the front ranks, giving three or four extra to each of them." Where did you find that Fannin issued out the muskets at that point? It makes sense to me at least to have your command all armed with the same weapon for ease of ammo distribution but then I have seen where Fannin got the muskets(and I think a few boxes as well) but I've never seen anything in regards to ammo.
Please shed some light on this for me... I'm anxiously awaiting your response and hope this is in some book I've overlooked!
Sincerely, Scott McMahon
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Goliad
Dec 16, 2008 8:45:29 GMT -5
Post by stuart on Dec 16, 2008 8:45:29 GMT -5
I'll have to look for the reference to distributing the extra muskets when I get home from the office; but the short answer to your question is that there isn't a book that you've missed - or at least not one that I've read. An awful lot of my stuff is written simply because nobody else has, so after going out and doing the research I write it up.
Pretty well everything in the article came from stuff on the de Witt Colony site, so you can try having a browse while I get back to you. Although i wouldn't take everything as gospel, the Huson article is quite useful
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Goliad
Dec 16, 2008 15:53:15 GMT -5
Post by mustanggray on Dec 16, 2008 15:53:15 GMT -5
Stuart,
So are you saying it's conjecture/educated guess? I'm just trying to understand where this information came from... I was hoping there was some obscure book or some original letters that have been overlooked until now. You're saying you came up with this on the DeWitt colony website?
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Goliad
Dec 17, 2008 3:29:33 GMT -5
Post by stuart on Dec 17, 2008 3:29:33 GMT -5
Stuart, So are you saying it's conjecture/educated guess? Not at all; I wrote the article above (in its original form it was going to be a chapter of "Secret War", because I thought the battle needed a proper modern account with just this kind of detail. You'll find the reference as I suggested in Hobart Huson's article, but the original source is John C. Duval's account: '...in addition to our rifles, each man in the front rank was furnished with a musket and bayonet to repel the charge of cavalry. Besides my rifle and musket I had slung across my shoulders an "escopeta," a short light "blunderbuss" used by the Mexican cavalry..." You'll find everything including all the other "details" in the various contemporary accounts collected in the De Witt site
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Goliad
Dec 18, 2008 1:57:15 GMT -5
Post by mustanggray on Dec 18, 2008 1:57:15 GMT -5
Stuart,
Okay, I've seen the Duval account so you're right, that's nothing new. Where did you come up with the idea that Fannin issued three or four muskets to each man as the battle began? Where do those numbers come from? Do you think when Duval says each man in the front rank he actually means EACH and EVERY man in the front ranks or just those in the then consolidated Mustang company?
All very interesting subject for discussion!
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Goliad
Dec 18, 2008 4:57:24 GMT -5
Post by stuart on Dec 18, 2008 4:57:24 GMT -5
Nah, nothing new to get excited about, as I said above all I did was pull stuff together. The clear impression I had from the Duval account is that everybody in the front rank got those extra muskets, not just the Mustangs. Don't remember where the additional ones came from though. It'll be in there somewhere but it was quite some time ago when I originally wrote it.
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Goliad
Dec 25, 2008 11:39:35 GMT -5
Post by Paul Sylvain on Dec 25, 2008 11:39:35 GMT -5
Very interesting account, Stuart. Even as a very young boy, I certainly knew about the Alamo (thanks to Fess and Disney) but didn't learn about Goliad until some time later when I picked up one of those monthly Wild West type mags that were popular back then. I think the cover piece had to do with the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee, and bought it because (as a boy) that whole "cowboys and Indians" think interested me. But inside the mag was a story about Fannin and the massacre at Goliad.
My point is that Goliad is often a sidebar to the Alamo story, and few people still know much about it, other than Travis' trying to get Fannin and his men up to Bexar to reinforce the Alamo. Nice piece of work, Stewart. I seem to recall some of this as appearing in The Texian Iliad, which I finally picked up and read this past summer. I don't recall anything about the muskets, though.
Still, Goliad is an often overlooked chapter of the Texas Revolution, but one that bears attention.
Paul
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Goliad
Jan 29, 2009 2:10:01 GMT -5
Post by stuart on Jan 29, 2009 2:10:01 GMT -5
Nah, nothing new to get excited about, as I said above all I did was pull stuff together. The clear impression I had from the Duval account is that everybody in the front rank got those extra muskets, not just the Mustangs. Don't remember where the additional ones came from though. It'll be in there somewhere but it was quite some time ago when I originally wrote it. The extra (ie multiple) muskets is in Urrea's account and also, although he wasn't a direct eyewitness, Garay's
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