History Lesson 
The Border Fence, Brownsville 
Ghosts Of War
More than 250 years of history are hidden at battlefields across the state, waiting to be discovered. I made it my mission to visit the places—both famous and forgotten—where blood was shed and lives were lost in the creation of Texas. And with apologies to my old teachers, I learned more than I ever did in the classroom.
Donald M. Yena’s painting of the Goliad Massacre, in which James Fannin and his men were executed by Mexican troops on March 27, 1836 and Jeff Wilson’s February 26, 2009, photograph of the presidio, which has been reconstructed.
Painting by Donald M. Yena, Photograph by Jeff Wilson
Bill says: For us history teachers who you are correcting, you need to add all of the artwork from the magazine to the on-line story. The pictures would be wonderful for class presentations. (April 8th, 2009 at 1:21pm)
God love her, Peggy Bayless got a lot of it wrong. So did many of the people who taught Texas history to our seventh-graders over the generations. Miss Bayless’s shortcomings were exposed recently during a three-month odyssey in which I visited battlegrounds all over the state. Time and again I learned about signal events that she had never mentioned and that I had never dreamed occurred. The trip covered more than a thousand miles and took me from the upper reaches of the Panhandle to the southernmost tip of the coast. The journey was an eye-opener, history exposed to the glare of fresh research and firsthand exploration.
I learned, for example, that the Texas Revolution—the original one at least—began not in 1835, as I was taught in the Arlington public school system by the learned Miss Bayless, but in 1812. That was the year the Republican Army of the North swept across the Sabine and later captured Nacogdoches, Goliad, and San Antonio from the royalist government of Spain before declaring independence on April 6, 1813. As Frank de la Teja, the chair of the history department at Texas State University, in San Marcos, has pointed out, when we celebrate Texas Independence Day, we should remember April 6, 1813, as well as March 2, 1836.
The Republican Army of the North was a ragtag band of Mexicans, Tejanos, Anglos, and American Indians commanded by José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, a native of the Rio Grande town of Revilla, and Augustus Magee, a former U.S. Army lieutenant. Gutiérrez was a patriot, Magee an adventurer. Their invasion of Texas from the no-man’s-land along the Louisiana border was the first step in a grander plan to free all of Mexico from the hated Spanish government. It resulted in the short-lived Green Flag Republic of Texas, so called because of the color of its battle flag.
That’s right, Miss Bayless, more than six flags flew over Texas. In fact, as I learned during my reporting, the correct number is closer to nine. There’s also a red-and-white banner that James Long and his filibusters flew when they occupied Presidio La Bahía, at Goliad, in 1821, and a flag with a red severed arm and a bloody sword that flew over the fortress a few months before the Texas Declaration of Independence (the one in 1836, that is).
My great adventure was conceived last summer on a visit to San Antonio when, in one of those eureka moments, it dawned on me that we’ve always treated battlefields as shrines rather than historical sites. We’ve forgotten why they are important, how they are interconnected, and how they shape our destiny. We protect the Alamo’s two remaining original structures, the chapel and long barracks, as if they were irreplaceable jewels, but we mostly ignore Alamo Plaza, where much of the fighting took place. The plaza has been allowed to degenerate into a commercial mess: The west wall, which was once William B. Travis’s headquarters, is now occupied by Ripley’s Believe It or Not; the north wall, where he died, is a post office.
So after consulting with several prominent historians and writers, I put together a highly subjective list of battlegrounds that had a special appeal to me and hit the road. I learned that some of our most interesting and important sites are sadly overlooked, a tragedy given the ferocious birth of our state. In so many ways, our history is written in the blood of the men and women—Spanish, Indian, Mexican, and Anglo—whose lives ended in violence. We’ve made almost no effort to understand these battles or tell people how to find their locations. Small wonder they are largely forgotten. I made it my mission to remember.
The Massacre at the San Sabá Mission
Location: Near Menard
Date: March 16, 1758
Casualties: More than 25 killed
The only help I had in finding the site of the massacre at the San Sabá Mission were a few books written by Robert S. Weddle, an independent historian from Bonham. Weddle spent years researching not only the attack on the mission along the San Saba River by an alliance of the Comanche and other tribes but also the ill-fated expedition that sought revenge. After several false starts, I located a marker next to a plowed field on Ranch Road 2092, just east of the bucolic Hill Country town of Menard. Archaeologists didn’t discover the actual site until 1993. For years people confused the mission with the presidio, which was built 4 miles upstream, or mistakenly believed it was 75 miles away, in the town of San Saba. As I would soon discover, this battle had been a massacre waiting to happen.
The ruins of the presidio were easier to find. They sit next to the Menard Golf Course. The fortress was imposing, but today all that remains are a few broken walls and a tower, which were reconstructed in 1937—the “ruin of the ruins,” as Weddle put it. Golfers on the adjacent course appeared not to notice or care what happened here more than 250 years ago.
As massacres go, the body count at the mission was fairly modest. A mounted horde of two thousand Comanche and their allies burned the mission on March 16, 1758, killing two priests and six other Spaniards. Spain had built this mission to help pacify the Apache, never dreaming that the Comanche were a more serious problem. The Apache had been driven down the Edwards Plateau by the Comanche and had started terrorizing settlers. Something had to be done. The military advocated killing as many Indians as possible, but the clergy thought it had a better idea: Convert them.
For a while the Apache appeared to go along with the “brown robes,” but in fact they never intended to trade their freedom for the life of a Christian sodbuster. Squeezed from the south by the Spanish and from the north by the Comanche, the cunning Apache played their two enemies against each other. The Spanish never realized that they had been tricked into building the mission on the edge of Comancheria; the Comanche knew exactly how to respond.
Before the attack began, the priests were so bewildered at the sight of the warriors that they ordered the soldiers to hold their fire. In his classic book Lone Star, T. R. Fehrenbach wrote that Padre Terreros “seemed hypnotized by the barbaric splendor of the savages, who were painted black and red—war paint, though the Spanish did not recognize it—and wore impressive headgear of buffalo horns, deer antlers, and eagle plumes.”
Rummaging through the ruins one chilly day last November, I got the eerie feeling that the ghosts of the Spanish soldiers were still around. I sat for a while on the banks of the placid, green San Saba, sheltered from the low autumn sun by giant oaks and pecans, reflecting on how a people as ingenious as the Spanish could have been subverted by their own arrogance. In downtown Menard, you can still see their system of canals. But these same deep thinkers practiced a suicidal policy of trying to match the Indians killing for killing, cruelty for cruelty. Priests signed off on the slaughter by giving soldiers absolution in advance. When Spaniards killed Indians, it was God’s work. When Indians killed Spaniards, it was a massacre. No wonder, then, that the Spanish began losing their missionary impulses after their experience on the San Saba.
The Parrilla Campaign
Location: The Red River, near Spanish Fort
Date: 1759
Casualties: More than 100 killed
The expedition to avenge the attack on the San Sabá Mission was the grandest ever mounted by the Spanish in colonial Texas. Commanded by Colonel Diego Ortiz Parrilla, six hundred men, plus seven hundred or so Apache, who had tagged along mostly to hunt buffalo and make mischief, set out to reassert Spain’s dominance. But Parrilla, who had survived the attack at the mission, had no idea where he was heading. This was uncharted territory, up the Edwards Plateau to the Rolling Plains, then along the edge of the Cross Timbers to the Red River.
Weddle estimates that Parrilla traveled more than four hundred miles to reach the Red River, meandering along the way. At one point the soldiers diverted from their route to attack a Tonkawa village. Though the Tonkawa were most likely not part of the war party that had burned the San Sabá Mission, the Spanish nevertheless killed 55 Indians and took away 149 prisoners in chains.
The trail eventually led to a newly fortified village occupied by the Comanche and the Taovaya, a branch of the Wichita. The fortress was surrounded by a moat and sat on a high riverbank in what is now Jefferson County, Oklahoma. Directly across the river, on the Texas side, are Montague County and a tiny community named Spanish Fort.
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