Deadly Old Medina
Did you know the bloodiest battle in North America west of Louisiana took place in Texas? And it wasn't the Alamo or San Jacinto?
In the grand scheme of human warfare, it's not all that enormous a bloodletting: "only" about 1500 people died at the Battle of Medina on this date as I type this (August 18) in 1813. Yet it remains, as near as I can tell, the bloodiest battle ever fought in what we now know as the American West and the second-deadliest day in Texas history. (Trailing only that of the Great Hurricane’s 1900 landfall at Galveston.)
The Texas State Historical Marker puts it in a nutshell better than I ever could, even if it downplays the geographical aspect. Nowhere else in the West has more blood been spilled in a single battle:
But what were they really fighting for? There is reason to believe the operation could have been a black op on the part of President James Madison, an early active measure in what would be the namesake doctrine of his Secretary of State James Monroe: stoke the embers of discontent in a teetering and nearby Spanish province, and then send in an “army of liberation” nominally headed by a “patriotic Mexican.” If it works out, then Texas is half in the bag for the United States, as instead of a European power as an enemy, you have a friendless fledgling state. Which is basically what we would do, albeit 30 or so years later.
Historian JCA Stagg categorically denies this, but even in his thorough point-by-point counterargument, he seems to lose the forest for the trees: our government knew full well about this expedition well in advance. They’d even met with Bernardo Gutierrez himself in Washington, New York, and New Orleans. If it was not exactly sanctioned, nor was it hindered, and had it taken a turn for the rebels’ favor, it’s hard to believe the US government would not have then hastily recognized whatever government Gutierrez established in San Antonio.
Which is not what happened. And since there is no smoking gun correspondence in any archive, it’s gone in the books as the rash action of a few overambitious hothead would-be Simon Bolivars or Sam Houstons or Bernardo O’Higginses, one of many such in those turbulent times ranging from Argentina to Texas.
You’d think it might make for a good movie, but it was A) It’s hard to find any good guys here; the motives of the Gutierrez-Magee Expedition were suspect, as they were trying to impose their version of freedom from beyond Texas’s borders, and while you could try to cast the victorious Royalists under General Arredondo in that light, you run into point B): The climactic battle itself was a bleak comedy of errors -- bungling field leadership on both sides -- that culminated in a rout followed by a savage massacre of prisoners.
As most such battles would prove to be in Texas for the next few decades, be they between Texans and Mexicans or either side fighting the Comanche or Apache. (Or the Texans under the vile President Lamar vs the Cherokee. And in the aftermath of San Jacinto there was a large-scale slaughter of Mexican prisoners before Houston’s officers could restore order, as seen below:
And as perhaps too-vividly described here:
After the formal battle the slaughter began, which tarnished the subsequent victory. The weeks of frustration and retreat, combined with the pent up desire for revenge and the seething anger against Santa Anna, had created a volcano of emotion that finally erupted in the closing stages of the battle. The thin veneer of soldierly discipline, so carefully built up over the days, was shed within minutes.
Surrendering Mexican soldiers were ruthlessly cut down, with bowie knives slicing throats in crimson sprays of arterial blood, and axes and tomahawks chopping, rending, and cutting with brutal efficiency and similar gore. Even drummer boys were not spared. Houston, badly wounded in the ankle, still tried to control his raging soldiers. Unsuccessful, he finally rode off to get his wound dressed. “Gentlemen, I applaud your bravery, but damn your manners,” he said disgustedly as he departed.
The killing continued for hours; even those trying to seek refuge by swimming in Peggy’s Lake were shot down. A Texas officer named Rusk tried to save Castrillon, but the Mexican general was shot down anyway. The Texans, especially the rough frontier types, were not squeamish about taking human life and reveled in the violence. Eventually the blood lust abated and by sundown the Battle of San Jacinto was over.
I am not sure if that aspect of the Battle of San Jacinto is included in the modern-day reenactments….
While these may have been mere skirmishes compared to the likes of Waterloo and Gettysburg, the conditions under which they were fought were much more metal -- trumpets blaring deathly degüellos, panicked soldiers in full retreat run down and lanced by cavalrymen, cries of mercies unheard amid summary mass executions, the air thick with black powder smoke.
At Medina, the Spanish commander ordered that the slain adventurers’ bodies be left where they fell, to the mercy of the summer sun and scavenging buzzards and coyotes.
There were no good guys to root for there -- after these Loyalists massacred these prisoners, they themselves turned against the same King of Spain they were fighting for at Medina.
In older accounts of the expedition, you detect a sort of bigoted tone coming from American and Texan historians. The whole crusade was a shambolic affair from the get-go, with this motley army always under an uncertain command structure of rival Americans and Mexicans.
One American commander, West Point grad Augustus Magee, died of measles. Or was poisoned — possibly by some of the outlaws under his command he’d had occasion to tie to whipping posts and flog back in the day. Two others resigned allegedly after a Mexican officer under their command named Delgado disobeyed their order to transport some prisoners to a Mexico-bound ship in Matagorda Bay, choosing instead to massacre them on the outskirts of San Antonio.
Supposedly this was a personal matter. The ranking officer among these prisoners had years before executed Delgado’s father amid an earlier episode of unrest in San Antonio.)
At any rate, we are led to believe that when American officers had the upper hand, the invasion was under able command, orderly and merciful according to the rules of civilized warfare. When Mexicans would take control, the same army immediately transformed into a rapacious horde of indisciplined barbarians. Hmmm…
Given that this army was composed in large part of Apache and Tonkawa warriors and common criminals from the lawless Neutral Ground of the Piney Woods of the Texas-Louisiana borderlands, it’s hard to imagine they would pass muster in the Duke of Wellington’s army, be their commander named Magee or Gutierrez, Kemper or Toledo. It just seems more likely that they didn’t meet any real resistance until the very end.
So — no movie. And had the Texas Revolution ended after Goliad and the Alamo with an ignominious retreat of the Texian Army to the safety of Louisiana, those debacles would not have been entered into honored lore either, so Phil Collins would have had to find some other glorious tragedy to latch onto with his oddball fascination. Without the redemption of San Jacinto and the victory that came with it, Crockett, Bowie, and Travis et al would be in the fascinating footnotes bin along with Gutierrez, Magee, and William Walker, the Gray Eyed Man of Destiny, a Nashville-bred lawyer who managed to seize control of Nicaragua for a few months in the 1850s.
Well, I take back the notion that there would be no movie about the likes of William Walker. Because there was one and it was really weird. It was directed by a left-wing Brit who previously made films like Repo Man and Sid & Nancy and it featured a score by Joe Strummer. It was an intentionally anachronistic surreal black comedy verrrry loosely based on facts and filmed on site in Nicaragua with the blessings of then-newly installed leftist president Daniel Ortega and the Roman Catholic Church both.
It did not lionize Walker but skewered him instead as an avatar of rapacious American foreign policy, Banana Republic capitalism, and the way both are cloaked beneath the Great Lie of spreading “Democracy.”
It was simply called Walker, and it starred Ed Harris as the Man of Destiny. Both Siskel and Ebert gave it zero stars — not so much for its slant as for its general weirdness — and the film effectively ended the once-promising Hollywood career of Cox, who’d been riding high up to that point off the back of those two Gen X-defining classics.
Absent the redemption of San Jacinto, that is where the “heroes of the Alamo” would be today, and such movies are doomed to abject failure. This is a country and a culture that abhors The Loser.
But!
I think I have found an angle — a bodice ripper of a romance centered on a Louisiana Frenchmen and his teen San Antonio bride and the creation story of a signature Texas dish. It’s all supposed to be true — a vieja in San Antonio knew the whole tale from birth.
But for that, you will have to read part 2.