There's something odd about the Alamo story.

It's a defeat.

Or at least it's a defeat from the perspective of the people that celebrate it the most.

It's probably the most celebrated defeat in United States history, and the United States isn't a country that likes to celebrate defeat.

And I think this is our first clue that the Alamo isn't a typical Anglo American story.

And yet, for the people who are arguing the loudest about whether we should remember the Alamo or forget the Alamo, they're usually doing so in the context of the Anglo American narrative tradition.

But it doesn't quite work, does it?

Maybe we need to look back to the people who set off the events of 1835 36 to better untangle this.

The channels.

The channels participated in the 1835 36 Texas Revolution at higher rates than Anglos.

So say Francisco Ruiz, in fact, was the second man to sign the 1836 Declaration of Independence, and his nephew, Jose Antonio Navarro, was third.

And it was the rabble rousing of younger diners like once again, who had drawn the Mexican army up into Texas in the first place.

By the time you get to the Battle of San Jacinto, once again, the core company of Theranos was the one unit that had seen action in nearly every engagement of the Texas Revolution.

And so, for me, the bigger question of 1836 isn't what Anglos were fighting for.

It's what were Theranos fighting for?

What motivated Theranos, like Ruiz, Navarro and Seguin and the rest of his company, to risk their fortunes and their lives in 1836?

What did they have in common?

What they had in common was the Battle of Medina, at least 15 of 1621.

Theranos had an immediate male family member who had fought in the biggest, bloodiest battle in Texas history back in 1813, the Battle of Medina.

And it's probably more.

But to bring it home even more, the underlined names here had fathers or uncles who were, in fact the leaders of the events that culminated in the ill fated Battle of Medina.

Francisco Ruiz, in fact, was the highest ranking Tejano survivor after the Battle of Medina, and would endure a decade in exile because of it, as would say Antonio Navarro.

The Battle of Medina was the formative event in the lives of the Annals of 1836, and so, for their motivations, we probably need to go back to 1830.

On September 16th, 1810, Father Miguel Hidalgo unleashed his grito against three centuries of Spanish rule and set off the War of Mexican Independence.

His revolt swept across Mexico more rapidly than anybody could have imagined.

The fervor of Hidalgo movement swept throughout Spanish North America, even reaching as far as distant little San Antonio.

On January 22nd, 1811, just before dawn, a retired militia captain named Juan Bautista de las Casas and most of the local San Antonio militia marched in columns to the Plaza de Armas.

They positioned themselves strategically throughout the plaza, and when the governor emerged, they arrested him along with his top lieutenants and set themselves in chains to wire Willa.

Although he initially enjoyed the support of San Antonio's population, de las Casas pretty quickly overreached.

His revolt soon became an excuse for different factions to try to settle old scores.

On March 2nd, 1811, just five weeks or so after the so-called de las Casas revolt had begun, ten of San Antonio's leading men, both royalists and revolutionaries, met in secret just north of town, including families like the Rojas, Delgado and Machakos, but also a young Joseph Francisco Ruiz and the commander of the local militia, Erasmo Seguin.

The next morning, on March 3rd, 1811, in coordination with the other conspirators, Seguin and his men turned the tables on de las Casas.

They surprised the insurrectionist de las Casas as he emerged from the Spanish governor's palace and sent himself in chains, where he was executed, decapitated, and his head returned to San Antonio on a pike.

Things hadn't gone much better for Father Miguel Hidalgo, even after reaching the outskirts of Mexico City in late 1810.

His momentum turned.

A string of defeats sent him retreating through the Mexican barrio region and up into a villa, trying to make it to San Antonio, where he thought the flame of revolt still burned bright.

But Father Hidalgo would never make it.

He was ambushed in what we la by the same Spanish governor, in fact, whom San Antonians had just deposed, but who had escaped.

His captors.

But not before Father Miguel Hidalgo had dispatched an emissary to the United States, Jose Bernardo Gutierrez de la.

Like the inhabitants of San Antonio, was a product of the northern Mexican frontier.

Born in Rivia, a town now submerged under the waters of Lake Falcon, he was a businessman, a rancher, and a charismatic natural leader of men.

Some later accounts will remember him as a blacksmith, because he was seen repairing his men's weapons in the middle of a battle.

But this may have actually just been the proof of his style of leadership.

Hands on from the front or wherever he was needed most.

And in March of 1811, just four days before Father Hidalgo was ambushed, the curate had appointed Gutierrez de la his emissary to the United States.

Gutierrez de la took the charge seriously with a small entourage of loyal allies.

He trekked his way back to the Rio Grande and from there to the coast, where he took passage to New Orleans with only a few letters of introduction from Father Hidalgo.

And after personally dispatching a few Spanish Royalist assassins who had been sent to kill him, Gutierrez de la laid the groundwork for his Republican Army of the North, a multiethnic alliance of Lipan Apache, Comanche and Toccoa Indians, Anglo American mercenaries, and of course, his corps at the hands, led by old families with names like Roger Delgado, Menchaca, Ruiz, Navarro and Seguin.

What followed was the most remarkable campaign in Texas military history that you've never heard of.

Outnumbered at every turn over the course of a year, Gutierrez de la managed to capture Nacogdoches, then Goliad, and then in March of 1813, San Antonio itself.

He routed an additional Spanish royalist army sent to defeat him at the Battle of Allison Creek.

In June of 1813.

And during this time, Gutierrez and his allies became the first Spanish American province to have rid itself entirely of a Royalist presence, leading them to publish the first Texas Declaration of Independence.

Notes.

El pueblo de la provincia the Texas.

We the people of the Province of Texas.

It begins.

And if your ears don't immediately hear the opening lines of the US Constitution, then you didn't pay enough attention in high school.

But El Pueblo also has a particularly rich resonance in the Spanish legal tradition.

You may not know this, but you need to know that the Spanish Peninsula has an even longer tradition of representative government than the British Isles.

The first Spanish Parliament was convened in 1188, the first such parliament in Europe.

In fact, half a century before the Magna Carta and almost a full century before the first English Parliament.

And unlike the English system, from the start, the Spanish Parliament included representatives of Los Buenos hombres de Los pueblos.

Commoners.

Pueblo in Spanish means both the people in the general sense, but also the town.

The idea being that the town is the core building block of government, and that the town is the people that live in it.

Pueblos in this tradition hold their rights against the monarchy as the ritual, natural or by custom common law, as we might call it.

And this becomes the basis for an incredibly rich and wildly underappreciated tradition of natural law.

In the halls of Spanish academia, and particularly Jesuit scholasticism in the 1500s and 1600s.

So it's not a surprise to see the phrase the ritual natural use three different times in this declaration as well, paralleling and pleasantly invoking the Anglo-American natural law tradition, which actually owes much to this Spanish tradition for its articulation of the right of out, the right of the people to dispense with an unjust monarch.

This form of Spanish natural law later comes to be memorialized in Cartas pueblos, town charters or people's charters.

And in particular they were granted to Spanish pueblos on the frontier, in this case of Christian and Muslim Spain.

The particular and in many cases special privileges granted to the pueblos on the frontiers under these charters were part of the incentive and part of the reward for life on the frontier, which was by all means, even then hard and unforgiving.

So that by 1813 the Spanish tradition had a 1000 year old legacy of rewarding frontiersmen, like those now living in Texas with special rights and privileges.

Rights and privileges that they felt with good cause were owed to them as North American frontiersmen.

And rights and privileges that were being denied to them now by the Spanish government.

The 1813 declaration articulates this doctrine in pretty familiar terms.

Here it reads.

Governments are instituted for the good and happiness of the communities, and not for the enlargement of a few individuals.

And when this end isn't perverted and it begins to become a system of oppression, the people have a right to change it for another, better adapted to their needs, that men are born free and that everyone comes out from this same principle.

To wrap it up.

The document channels a healthy dose of Thomas Jefferson quote, in order to give greater weight to the declaration and to inspire, do confidence in our new nation.

We each and all solemnly swear before the Holy Ghost, before our brothers, throughout this Republic and before the universe at large, that we will defend and sustain to the ultimate extremity and to the ultimate end, our principles and our patriot, our homeland.

Unfortunately, most of the men signing this document would pay for their principles with their lives, but not before a coup from within the Republican Army of the North deposed Gutierrez, the latter a Spanish nobleman by the name of Jose Alvarez.

The Toledo came into camp one day and convinced Gutierrez, the latter's ruling junta, to swap out the blacksmith merchant from Revere for a newcomer with shiny metals on his chest.

This left local leaders, most notably Miguel Men Chacon, because Francisco Ruiz is the highest ranking the hands in the ranks, both of whom were openly skeptical.

Now of their new commander's loyalties.

And yet, in Chuka Ruiz and 1400 or so other men follow the newcomer Alvarez de Toledo into the field.

On August 18th, 1813, to a spot near or just south, or maybe on the Medina River.

More on that later.

There they laid up an ambush for the approaching Spanish royalist force, numbering 1830 men, under the command of an experienced, one eyed commander named Joaquin.

The Arredondo.

The terrain was well chosen for an ambush.

Everyone agrees on this, but when the first Spanish rider came into view, a handful of jittery Republican riflemen gave up their position.

A Spanish cavalry troop rode into view, now to rescue their comrade, and the Republicans attacked.

The Republican Army of the North was as yet unbeaten, and it hadn't won its battles by playing defense.

The Hamilton, Libanais and Tonka was, and Anglos all charged forward through the blackjack sugar sand of the so-called ensign.

All the Medina men, chuka and Ruiz, were at the forefront of the Takano cavalry Anglo internal militia, dragging the cannons through the heat without water, mile after chaotic mile in pursuit of an elusive Spanish retreat that they could never seem to catch up to until they stumbled into an ambush of their own.

The complete Spanish army revealed itself now to the Republicans through an opening in the oak trees.

There the armies collided, slugging it out for several hours in the sun, each trying to outmaneuver and outgun the other.

Despite their fatigue, the Republicans slowly began to triumph until the savvy old royalist general horizontal came up with a ruse.

He ordered his band to play the notes of a a victory song.

During this, the Royalists were energized.

Hearing this, the Republicans lost heart.

Then the personal commander, Ben Chuka, caught an artillery round in his neck and pull it out.

The Republicans broke and began to run.

Ruiz assumed command of what the hands remained.

The Republican discipline collapsed.

Royalist soldiers offered no quarter.

They killed the men they caught up with, tortured and dismembered others.

More than 100 Republicans were captured alive on the field of battle and then executed along the banks of the Medina River.

No one knows the total exact body count, but perhaps as many as 1000 men lost their lives that day.

Lewis and an unknown number of other survivors managed to escape to Goliad and then Louisiana, but they were the minority.

But we're not done with the atrocities.

The Spanish royalist army entered San Antonio with a vengeance on their mind.

This is the only firsthand contemporary account of what happened after the Battle of Medina.

It begins.

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.

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.

Yet even still, Arredondo continued to ratchet up the horror.

Several hundred other men in the community who had sought sanctuary in San Fernando Cathedral had been unceremoniously dragged out and imprisoned, and each morning, Arredondo ordered three of those men yanked from their cells, lined up against a wall and shot.

He repeated this gruesome ritual for nearly three months.

By his own account, he executed 327 civilians during this period in a town whose population before the Battle of Medina was less than 3000.

And yet the men got off easy.

As soon as he entered San Antonio, Arredondo rounded up the wives and children of known republicans and imprisoned them in the largest building in town, a building called La Quinta.

There they were insulted, assaulted and worse.

Almost 300 of them.

He forced them to grind 24 bushels of corn every day to make tortillas for the very men who were murdering their husbands, fathers, and sons.

Outside the walls, Arredondo worked these women from two in the morning until ten at night.

Every night they shucked corn until their skin blistered and their fingernails fell out, their living blood mixing with the corn they hold.

And yet the women fought back.

Some may have even participated in the battle itself.

After Luis de Los Santos.

Pedro Benitez Josepha, a wholesome one of the La Garza, Luis Montes and Josefa Santos are all listed as insurgents on a property confiscation list published by Arellano soon after the battle.

And there are reports of women firing pistols at the Royalists when they marched into San Antonio.

All of this later Redondo and his jailers to raise the stakes.

However, they ordered all the children of the imprisoned women cast out into the streets without food, without shelter.

And yet within earshot of their anguished mothers, the banished children huddled around the walls of the La Quinta building, whimpering and weeping, doubling their mothers suffering.

They cried out to their imprisoned mothers through the walls, asking what they should do to survive.

And all their mothers could say was to go beg for arms and pray for the mercy of strangers.

For 54 days, these women endured the ordeal of La Quinta.

Until at last, sometime in late October of 1813, General Redondo ordered them released for nine more years.

The Republican deadly unburied on the fields of battle south of the Medina River.

By order of the Royalist commander, a gruesome reminder of the cost of defiance, as if San Antonians needed to be reminded.

The reality here is that even once Mexican independence was won and that the dead finally buried, their murderers were never held to account for their crimes.

Because Mexican independence was ultimately won by the very men who had opposed it.

By 1821, Mexican Royalists were pretty disappointed in their Spanish monarch and realized the advantages that would accrue to them from independence as long as they were the ones running this newly independent nation.

And so in 1821, they switched sides, including the one eyed Arredondo, who went from being the Spanish military ruler of Texas to being the Mexican military ruler of Texas.

Overnight.

In the words of a witness to the horrors of La Quinta, I quote, even now, as we at last enjoy our independence, their property has not been restored to them.

Instead, it remains in the hands of those who victimized them, who never suffered, who never fought for our cause, and yet who now co-opt their suffering in the name of independence.

These royalists began to scheme now to control the new government of independent Mexico, aligning themselves in particular with the political philosophy of centralism that advocated a highly centralized and autocratic form of government, is, in effect equal to the principles of self-government and republicanism as rule by a distant monarch and Spain had ever been.

Men like this guy Santa Ana, who had been a young Royalist first lieutenant during the Battle of Medina and subsequent occupation of San Antonio, but also pretty much the entire Mexican officer class in the New Mexican Army were Spanish royalists.

Ugarte cheer freely.

Soler and other names that Texas history buffs will start to recognize for all the wrong reasons.

And so it should be no surprise that San Antonians, led by once again, were among the first to rise up against Santa Ana when he revoked the Republican Federalist Constitution of 1824.

Seguin called together 20 of his peers.

And again, many of them children of the leaders of the events of 1813 and rode to the aid of the federalist government in Guatemala.

This is what prompts Santa Ana to send Martin Perfecto the course after Seguin, eventually pursuing him all the way back to Texas, to Gonzalez, and ultimately to San Antonio, the better.

And so it was the memories of 1813 that preceded Santa Ana and his band of ex royalist officers up the Camino Real in 1835.

Because for at the hands the Texas Revolution of 1836 wasn't a new fight.

It was a rematch.

And yet, today, we don't even know where this most pivotal, biggest, bloodiest battle in Texas history occurred today.

Three or maybe four markers, depending on how you're counting, claim to mark the location of the Battle of Medina.

And there's also another handful of theorized locations that have appeared in various publications over the last century.

Really, we've got on off, so we've got Robert Marshall's, Dan Ariano, Joe Alvarez, Bruce Moses, al McGraw and many others.

The frustrating part is that we used to know where this battlefield was.

The carnage of the battle is a landmark on every traveler's journal from the period.

You can't read this for, well, this is from 1850.

Campo de la Battaglia.

The Medina Muertos, cadaverous dead and cadavers, but espacio the Casa una liga for the space of one league dead bodies and cadavers.

It's a landmark on every one of Stephen F Austin's maps.

Here's how he typically depicts it.

The Rota de la Republica.

Arredondo, Emilio.

Jacinto and his latest 1932.

At least.

It was apparently findable just by a little bit of asking around.

A battle of this magnitude has to have left behind more than just stories.

Somewhere in somebody's closet, there must be old coffee cans or cigar boxes full of old musket balls and canister or grapeshot or something.

Or so we thought.

If only we could get people to come forward with them.

So we mailed out thousands of letters, hundreds of fliers, conducted dozens of interviews, and scraped together a handful of artifacts that had been turned up over the years in the area.

And it gave us a few leads.

But at the end of the day, we knew that we were going to have to put boots on the ground and shovels in the dirt.

So we raised money from a list of people to long to thank here, see the end of this piece.

And we started building a team.

We hired UTSA center for Archeological Recovery to help us with the initial digs.

We got help from the Texas Historical Commission on Methodologies and Source Materials.

We enrolled the Whitney Museum as a curatorial facility, and we built off the decades of work by the Atascosa County Historical Commission to launch our initial surveys.

We talked to everyone we could like 90 year old Robert torn off offer of the seminal 1985 work Forgotten Battlefield.

We talked to Bexar County Historical Commissioner Fred Martinez, who became a good friend of the project.

We enrolled Suica to help us build maps and compile cultural resources.

We did aerial surveys with friends like Alberto GIS.

We involved the help of the local parishioners at El Carmen Church, including Carmela Ferrer and others.

And finally we found Kay Hines, the discoverer of the Mission San Saba, and enlisted her help to help us put structure to this whole thing.

But probably most important and most critical to us in terms of actually getting boots on the ground and starting to find things, was partnering with Avar, the American Veterans Archeological Recovery Project.

Avar is a 501 C3 dedicated to the practice of rehabilitation archeology, using the expertise of veterans to work battlefields and archeological sites.

And in turn providing veteran volunteers the sense of mission and team that's often missing in civilian life.

I'll admit to you that it all sounded a little fluffy to me at first, but I very quickly came to see how metal detecting, which is our primary methodology here for looking for the battlefield, is very much a flow state activity.

It's hours upon hours of monotony, punctuated by little dopamine inducing beeps that, 99% of the time are just trash.

But all culminating, if you're lucky, in 1 or 2 moments of sheer shared exhilaration, and then suddenly it all feels worthwhile and that you a part of something.

And I have to admit that even from the beginning, there was something appropriate and even poetic about the idea of using veterans to search for a battlefield.

By February of 2022, four years after the first publication of the podcast in the series, we were ready to get to work.

We first prioritized searching previously theorized locations of the battlefield.

We searched between the 1936 marker and El Carmen Church, first on the campus of Southside High School, and found nothing.

We searched Robert Marshall's proposed site over on Old Pleasanton Road and found nothing.

We tried to get on the property next to Robert Ton off site, but we kept getting turned away by ghost county landowners.

But with just a few days left in our first field season, we got onto a property that had been highlighted by scholar Bruce Moses and his work roads to the Battle of Medina, and found nothing until the last day when this little 54 caliber guy turned up.

Then, just a few feet away and a few minutes later.

We found this 30 caliber guy two balls within five yards of each other.

And note these are impacted rounds, not drop shot.

These rounds had been fired and hit something or someone.

And so we kept searching and found nothing for three more days.

Until this big, beautiful 62 something caliber round came up.

And then that was it.

We ran out of time or any of our volunteers had to go home, and we were left to dig through the thousands of pieces of metal that we had pulled out of the ground, from shotgun head stamps to pull top tabs to fence wire.

As we were going through the finds, however, Clint McKenzie from UTSA noticed one item in particular.

It was an iron ball with a little stem at the top.

It was grapeshot.

Grapeshot, so-called because they looked like a bunch of grapes.

They're held together on the inside by a bunch of little stems that are meant to tear apart when the round is fired, turning artillery into a giant shotgun with devastating effect.

And artillery fire means cannons and cannons mean battles, not just deer hunters or highway robbers.

Along the Camino Real.

And it reminded us of the other piece of cannon shot that had been found many, many years ago.

In 1968, road crews working on Bluing Road, south of San Antonio found a body in a bar ditch.

They quickly realized it wasn't a contemporary body, and so they called in and Fox with the Whitney Museum to excavate it.

What she found was the body of a young man, nearly a century and a half old, pieces of his clothing still clinging to his body with a 1.18in lead ball in his neck.

Now, a munition of that size didn't come out of a rifle.

It also came out of a cannon.

And it's really tempting here to want to turn this body into the body of the unknown Colonel Miguel Baca.

And it would be an amazing thing if so, the more recent study by Cindy Munoz with the UTSA center for Archeological Research has concluded.

Based on the teeth and bone where the victim was too young to have been the middle aged man, check up.

But the buttons were unmistakable.

According to city, they were from the years immediately preceding 1813.

And if cannons mean battles and this body was found with cannon shot inside it, just a few miles from the general vicinity of the battle.

And if the buttons the man were wearing are definitively from the period of the battle as well, we suddenly had a pretty good control artifact to which we could anchor the lead balls that we had found.

If we could find a way to analytically match them.

Todd Holman with Texas State agreed to help us out.

Todd is an anthropological archeologist and, among other things, an expert in the use of X-ray fluorescence.

Every metal alloy, manmade or natural, has a unique elemental composition.

And X-ray fluorescence picks up on the little elemental variances between metals of different origins, which means it can tell you with a fair degree of accuracy if different pieces of metal lead in our case, came from the same source.

We sent Todd the blue ball and all of our lead artifacts, not just the ones that we suspected of being colonial.

And this is what his xref analysis spit out.

Confusing, right?

Don't worry.

Just compare it to this image.

This second image.

This is what Todd's analysis spits out when you remove all the modern LED artifacts and analyze only the blue ball and the three lead balls that we had found in that season.

They're a match.

Todd emailed me on a Friday afternoon after a long workweek, and even my exhausted, untrained eye could tell that they were metal surgically identical.

Which is to say, the musket balls that we had found in Bruce Moses's search area came from the same batch of lead that the 1.18in cannon ball.

Found in the poor boy's neck on Blue Wing Road in 1968 had come from.

I'll spare you the suspense.

We went back to that same site.

The next field season, and this is what we found 21 musket balls or associated slag and just as many buckles, buttons, parts of powder, horns, ramrod mounts, and many other things.

Harder to identify.

Most of which, though interestingly, not all matched the blue ball.

But even the ones that didn't match clustered with each other, suggesting that we'd also stumbled on at least one other batch of lead artifacts with a common origin.

Here they are plotted on a map right next to Godliness Creek, next to an old earthen tank.

And so now we went back to the archival materials to see how our site stacked up.

We have Pedro Walker's 1815 account referring to a league and a half away, Navarro's 1853 account referring it to it being six miles south of the Medina River.

Just like our site.

We have Gaines riding an 1822 just a few years after the battle, referring to the battle site is located at a lake six miles from the Medina River, and we have a judge writing an article in 1898 about a totally different historical matter, referring to the battles having occurred on Gaynor's Creek.

And look, it sits at the same location relative to the Osceola and Medina Rivers, where Stephen of Austin had put the battle marker on all his maps.

But then guess what?

We came back for a third field season and found only a single borehole on the property directly across the highway from where we'd found our major hoard.

Which was a little disappointing.

Granted, the neighboring property had been pretty disturbed by sand mining activity over the last hundred years.

But if I'm being honest, I thought we'd be able to extend that concentration in pretty much any direction and find munitions.

But we didn't.

At least not on the property to the immediate east.

So we wandered about three miles up the only road, halfway to El Carmen Church, to a spot that another Battle of Medina Fist united.

Joe Alvarez had long been intrigued by a spot that I really hadn't thought would turn up anything.

And we found another 18 balls there in the course of about 12 hours.

We ran out of time, but didn't even get to finish the site, but we sent the balls off to Todd Allman again.

And sure enough, they matched in equal proportions to our earlier samples.

And look where we are.

Halfway to the Medina River, 3 to 4 miles southwest of the Medina River, at the headwaters of the Sawyer Creek.

The next stream after the Medina River was this the ambush site was the other site.

The battle site.

What have we found?

On January 15th, 2024.

I got a phone call from Martin Gonzalez, the chair of the Osceola County Historical Commission.

Nobody and I mean nobody, has done more to keep alive the memory of the Battle of Medina than the US Ghost County Historical Commission, most notably with their annual Battle of Medina Symposium, first organized by Battle of Medina scholar Robert Ton Off in 1988.

Martin is chair of the County Historical Commission, and carry forward this proud tradition and frankly, taking this symposium to the next level, making it the event for scholars, passionate amateurs and, well, podcasters interested in the Battle of Medina.

He's been crucial in helping us organize the Special Battle of Medina, an open forum event back in 2021 that had helped us produce some of the leads that we and Avar have followed up on to find their sites.

Yet me, Avar and the rest of our group have been unable to get access to any properties in Osceola County itself.

To be more blunt, I've been run off of one property by a menacing teenager in a Polaris called and threatened with a trespass lawsuit just for talking to a different property owner, and that just goes to and then ghosted by a third who had agreed to let us come onto his property.

And only after I already moved the porta potty there did he tell me that we had to leave.

We don't, but given up on that Osceola County, especially after we found such promising sites further to the north.

But Martin, the exclusive County Historical Commission, and their team of volunteer metal detectorists led by David Emery hadn't.

Throughout 2023, they've been working a site that had come to them from the landowners almost seven miles south of the Bruce Moses Avar site, and they had found a motherlode, the largest concentration of munitions yet found to date, dozens and dozens of musket balls.

But not just that buckles, ram rods and some really special ones.

This is why Martin had been calling me, was to ask if they could have their munitions exact against ours.

We of course, said yes.

And when Tallman ran them against the Blue Ball and Avars artifacts, they clustered into the exact same groupings of artifacts that we'd been finding.

So, to put it quite simply, whatever had happened at Martin's, at a Scotia site.

Had used ammunition from the same place as the fight that had gone on up on Blue Ring Road.

Gowanus Creek and the Sawyer Creek.

And maybe also the Medina River, because there was now rumored to be a fourth site out there, right on the Medina River.

3 or 4 dozen munitions have been found, spread across many dozens of acres in similar little pockets, like the ones that Avon and Osceola County had found.

They hadn't been zapped yet, but visually, I'm told they look exactly like the other munitions that we'd all been finding.

But look at how far apart these sites are now.

The royalists and Republicans supposedly slugged out this battle at something like 40 yards from each other, not 14 miles.

Five years ago when we started this project, there were four battlefield markers, but zero archeologically confirmed sites.

In the course of about 18 months, we now had at least four archeologically confirmed conflict sites, spread out over nearly twice as large of an area as the battle markers had been, with the near certainty that others are going to be discovered soon, especially now that CPS and others are having to develop large infrastructure projects right through this area that will require extensive archeological surveys, which means that we may actually be further from finding a single Battle of Medina site than we were five years ago.

And I'll confess, the lack of artillery shells that we're finding suggests that there still may be out there a yet more concentrated hoard of munitions sitting underneath some farmer's field, or more likely, these days, some sand mines.

Slag pile.

Obviously, we need to go back and really analyze our XRF work linking all these munitions together into the blue ball itself.

We're hanging a lot on that link, and we probably need to validate those with a second Zeff device, or do some mass spectrometry or something else.

Your ideas are welcome, and it's not easy for me to admit this, but we also may need to really rethink what the battlefield of Medina looks like.

It's very cinematic to think of it in terms of lines of men lining up and firing at each other with Napoleonic discipline, but the truth is, all the accounts of the Battle of Medina made clear that it was a highly mobile battle, with maybe half the men mounted, or more.

And though the accounts agree that the riflemen and artillery slugged it out with each other at close range for several hours.

The veterans on our air crew point out pretty quickly that there's nothing in the accounts that says they didn't move around when they were doing this.

Men, especially untrained men like most of these guys were, don't tend to just stand still when they're getting shot at.

Maybe there was no single Battle of Medina.

Maybe we should be talking about the battles of Medina, which would mean that in a sense, everyone who has ever studied the battle and venture to guess as to its location has been correct.

It's a little too post-modern for me, and I don't think we need to take it that far yet.

If we're looking for a place to be able to commemorate the significance of this battle and the trauma that inflicted.

Well, in a way, we have that.

It's the place that's been commemorating the battle since at least 1854, when this bishop gave these dedicating remarks.

He talks about here how this chapel was originally dedicated to God under the invocation and protection of Nuestra Senora del Carmen.

That hurts a little that the place we have to go to commemorate the victims of General Arredondo was, in fact, likely founded by him after the battle to honor his royal dead and named after his patron saint.

Just for reference, he named his son and daughter Joaquin del Carmen and Maria del Carmen, respectively.

But the sad truth is that the winning of Mexican independence itself was unsatisfying in kind of a similar way.

As we heard it left in power of the very men who had most violently opposed it, meaning that the suffering of 1813 was left unredeemed for most Mexican insurgents.

But not for tyrannies like, once again, we'll say Francisco Ruiz and the hundreds of other Tucanos who fought alongside them.

In 1836.

They would get their reckoning on the banks of the San Jacinto River.

On April 21st, 1836, which makes it all the honor that we choose to remember the Alamo, not the final victory at San Jacinto.

I mean, of course we remember that, but we don't celebrate it to nearly the same extent that we celebrate the defeat at the Alamo.

But this, in and of itself, may be a legacy, maybe even the legacy of one Seguin himself, one of the few men who was present at both the Alamo and San Jacinto.

Returning to the Alamo just months after saying Sinto once again set the flavor of 200 years of Alamo mythmaking with his eulogy.

Quote.

Companions in arms.

These remains, which we have the honor of carrying on our shoulders, are those of the valiant heroes who died in the Alamo.

Yes, my friends, they preferred to die a thousand times rather than submit themselves to the tyrant's yoke.

What a brilliant example deserving of being noted in the pages of history.

The venerable remains of our worthy companions as witnesses.

I invite you to declare to the entire world.

Texas shall be free and independent.

Or we shall perish in glorious combat.

Listen to what he's saying with these words.

Seguin is also eulogizing the dead from 1813.

He's pointing us and his audience in 1836, particularly his new Anglo compatriots, to the idea that defeat is what gives dignity to victory, and that shared suffering can form the basis for a new people.

This is a profoundly Tejano idea, growing out of the trauma of 1813, and frankly, their entire colonial experience.

Even the words remember the Alamo are an imperative to stare tragedy in the face, not something that Anglo Americans have ever been particularly comfortable doing, but something that the hunters have been doing every day since August 18th, 1813.

And with the Alamo, Anglos had now suffered for Texas in a way that the Annals had a generation prior.

And Anglo Texans got it.

They chose to celebrate the tragedy, so much so that today, apparently only 43% of Texans under the age of 29 actually know who won the battle of the Alamo.

They could be forgiven.

One other defeat that we celebrate like this in American history.

Do elementary school children in other states memorize General Custer's last letters?

Does anyone mistakenly believe that the U.S.

Navy won Pearl Harbor?

The Alamo story feels odd in the Anglo American context, because it doesn't come out of the Anglo American context.

Anglo Texans adopted it and made it their own.

Maybe Anglo Texans were all along wanting to distance themselves from the triumphalist city upon a hill tradition that they left behind in the United States.

Maybe it truly made them feel, as Seguin hoped, that they had now endured something exceptional in the Anglo American experience, something that made them more like their hands, and something that made them exceptional.

In turn.

And yet, within a decade, Texas wasn't free and independent.

Texas was part of another nation, a nation whose capital and ruling class were even further away than Mexico City had been in a nation whose cultural elite wouldn't tolerate stories of exceptionalism from the provinces unless that provincial exceptionalism served to exaggerate or glorify the exceptionalism of the center and leave an utter turn of events.

The Alamo later had to become the quintessential American story, whether it fit or not.

Joseph Francisco Ruiz died in 1840, but his son Francisco Antonio, believed that Texas's annexation to the United States in 1845 represented such a betrayal of the dream of 1836 that he went to live with the Comanches in protest, and even once again was run out of Texas and became, in his own words.

A foreigner in my native land, excellent in Tierra.

Texas's independence didn't work out for pecans the way that most of them had envisioned it.

And there's a scene from the opening of The Battle of the Alamo and realize we're back to the Alamo again.

That foreshadows the disillusionment to come as Santa and his troops started to surround the old mission.

Jim Bowie sat down to compose a letter to Santa Ana, too ill now to even hold a pen on his own.

He had to ask once again describe it for him.

The substance of the letter is important for now, but how they closed the letter is.

At first Seguin signed off with the customary Dios e Federacion Mexicana God and Mexican Federation, a declaration of commitment to the principles of the Mexican Constitution of 1824.

That latter day Mexican Republicans, now calling themselves Federalists, often used to close their letters, but after thinking for a moment, Bowie scratched out the words Federacion Mexicana.

And instead, with shaking hand, wrote deals editors.

God and Texas.

Growing up, I understood this moment to be the great moment where Bui, Seguin and the others realized what they were fighting for.

An independent Texas.

But it's the opposite.

It's the moment that exposes how very different Anglo internal expectations of Texas independence were.

When Seguin, Ruiz and other Takano spoke of independence.

They spoke of it in the old Spanish context of the Pueblo of.

They spoke of it in terms of federation, self-determination at an extremely local level, the quote unquote, rebirth of the Mexican people.

El Pueblo mexicano, taking in our own hands the reins of our government.

To quote from the 1813 Texas Declaration of Independence, a rebirth rooted in the 1000 year old Spanish tradition of local self-government informed by the Anglo American experiment next door, to be sure, and to quote from the first Vice president of Texas Lines with Isabella, with the canos really desired to create was, quote, a mixed society and the American system and the Spanish customs and traditions which would represent the triumph of the New World over the tired ideas and prejudices of the old and quote.

But Anglos were coming out of a different tradition.

Think of the lines at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

But keep ancient lands your storied pomp.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

And the quote they came from a developing tradition of fresh starts where independence meant a break from tradition.

We don't have to speculate about this misunderstanding or this difference of what independence means, because we have something really unique in Texas.

Two years later, we have a control case, a parallel federalist revolt coming out of the Rio Grande Valley this time, but in which men like once again and even other Takano, an Anglo veterans of 1836, participated, but which never came to be dominated by Anglo Texians.

And there we see a revolution striving for autonomy within a tradition rather than independence from tradition, which, frankly, maybe the most Texan idea that we've yet encountered.

But that'll have to wait for our next installment.