Episode 354 - The 1813 Battle of Medina

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Howdy, y'all, and welcome to the Lotton Sled by Donkeys podcast.

I'm Joe, this here president of the Racist Texan Convention of 1813.

I would like to thank the Austin Chevy Dealership for putting on this year's convention.

And because it's 1813, I should point out they only sell horses that are named Chevy.

Now, fellas, due to the growing fear of that Mexican revolution, I have gathered you all here to field your concerns for the future of Texan independence.

I'd like to welcome our first speaker, our head of Indiana Racism Importation, Nate.

Everyone give Nate our traditional Texan welcome.

Yee-haw!

Yeeeeho!

Hey, y'all.

Yeah, just in case anybody's wondering, if you come from southern Indiana, you're going to talk like this for some fucking reason.

I can't even understand it.

You know, the only way we ever get representation is going to be in like 200 years.

There's going to be a guy on there saying, I am broke as shit.

I will never wear a suit.

And it's just how we talk.

But anyway, I heard y'all are having a problem down here that y'all decided to create an independent republic, but you're surrounded on all sides by the actual territory of Mexico.

And y'all say, but these invaders are taking our space.

I feel like there's this thing we got up in Indiana called cognitive dissonance that I ain't caught on yet.

So anyway, y'all may not want to have too long a discussion about it, but all I can say is have you considered naming towns in ways that would make things, people will think in the future that it's an accident, but actually it's deliberate when y'all call it like Whitestown, Whitesville, Whites Only, racism, Topia.

There's a lot of names we can do to just kind of make things less subtle.

Y'all understand that subtlety just don't really work that well.

Anyway, another thing I got for you is, well, I heard that there might be oil in the ground, and if there is, y'all might be able to burn it and cause some fucking hurricanes to come through and knock the shit out of everything all over the Gulf of Mexico.

I don't know what y'all calling it these days.

I believe we have changed the name to Gulf of America.

Oh, no, no, believe me, believe me, Joe.

I'm 100% on board with naming things the stupidest fucking thing you possibly could be.

But the problem that I got here is that unfortunately, for the time being, I think the whole audience of Mexico extends all the way up to what they'll call Guatemala in a couple hundred years.

And before we can build the wall, you know, we got to understand where that line's at.

So first thing I got to say to y'all is

if there's a possibility of making the worst version of Mexican food y'all can think of and selling it as Tex-Mex, but like in fucked up burrito form that they'll be buying in gas stations and shit when all those horses named Chevy die and then y'all got to make cars or something, that would be my recommendation.

Make sure people think an association with anything related to the word Texas is just like a fucking fat white guy who sucks at cooking, but it's always got a road soda that's like, I don't know, steel reserve or something like that.

You know what I'm saying?

Like people won't associate with high culture.

And then they'll say, all right, all right.

Texas, that's where all the white folks who can't cook shit.

That's where they all go.

That's where like you can't even roast coffee beans in a cast iron pan or whatever because y'all burn it.

It just tastes like dog shit.

So go that route, I think.

And then people who will want stuff with Mexicans, they'll be, they'll go further south, wherever y'all draw the border at.

I don't know.

That great big ass river or something like that.

You know, I can't really think of anything else.

I mean, in Indiana, we just, best way I can describe it is that nobody wants to come here.

Thank you, Nate.

Our next speaker and head of our strange Irishman of history, Tom.

Everybody, give Tom a traditional Texan hello.

Yee-haw!

Yee-haw!

I'm very welcome to very honored to be welcome to speak at this conference.

When I received your letter, I saw that you had a procurement problem of soldiers, and in order to fight the brown menace, that is the Mexicans.

So, I put together a glorious list of options where it seemed like you were a couple of thousand soldiers short.

So, what I have done in procurement excellence and making sure that Irish people show up in the strangest form possible is I looked at our population.

It seems this is, you know, the early 19th century.

We have a couple of million extra Irish people in Ireland that we need to get rid of.

So, what we have done is we have tried to fight fire with fire.

We're importing

what many would consider members of the global Latino belt, Ireland.

We are importing Irish people to fight their

fellow minorities in the Americas, the Mexicans.

Now, a lot of people have talked to me about,

I don't really see the similarities between the people of the wonderful land of Mexico and Ireland.

And Irish people don't know how to season everything.

All we have is just salt and cabbage.

And I like to see us as kindred spirits.

You know, we are in inhospitable lands, both set upon by the Dutch and the English.

And yeah, I think overall, I think this is going to be a great successful venture.

I can't wait to buy about 40% of the entire country.

And yeah, so we are...

importing the white Mexicans to fight against the real Mexicans.

And quite frankly, I got to be real with y'all.

You know, a lot of people don't think the Irish people are white.

I understand that might be a controversial topic, but I mean, all I can say is their lack of hygiene even extends to their potato crops.

So, quite frankly, I will say this is not the time nor place to argue about the brain pan of the Irishman.

Now, everybody, I would like to thank you for coming to this convention.

And I know we're all going to find warmth tonight in the place that us Texans love best, inside of our own sisters.

Guys, I have some bad news.

Literally, nothing we talked talked about has anything to do with this episode because this is way before the Texas Revolution.

I don't know.

It's just extremely funny because it's like you lived in Texas.

I've only for a long time.

Yeah, yeah.

I've only passed through Texas a few times.

So it's like, I don't know.

I feel like there's a specific kind of diss you got to go for out there.

I don't know.

I just know it's the only one I got because today's episode, we're not jumping back to the Texas Revolution or the Texan Revolution, or sometimes said the Texian Revolution, which I hate the most.

We're actually going before that.

Texas, back when it was Spanish Texas, during what you could call kind of, sort of, the first attempted Texas rebellion.

And that is the Battle of Medina in 1813.

This is just when Buckies was just a giant stable.

Things would look a lot different if Buckies still existed back then.

There'd be a lot less war because everybody would just be trapped in the endless gas station of hell.

I will say, as someone, again, who lived in Texas for a very long time, it was really nice that whenever you went on, you know, to see your friends at the next closest town, which would require four hours of driving, you could stop at a Bucky's and do minor and major gas, like grocery shopping all at the same time as getting gas.

Kind of nice.

See, it's funny because on one hand, it's like actual Tex-Mex food is good.

It's just that what people call Tex-Mech is usually the biggest shit not made by Texans.

But also, it's something about Texas I find funny is that like, it's not the sort of the redneck sister fucking stereotype that I think of.

I think of someone being like, you know, like family memories photo.

It's like them and their mom both high on meth bottom Dallas Cowboy sweatsuits.

Like

that is.

The two kind of Texan.

Inside of you, there are two Texans.

One is high on meth, but both are wearing Dallas Cowboys sweatpants.

And they're both your cousins.

It's just different.

It's all I'm saying.

It's the early 1800s.

And let's say to make a very, very long story short, things are not going great for the Spanish Empire.

In 1808, Spain was forced to kneel to Napoleon, replacing their king Ferdinand VII with Napoleon's idiot brother Joseph.

Unfortunately, we share names in this one.

Even before Napoleon did this, Spain was economically and administratively a nightmare.

There had been decades of mismanagement, the continental system, as well as just getting their teeth kicked in.

multiple times during the ongoing wars in Europe, specifically the loss of virtually, obviously, and famously, their entire fleet at Trafalgar.

Spain was at a death spiral and Napoleon was putting in the world's second dumbest Bonaparte on the throne and that was not going to make things any better.

The first dumbest being Napoleon III in my opinion, but that's to be argued, I'm sure, by people in the comments.

Now for the context to our episode here today, while Joseph was running an empire that had already firmly been driven into the ground, The Spanish Empire's colonial holdings all just kind of fell into a weird gray zone.

There was Joseph's government as well as a shadow government working out of Cadiz that was made up of like the deposed old government, and they both claim legitimacy.

But since there's so much unrest, war and turmoil back home, very little if any effort was being put into actually governing the Spanish colonies.

And obviously the context of this episode being Spanish Texas or just the Spanish territories in America in general.

Meaning the same unrest, war, and turmoil quickly spread into those colonies.

At any given time in Spanish Mexico and Spanish Texas, there could be a government administrator claiming they were in charge from either the Bonapartist government, the Spanish one, or an independence movement.

All of this mismanagement and chaos piled on top of generations of oppression and exploitation, and thus erupted the Mexican War of Independence, spearheaded by Father Miguel Hidalgo Castilla in 1810.

Now, this is not an episode about the Mexican War of Independence.

That would be a very long series.

Instead, this is kind of an episode on a side piece of that of what was going on in Texas during the Mexican War of Independence.

Just so everybody's aware of the narrative structure of what we're going to talk about.

Now, at the time, Mexico and Texas were administered separately by Spain.

So, effectively, a revolution in Mexico to people in Texas occurred over the border.

However, Texans, I'll use the term Texans to generally mean anyone from Texas in this episode because there's a lot of interesting things.

Like Texians is a term sometimes used for like American settlers in Texas, but it's also sometimes used as for everyone in Texas, whether they be Spanish-born peninsulares, or that being, you know, European-born Spanish or the Criollos, the Mexican, the Mexican-born Spanish people.

There's also obviously indigenous people to the area.

There's also Tahanos, which are like a mixed race people.

There's also French-speaking Creoles from Louisiana.

It's a weird mix of people.

Something that I know this because I've actually seen some of these before in museums in Central America, but one thing to bear in mind also, and it's not like you're not obligated to memorize all of them, but just understand this, is that the Spanish colonial enterprises in the Americas were obsessed with race mixing and categorization and what.

X

one plus one equals two or X plus Y equals Z.

And so there's so many categories of like if black people or black and white people or black and indigenous people or black

mixers, derivations thereof.

And like, it's fucking weird.

You'll see what looks like children's primers painted with examples of what each like racial category is.

There's like a weird arithmetic.

It's like if A plus B equals C, then you are D.

It's really strange and it leads to like this.

tapestry of hard-bitten racism mixed with race politics that is very unique.

The Spanish Empire in a lot of ways.

Yeah.

If I remember correctly, that one of of the things that did seem, it was just kind of nuts is that the combination of an indigenous person and a black person produces a child called a Lobo or a wolf.

And I'm like, well, I guess you can have it.

It's kind of badass if they call you a wolf, but still, like, you probably weren't particularly high in status.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, they probably called you a wolf, not for good reasons.

You know, not for the cool reasons that make you sound like a professional wrestler these days.

Not the cool reason.

But for racism reason.

But yeah, so, so point being that this is a huge aspect of it, of like a caste system or like a racial taxonomy they're big into this in a way that like other european cultures absolutely are but like by contrast the

fact that they aren't as much or they are they're not as they're not as into like rigidly enforcing

could not be reached for comment think of well that's a conversation for a different episode

for for the context of this episode just know that people are really fucking pissed at the European-born Spanish peninsulares and anyone regardless of the racial makeup that was born in the colonies was kind of being exploited.

And depending on where you fell on that ladder, of course, your life was much worse than other people.

And Miguel Hidalgo's mission wasn't just to free Mexico from the Spanish, but to break away all of New Spain, which stretched from Florida to Colombia at the time.

Now, that is one hell of a pipe dream.

But he believed that if he was going to break away all these lands from Spain, which was, you know, despite Spain falling into a death spiral as an imperial body, it was still overwhelmingly powerful to the colonies it had been dominating for generations.

So he believed that the key to doing this would be getting help from the United States.

And to do that, he would need to destabilize part of northern New Spain, specifically Texas.

The idea was if he destabilized Texas enough, America might get involved and then they might, you know, join up to really start chipping away at New Spain.

I'll just like cut off the strategic supply of dip to just to the region.

You're just going to have like thousands of angry Texas stomping on their hats.

Stomping on their hats.

They don't have their grisly winter green.

They have no idea what to do now.

And to be fair, this did actually succeed.

in a lot of ways.

Despite the fact that the U.S.

was technically neutral during the Mexican War of Independence, they essentially turned a blind eye to watching anything go over the border.

Most of the weapons and ammo used by Mexican revolutionaries came from the United States.

A lot of Mexican revolutionaries had like safe haven just over the border knowing that the Spanish authorities couldn't come after them.

So they were kind of involved already.

And I should be clear here, though, at the best of times back then, the U.S.

barely watched the international borders at all.

So it wasn't really much of a burden to just look the other way.

We're also talking about, I mean, in the early 1800s, we're talking about 1813, like states that are now in the Midwest hadn't even been admitted into the Union yet.

It was still the Northwest Territory.

Like this area was absolutely considered the frontier slash wilderness.

I mean, like the U.S.

is involved, but the U.S.

is a much smaller entity at this point.

It's very easy for them to get involved because they wouldn't be doing anything anyway.

Like, oh,

we're going to let all these weapons of ammo go over the border that we're almost certainly going to go over the border anyway, but now the government can take credit for it.

Yeah.

We're going to destabilize New Spain.

We're going to send weapons to Texas and all of our lesbians to New Mexico.

Sorry, I lived in New Mexico, okay?

I didn't realize what was going on as a kid.

Now I fucking realize.

I'm like, oh, oh, oh, right, right.

It's like, since the 1910s, it's been like, are you a lesbian?

Move to New Mexico.

And I respect it a lot.

There's just a lot of fucking Subarus out there.

All these ladies love turquoise and holding hands.

I don't really get what's going on.

Oh, it's fun.

Yeah, exactly.

So by starting some shit in Texas, Father Miguel hoped that the U.S.

involvement would only deepen in the war.

Obviously, like, you know, think of the time frame here.

The U.S.

is not powerful in any stretch of the imagination, but any help would be fine.

And not to mention one of the biggest problems in Texas for Spanish administrators at the time was the constant illegal settling of Spanish lands in Texas by Americans.

They're oftentimes called squatters, which is very funny.

Because now this is something that would become very, very important in the coming Texas Revolution.

And we'll talk a lot more about it then when we cover that in a series.

Just know that it was effectively Americans moving into Spanish land, land that the Spanish had stole from Native people, and illegally settling it and bringing their slaves with them, all of which was causing massive issues.

This was something that the U.S.

government did absolutely nothing to discourage.

And it was a huge problem between Spain and the United States.

Soon, the Spanish governor of Texas, Manuel Maria D.

Salcedo, learned of these plans to get the U.S.

involved and that there was already revolutionaries kind of doing groundwork in Texas, trying to whip up support, not only from the American squatters, but from within the Spanish royalist militias.

Ironically, it had been Salcedo who had been complaining to the Spanish government about all of the American squatters on Spanish land in Texas.

He fell under the government in Cadiz and he told them the only way to offset all of the Americans moving into Texas was to flood the area with Spanish settlers.

And this is something that nobody wanted to do.

It's Texas in the 1800s.

Life is hard as fuck and miserable at best.

There's a reason why the Americans who moved to Texas to settle had no other options.

Life in Texas fucking blew.

There was just a lot of land up for the grabs for free.

Yeah.

And like, that's a real fucking statement that like oh i'm living in northern mexico life is already hard why would i want to move to texas like how much worse could it have been well they wanted to take spanish settlers from european holdings and move them into texas because texas obviously famously is huge and the spanish population the colonists was actually very very small And like the Americans are moving in and slowly kind of muscling them demographically.

he wanted like the only way we could stop this is to bring in Spanish settlers, but nobody wanted to fucking settle in Texas.

It's kind of the same problem that like Russia had when they tried to settle Alaska, where like Russians are like, why in the fuck would we want to move there?

That sounds horrible.

So the Americans got the long-term revenge by just like completely gentrifying Barcelona now.

I'll have you know that a lot of people from your particular island have a huge hand of that too.

Yep, yep, I know.

Hey, if anybody deserves it, it's the Spanish.

Fuck them.

I mean, look, man, at the end of the day, you can understand why an American would want to go to Barcelona and be annoying on Instagram, but it would be, it's also, you can understand why a Spanish person in the early 1800s, whether they are in Spain or in Spanish colonial possessions in the Americas, would not be like, hell yeah, I really want to go live on like, you know,

the frontier of death, or they'll have some other nickname for it, you know what I mean?

Like El L Ugar, Dundee Muiris, or something like that, just flat on like the place where you die.

Like, you know what I mean?

The Spanish names for places in Desert Southwest are often like they're pretty literal.

It's just sort of like where you lie.

It's like the one thing that the Spanish Empire could not defeat that was like early American frontiersmen being absolutely psychotic.

Like, no, this place sucks.

It's going to kill me.

And I love it.

You can't overpower that.

Like, Native Americans could come by and rightfully murder my entire family and there's going to be a dozen motherfuckers right behind me waiting to move in on my land.

A bunch of dudes who come from what's now West Virginia were like, I had to leave.

It was too woke.

I had to go die on the prairies to get away from the DEI.

Yeah, exactly.

DEI wasn't letting me throw Donkey Kong barrels of whiskey at people and just fucking plunder the land.

So I had to move to, you know what?

I mean, like, the weather sucks here too.

It's just hotter.

and also weirdly colder at times.

Jesus Christ, Texas weather.

Looking down at my family and like, you know, as we live in ye old Boston or whatever, the streets are covered in shit.

Everybody has typhus and cholera.

I'd be like, honey, kids, what if we also died of typhus and cholera, but we did it in Texas?

What if we died of typhus and cholera, but also were sunburnt?

Anyway, Salceto worried about the infiltration of his ranks.

So he ordered two militia officers he thinks are responsible for this infiltration, Francisco Ignacio Escamilla and Antonio Sienz, to be arrested and imprisoned in the San Antonio de Valero mission.

Then Salcedo realizes the revolution is coming to Texas pretty much no matter what.

A lot of that has to do with the Spanish Empire really not trying too hard.

to police these massive empty swaths of land.

There is a complete freedom of movement in a way just due to administrative rot.

I would also say, because I know this about South America, but this is also true in North and Central America.

The Spanish Empire basically did, like, it was more or less impossible to get authorization to buy or sell products that weren't produced by other Spanish colonies or Spain, which they did not do a very good job of

flying.

So, like, there was such a blind eye turned towards what's effectively contraband, smuggling, et cetera, because like you simply couldn't get the life necessities.

People who were famous for running operations and making money off this were the British.

It's why the Brits, there are so many Brits in Chile.

But this was all over the region.

Basically, it was both that kind of fluid border, you could get away with smuggling and light crime and whatnot, and total lack of surveillance, like what you're describing.

Pretty much every Spanish colonial administrator has an addendum onto their biography of effectively cartels that they ran along the side.

And this is on top of, remember, this is going in during the continental system in Europe.

So, like, and we've talked about the continental system before, uh, so we don't really need to go into it, but like, the Spanish economy is dying horribly.

And, like, the colonial enterprise itself has been kind of shuffling around half dead for decades at this point.

Yeah, I'm just imagining like an 1810s narco corridor about like Jim Bowie.

It's just like this American guy.

He sucks shit.

He's fucking racist.

And that means something coming from us.

He's like fucking Jim Bowie in like the giant pointy narco boots, like wandering around Texas.

Oh, God.

See, there's also a lot of other issues at play.

It's one of the reasons why this revolution is so successful in Mexico.

Not so much in Texas, but we'll get to that point.

And that's because, you know, when a huge amount of people gather with weapons, the Spanish crowd really doesn't have the ability to muster a large army.

Supply lines are very, very long.

And people in these territories, even if they're European-born Spaniards or descendants of like immediately, like their dad and mom are from Spain, they'd be like, no, fuck the Spanish.

I'm sick of it.

Like, it's kind of incredible how bad Spain ran this shit.

And Salcedo realized that this revolution was going to come into Texas from Mexico across the Rio Grande.

And he realized that the Spanish crown was really not going to do anything to help him.

Specifically, he would have to handle his own shit.

So he orders the militias to muster.

The militiamen immediately do what soldiers do best.

Bitch and complain.

And Nate and I can attest to how true this is.

You can give us anything that we want.

Everything a soldier could ever need to be like, man, this shit sucks.

Like, fuck this.

I want to go home.

This is going to sound like a random insertion here, but to your point, exactly, I can recall a detail from Mark Bowden's book, Blackhawk Down, about one of the Ranger, I think the regimental commander, having paid to like bring a rock band to do a barbecue for the troops when they were stationed in Somalia before like the fucking the actual fighting happened.

And he was like, Yeah, kind of like, you know, randomly asked some of the privates what they thought.

They're like, oh, yeah, they fucking suck that man.

Shit.

It's just like, this man brought you a rock band that doesn't lead to Somalia, dude.

And they're like, yeah.

Soldiers can have an open bar in every brothel if they'd ever want covering whatever cardinal need soldiers require.

Like, it could still be better, man.

This fucking beer sucks.

The brothels are too expensive.

Like, back at Bragg, we got all this shit for free.

Because we bought it with heroin.

Unlike everything we were just joking about, the soldiers of the militia had decent complaints.

They made a fair amount of sense.

Namely, they're militiamen.

They're not soldiers of the Spanish Empire.

They're supposed to remain close to home.

And Texas is still a very dangerous place.

Owing to war, of course, and obviously...

tribes of Native Americans who really fucking hated Spanish settlers for very good reasons and thus were conducting raids against them.

So the militiamen believed like, if we leave home, our families will be in danger.

The reason why indigenous people fucking hated the Spanish was there still was some, but there was not as much of the Atlantic slave trade in Spanish territories.

The reason is because they enslaved all of the indigenous people and forced them to work to death.

Yeah, and a lot of the places where the Spanish did do Atlantic slave importation was because they had killed off the native population had no one else left to enslave.

Yes.

And you'll notice, particularly on the Atlantic coast and areas in Central America, where like you basically can't get to the Pacific coast because the territory at the time was just too swampy, mountainous, whatever, like where the English were involved somehow.

Before they could end the slave trade and pat themselves on the back, they were importing slaves.

But on the Pacific side, in particular, it's just they just did genocide on indigenous Americans.

I do feel like whenever we talk about like a tribe of native people, regardless where they are in the world,

wanting to fill the local Europeans full of speed holes, you can just default to the side that they're like, it's for a good reason.

Like,

those Europeans didn't show up because they were invited, you know.

You remember in 2001 when they're like, why do they hate us?

And it's like,

Do you want to ask that question?

The Spanish standing around Texas, like, pulling up their fucking overalls, like, they hate us because of our freedom.

Yeah, yeah.

Curtis, you're the red, white, and green.

They hate us because they're jealous of our naps.

Yeah.

I mean, what is the ultimate freedom if not being able to go for a nap in the afternoon?

What's the Spanish version of like three doors down being hired to write a song about the National Guard?

Oh, the citizen soldier song is just about the Texan militias being mustered by Salseto.

I mean

i don't know in my mind i can think of one really terrible puerto rican trash band but it doesn't apply here so i'm just gonna leave it now the militiamen rightfully pointed out like you know why the should we march down to the rio grande when we have to worry about our own backyards and worse still you know it puts stress under the area's militia protection because while they were gone, their families would have to rely on something called the Citizen Guard to hold things together.

And obviously the people of the Citizen Guard are people that did not qualify for militia service.

So they're not exactly crack troops to protect your, whatever your local village is from being raided.

Nobody is confident in their abilities, and this made men begin to worry about the safety of their families.

Tired of the complaining, Salcedo asked the Alcalde, which is the highest level of local municipal colonial government.

Francisco Trevisio to hire someone who might be competent to lead the guard and therefore calm calm everyone down.

So he called retired Captain Juan Batista de la Casas, who was retired, but he was a battle-tested captain with years and years of service.

So whatever, getting called back up for one last go.

However, unbeknownst to anybody, Casas was actually a revolutionary.

And on January 21st, 1811, As soon as he was given command, he grabbed a group of militia sergeants, stormed into the governor's compound, and arrested Salcedo, freed Sands, and Eskamilla, and quickly declared Texas free of the Spanish.

Salcedo's rubbing his temples like, God damn it.

It should be remarked of how quickly this happened and how little military force it took.

About two dozen guys?

What?

Yeah, that's how little military force Salceto actually had.

at his immediate grasp.

Like, he couldn't counter a handful of militia sergeants telling him that he's not in charge anymore.

Just being deposed by like the equivalent of a full rugby team plus the bench is fucking insane.

And instead of declaring Texas independence, they declared it part of the Republic of Mexico, which wasn't actually free quite yet itself yet.

This is the real life version of the thing that the really hardcore still with her Democrat people think is going to happen.

You vote for a right-wing fucking Democrat and suddenly they're like, surprise, I woke Dracula.

She's going to fucking do everything.

And it's like, like, no, but this actually happened in Mexican history.

They're like, the guy was like, yeah, you're right.

I'm gonna defend the Spanish crown.

I love the idea that, like, Celsedo's like, don't worry, I have a guy I can trust.

It's this retired dude who's living out on this plantation.

And the whole time he's a sleeper agent.

He's like, haha, now's my chance.

What was his backup play if he didn't get the call?

You know,

my most trustworthy soldier, traitorous Juan.

Then, with Casas as the new governor, he ordered all Spanish-born people to have their lands seized, their leaders thrown in prison, and sent agents further into Texas to spread the revolution and establish his government at Nacogdoches.

However, Casas wasn't in charge for very long, because pretty much as soon as he sat down on the fancy governor's chair, he probably pissed off everyone else.

First starters, he favored his own people, Mexican-born Spanish, over everyone else.

This included over Native people,

this included included over mixed race people and the large faction of American-born, they're called Texians floating around.

Casas seized all this land held by European-born Spaniards and pretty much just gave it out to his friends and family.

So within a month of taking power, all these other groups that were standing against him united with several of his own officers in his army.

and decided, you know what?

We actually prefer the Spanish to the sky.

So on March 11th, they rallied the army to their side, chose a man named Don Juan Manuel Zambrano, a military officer and church deacon who had previously gotten trouble with the Catholic Church due to running a brothel on the side and put him in charge.

This is like real old school like

colonial territories, Catholic priests.

Like just like, gotta have a side gig.

You know, you're not getting...

Because like the thing is, if you get sent to a colonial territory as a priest, you're probably not making a whole huge amount of money from the diocese.

So it's like, yeah, just smuggle gold and people and do shit that only the Vatican can do now.

Yeah, you're like, everybody has a side gig.

And, you know, nowadays, this guy would just have like 80 different drop shipping companies while making YouTube videos about like, bro, if you put me in charge of your company, I can make you $80,000 a month.

Instead, his dropshipping company is a chain of brothels across the Rio Grande, which he administered so closely, he rarely showed up to church to do his job.

And he was a military officer at the same time.

You've got to appreciate the ecclesiastical grind set.

That's all I got to say.

On that Pope Grunt set.

I feel like the hustle culture in the Catholic Church has just gone too far.

I am finding it really funny that, like, I didn't expect this, and I wasn't going to say anything, but this is becoming like the all-star game of both name-alert and stereotype off.

Like, just, can you think of the most like, okay, he's basically a whiskey priest with ridiculous name that sounds like a dude that's got like the version of Antonio Bandeires' outfit in Desperado they said was too ridiculous, so they have to reject it.

He's got the real life version of that, he's in the military, and he also doesn't go to work.

Like, it's just every fucking stereotype you can think of thrown together.

Nowadays, this dude would just be like a DJ at some Spanish fucking resort that also dealt cocaine.

I mean, look, man, you know what?

All I can say here is that, like, I appreciate that

these guys are getting involved and fighting, not because of this being, like, it's not really the ideological principle.

It's that, like, they're just fucking with each other's side hustles.

Yeah, that's exactly what it is.

And the side hustle got fucked with less under Salsetto.

So, like, no, let's arm Don Juan over there.

Yeah.

Yeah, they did the 1810s equivalent of changing YouTube monetization settings, and everyone just grabs their like, you know, flintlocks and muskets and whatnot.

The rest of the revolutionaries who didn't switch sides back to the Royalists were thrown in the Alamo and soon executed, returning Texas to royalist rule and putting Salceto back in power after only a couple months.

Very short-lived.

However, just because the revolution's own people did what revolutions do best, spitting wildly out of control, consuming their own, did not mean the revolution was dead.

In December, a few months after Casas had been executed, rebels still at work in San Antonio decided to send an envoy to Washington, D.C.

to see if the president of the United States at the time, James Madison, would sit down and talk to them.

Jose Bernardo Gutierrez-Dolora led this mission, and it was effectively the first ever Mexican diplomatic mission to the United States.

This is something of a dream come true for Dolora.

He had been born only a few months before the start of the American Revolution, and he idolized the founding fathers.

He saw the American Revolution as like the Texas and Mexico way forward, obviously with a big asterisk next to that, probably about, you know, white supremacy mostly.

But, you know, he saw them as like the freedom fighters to base his ideology off of.

So this was a huge deal for him.

And his trip to DC could not have come at a better time.

When he arrived in December of 1811, the so-called war hawks of the south were in power.

And many of them had a stated goal of trying to muscle Spain out of North America.

James Monroe is the Secretary of State, and we're about 10 years away from the Monroe doctrine that most people probably remember him for.

But you can see the beginnings of that forming here.

The U.S.

had pressured European powers like the British, the French, and the Russians to accept independence of Spanish colonies in the Americas as like a liver shot to Spanish imperial rule on the continent.

And the House of Representatives had just passed the motion expressing interest in a free and independent Mexico.

So Dallara could not have come at a better time.

And Dallara was welcomed with open arms by pretty much everyone other than the U.S.

president himself.

Specifically, he had an extended sit-down with the Secretary of War, William Eustace.

And this is where shit gets really, really weird.

Eustace said that the U.S.

supports the Mexican Revolution and supports Mexican independence, but could not directly get involved because obviously then they would get sucked into an open war with Spain.

And again, it's not like the U.S.

is some kind of juggernaut at the time.

The U.S.

barely has an army.

However, he did offer to muster said army and occupy Texas.

This is because a little-known fact of the Louisiana Purchase is the U.S.

firmly believed that it also gave them Texas, which obviously Spain had a huge problem with.

So they believed by occupying Texas, which is legally Spanish territory at the time, they would just be enforcing the Louisiana Purchase.

And they believed that was the only way forward.

Like, we can't invade Mexico.

Don't be ridiculous.

However, we will occupy all of Texas despite the fact our army does not exist.

And this is about 30 years before most people think of like the U.S.

openly fucking grounded Texas.

But Dolora rejected Eustace's offer of an American-occupied Texas for the simple fact that he didn't think he had the authority to agree to it.

However, Eustace and other American officials kept saying that the occupation of Texas was clearly the only way forward, which pissed off Dolora to the point that he began to learn English just so he could say swear words to show his anger during negotiations.

Which is impressive.

Fuck yeah.

As we're aware of history, we know that neither of these deals go through.

The Americans can only give him vague notions of support.

And before he leaves DC, he runs into a man with a powerful name, Toledo Dubois Jose Alvarez.

That is a fucking red dead redemption ass name.

And he's a red dead redemption ass character.

Okay.

He was born in Cuba to two Spaniards, one of whom was a naval officer.

He then takes up the mantle of anti-Spanish pro-Cuban revolutionary.

His politics get him exiled from Spain, and then he gets a job with the U.S.

State Department stirring up shit in Cuba before he has to flee Havana for the United States because he's about to be executed.

This man worked for the CIA before the CIA even existed.

And he's not even the only proto-CIA character we're going to get to in this episode.

I love this idea of just like, yeah, you look back at the sort of, you know, leading lights of American diplomacy and foreign affairs in the early, early 19th century, and one of them is just Tony Montana.

I love the idea of like showing up to your local Cuban revolutionary meeting, and it's just like the most Spanish man you've ever seen in your life who's like, no, I'm with you guys.

Why would anybody trust him?

Alvarez gave Dolora a letter of introduction to the governor of Louisiana, a man named William Claiborne, and told him to go to New Orleans in order to meet him.

So he did.

And Claiborne welcomed Dolora with open arms and in turn introduced him to a man named William Shaler.

Shaler is kind of like Alvarez, best described as a CIA agent before such a thing existed.

He had grown up dirt poor on the streets in the 1700s, which means like the most dirt poor anybody has ever been in the history of the United States.

And he worked his way up through a mercantile firm.

He did a short term as a sea captain and a smuggler.

before becoming friends with someone who worked at the U.S.

government, a man named Robert Smith, who then introduced him personally to President James Monroe.

Shaler, you see, was an oily little fucker.

He spoke Spanish and he could always find his way into Spanish-held lands and stir shit up.

But probably the most important thing about him is he knew what were known back then as, quote, adventurers, which we would know today as mercenaries.

Tom, I want to say that I think there's mutual admiration between the two of us on our restraint at not jumping up the name Robert Smith.

Just a goth mercenary showing up, just like the big hair, the makeup.

He's like, are you destabilizing the entire region by introducing the concept of melancholy?

Like, you could always smell the mercenaries coming through the clove cigarettes.

Yeah, they hadn't invented digital sustain pedals yet, so you had to go be a revolutionary and go fight in Mexico, you know, go be a smarmy weirdo, hang out with the, can you imagine the 1810s governor of Louisiana?

Oh, he's the most racist man Louisiana's ever seen.

That's like the first time Milo's accent that sounds like it comes from like the New Orleans city of Atlantis would actually be accurate.

Well, y'all see now.

That kind of thing.

You know, that's what it was like.

Or it was just a French accent.

And Shaler was officially a diplomat, but he was really a spy who was always hired to stir shit up in Spanish-held colonies.

They use Shailer to run things when the U.S.

could not be officially seen to be running things.

And they use Shaler specifically as a filibuster.

Now, we've talked about filibusters before, and we're going to talk about the most famous of these, again, William Walker at some point in the future.

But a filibuster is sometimes known as a freebooter.

And in this context, it is an illegal military operation used to seize land or overthrow a government normally funded by the United States.

That was the term used for it in this time.

The most famous of which is Guyanam William Walker.

We'll talk about him in a series at some point in the the future.

But Shaler was used as a guy who could organize a filibuster.

He was never ever in charge, but you take a guy like Delara and be like, I know a lot of adventurers that would like to help you.

That kind of thing.

And Delara met with his cousin, a guy named also De La Casas in the Louisiana town of Natchitish.

There, they both met with Shaler.

And Shayler directed them there because wouldn't you know it, this town near the Texan border happened to be something of a hotbed for random white dudes willing to do violence for the sake of a paycheck and maybe some land.

And there's a really, really strange reason for that.

You might remember a time in American history where a guy named Aaron Burr, the American founding father who famously killed Alexander Hamilton, kind of sort of tried to create another country in North America.

It was a strange episode of American history called the Burr Conspiracy.

It didn't work out, but it had a fair amount of support amongst army officers, farmers, and business people.

It's kind of like the business plot, but it was much, much more real.

We might cover this in depth at some point, but after the Burr Conspiracy fell apart, a lot of those adventurers ended up hanging around Nakatish.

So they were already kind of planning to freeboot one thing that didn't work out.

They decided, why not freeboot something else?

Yeah, I mean, I'm just thinking about like this, you know, famously in the 20th century, the CIA was like, well, there's these dudes dudes just hanging out in Miami that need jobs.

And so it's like, why not get them to do some dumb shit that doesn't work?

And you know what?

I mean, like, it's a proud American tradition.

We talked about that on a couple episodes.

We're just like, oh, no, there's just like people literally running mercenary storefronts.

So like, just go ask them, like, 10 dudes, please.

And this strange collection of mercenaries would need a commander.

Enter a guy named Augustus McGee.

You want to guess where Augustus McGee was from?

Fuck off.

Fucking swear to God.

We got our Irishman of the UK.

Wait, wait, no, no, no.

Most importantly, is it spelled MC or M-A-C?

So here's the interesting part.

It's spelled MC sometimes, but also sometimes spelled M-A-G.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, he's definitely Irish.

Are you going to mention where he was born?

Oh, he was born in America, but his parents were Irish immigrants.

Where's his father?

His family in America?

New York.

Yeah.

His father, County Cork.

Of course.

McGee was the child.

He's the first generation born in the U.S.

His father, James, had been a pirate during the American Revolution.

And he got fantastically wealthy by being the first American merchant to do business in China.

And this made him like Bill Gates rich back then.

Fantastically wealthy to the point that everybody stopped caring that he was Irish.

He got that wealthy.

Yeah.

He got so wealthy that he managed to get, you know, Chinese artisans to make him the first tracksuit.

Using that money, he spoiled Augustus, his son.

He put him in the most expensive schools in America at the time.

He eventually went to West Point, but like we talked about, this is the chaos version of West Point.

Now, James dies and leaves all of his money to like a close business partner with rules that like, you need to continue taking care of my son.

He ends up getting commissioned in the army.

And eventually in 1809, he's sent down to Louisiana to patrol what was called the Neutral Ground, a kind of lawless strip of land between the U.S.

and Spanish colonies that both sides staked a claim on.

But then there was also like dual patrols because it was like a no man's land.

Everybody was smuggling across it.

So you had Spanish soldiers and American soldiers patrolling it jointly, and McGee is one of them.

You might be wondering why the fucking officer to active service to the U.S.

Army suddenly found himself freebooting his way into the Mexican War of Independence in Texas.

Well, mainly because his promotion to captain got personally shot down by the Secretary of War.

The reason for this is McGee had been recommended for promotion, but had been shot down personally due to the fact the guy that McGee's father left his wealth to, a business partner named Perkins, he effectively raised McGee, to make a very long story short.

And Perkins had become a political opponent of President Madison.

So the Secretary of War said, Fuck that man's unofficially adopted child.

You'll never be more than a lieutenant.

Fuck you and your mix on.

I absolutely fucking hate it when my career gets scuttled by manifest destiny era beef.

You know that that shit will never be squashed.

Furious and looking for wartime glory and a way to kind of show the Secretary of War of like, fuck you, I can be a good leader, McGee ran into multiple other army officers who had been hanging around leftovers from Burr's plot.

And they kind of told him, you know, fuck the army, fuck the U.S., fuck those guys.

We're going to conquer Texas.

We'll make our own goddamn country and we'll make ourselves whatever goddamn rank we want.

Oh, an Irishman trying to invade Texas because he heard of Paprikas like searching for fucking El Dorado.

I was going to say that I do find it funny that like basically all the border towns, you know, right on the border between Texas and Louisiana in this era where like.

the town's in Final Fantasy tactics and everyone's got a fucking Warriors Guild.

You can just get new members to join.

There's just guys hanging around in the bar.

You're like, yeah, you want to to let me join?

I'll join as a novice to do your free booting.

But due to technology, you walk at just a bunch of Irish guys doing the constant walking motion because standing still in a video game.

Just all the Irish guys tee posing in the corner.

So McGee took leave from the army and resigned his commission.

And for some fucking reason, despite, again, only being a lieutenant, was made commander of what would become known as the Gutierrez-McGee Expedition.

Marshalling together what would be named the Republican Army of the North, which is even funnier knowing it's being commanded by an Irish guy.

I need to point out that this glorious army numbered only 130 guys.

This will do much better than you think it will, I promise.

Getting screamed at by your commanding officer who sounds like Roy Keene.

We're going out of Texas, lads.

You know, we're not slacking off.

You know, you want to get stuck into the war.

There's vices and there's Mexican ladies down there.

You know, like, what are we doing up here in the north?

I love the idea of like an American freebooter who's, like, shows up, like, because he wants to get promoted, whatever, and he's really confused why his commander keeps insisting that

they wear ski masks everywhere.

Guys, I think Mr.

McGee thinks he's in charge of a different Republican army.

What are you talking about, boys?

Put on the mask.

It's very cold in Texas at night, you know, like it keeps your face warm.

No reason.

So, this glorious army crossed the Sabine River into Spanish Texas on August 8th, 1812.

Their army was a mix of white guys and, weirdly, French Creoles from Louisiana.

And in the very beginning, these were the majority, followed by the various different makeups of Spanish Texan revolutionaries.

From Tejanos to Spanish Mexicans to Native Americans to Texians, you name it.

It was the world's weirdest rainbow coalition doing rebooting.

Like the fucking battle of the weird accents.

Yeah.

Yeah, this combination would never be repeated again in history until the first time they hired people to flyer for a UGK show.

But

would the food still slap?

Or is it just too confused at this point?

I think it would be, but it's also a question of.

A handshake across borders, everybody just settling on potato.

I mean, it's really just like, I mean, I just, I don't know what would have been available at the time.

You know what I mean?

Because you go back in history and it's like American food was basically like, no, sorry, I can't eat vegetables.

This will poison you.

I just eat boiled porridge of grain thing and some meat if i'm lucky i'm on that all meat fucking 1800s carnivore diet i've died from worms yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah i got i got rickets so bad i look like you fucking like put that whatever that doll was fucking stretch armstrong that they had in the 90s where it was filled with corn syrup it's like you jammed fucking needle point into that thing twisted it all up in a knot like a balloon it's like yeah this is normal this is because i'm on that i got that rickets walk i don't want to call it if i if i called that i have to delete this if i called it a crip walk it would just sound really fucked up right now so

Big woke doesn't want you to know how swole you can get on millet porridge.

Now, credit where credit is due, I guess.

This actually seemed to work at first.

Shaler, Dolora, and others sent men around the Texas countryside to spread propaganda, telling everyone that they're coming to liberate Texas.

Dolora knew that the Spanish couldn't hope to defend this vast, massive frontier, and instead knew they could draw more and more volunteers into the ranks, and that's exactly what happened.

Soon, they had 300 men.

They conquered Nacogdoshis without much of a fight, chasing off the garrison that was smaller than they were.

And what's even stranger here is, as they advanced with their strange ad hoc slap-together army that had no supply system to speak of, nor any real hope of developing one due to the huge amount of miles they were going to cover, the Spanish presence in Texas was actually worse off than they were.

Royalists working for the Spanish government hadn't been paid in sometimes months.

They weren't sure which Spain they were even working for anymore.

And they were so pissed off at the chaotic government that just was not working that many people simply joined the revolutionaries or packed their shit and went home when the army showed up.

Things got so weird that eventually McGee squared off with a young Spanish officer that he had previously worked with during those joint American-Spanish patrols over the neutral ground.

But when the officer saw McGee marching through Texas with his Mexican friends, he just surrendered and joined them.

Spanish soldiers, civilians, anyone that they came across decided, well, they can't possibly run this place any worse and joined them.

It's famously when people say that it bodes well when we are covering the story on this podcast.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, like the lesser of two evils and the other evil is the Spanish Empire.

I can't blame them.

I was going to say, I've been betrayed by Spain's one and two, so I'll take my side with America the first half of the 20th of the 19th century.

Yeah, I really don't want to see how the Spain trilogy finishes out.

It's not going to stick to landing.

McGee thought that they were strong enough to march on San Antonio itself, but learned that the governor and the commander of Spanish forces, Salicedo, had prepared for them, keeping his actual army of 1,400 men waiting near the Guadalupe River in an ambush.

So McGee changed directions, marching his men towards La Bahia on November 14th.

And since they now had 800 men in their army, the hundred or so bored, unsupplied, and not paid Spanish soldiers holding on to La Bahia just said fuck it and surrendered as soon as they arrived.

La Bahia also happened to be home to a massive weapons dump, and this gifted the revolutionaries plenty of ammunition, cannons, and actually, like, they had locked away taxation money that they found, and they just broke into it, used it to pay all of their soldiers for the first time.

I mean, it sounds pretty romantic, you know?

It's called La Bahia.

It's probably some cacti, you know, warm weather, loot boxes full of money somehow.

I found the illustrious Spanish loot box.

I mean, this is kind of like a boss fight, right?

The Spanish soldiers are standing in front of it.

They have no idea that the money is in there, or they know if they break into it, they'll get lined up against the wall and shot.

And you have to just defeat them and you get the loot.

And the loot is, you know, your first paycheck.

Pissed, Salicedo sent his army to the town and put it under siege.

This put the revolutionaries in a really, really bad spot.

Namely, as bad as the Spanish logistic system was, they were getting resupplied and reinforced.

And the revolutionaries were not.

Soon their food supply began to run out.

And Salicedo, realizing who he was fighting and knowing they kind of had their backs against the wall after weeks of fighting, offered a parlay.

McGee, the commander, met with Salicedo over a candlelit dinner at the Spanish camp, which is very funny to think about.

Salicedo offered him terms.

Namely, you know, the conversation boiled down to, look, I don't know why you're here, but our problem isn't with you or the other Americans.

Pack up your shit and go home.

You can even keep the money that you stole from La Bahia, but you have to leave the Mexicans and the Spanish traders behind for us to kill, and we're all good.

Everything's square.

I just love, I have to give them credit where it's due that, like, Spanish and also Mexican culture.

It's like, you know what?

We might be talking about how do you organize selling out your friends so we can kill them, but we're going to do it over a candle at dinner to like maintain the illusion that like sex is also on the table.

Like, it's just such a,

you know what?

Like, I just, I just appreciate it.

Hitting McGee with that seduction game.

He brings in his favorite guitar player to play his favorite Jim Bowie Narco Carrito.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He comes in and it's the guy for some reason is talking with the puss in boots accent.

Like just, it's Antonio Banderas, who's Spanish, not from Mexico, but for some reason is always cast.

McGee looks over his shoulder, looks back.

Now Salicedo's not wearing a shirt.

He's glistening in sweat.

Salicedo just marveling at the mound with the biggest head he's ever seen.

Yeah.

McGee decides, you know what?

This deal sounds pretty good.

And they shake on it, immediately betraying everyone he just recruited.

This is effectively like the diplomatic equivalent of fuck Mary Kill.

Yeah.

True, actually.

But it's got a guy with a guitar in the background going,

you know what I mean?

And then they probably explored each other's bodies and McGee made it back to his camp to inform everyone that.

These are the terms I agreed to.

1800s, ketamine, you'll take whatever.

Neither of these men are eating enough fiber.

It was disgusting.

Nobody wants to do the campaign rations, butt fucking.

Oh.

I think I learned about that in cold weather survival thing about how to fix someone's fecal impact.

But since the army was made up of volunteers, they had a handshake agreement that any agreement or treaty they made with the Spanish would need to be voted on.

And of course, this army, which was now overwhelmingly Spanish, universally shot down the agreement that McGee had agreed to.

But I should point out here that the Americans began to heckle him and boo him openly, just so like their comrades didn't think that they were on his side.

But also, like, what kind of fucking went to parents' names is blue on Wikipedia-ass 1800s Academy kid thinks, like, hey, I'm going to put killing all you to a vote.

You outnumber me 100 to 1.

Imagine being like the Native American or the Mexico-born Spaniards.

Like, this sounds like a good deal.

He seems trustworthy.

I vote yay.

You know what?

You judge harshly, but there was just way less understanding of neurodivergence.

Someone voting yes just because they really fucking hate this other guy standing next to him, knowing that he'll get killed too.

I mean, it's just like, I'm sorry, but when you when you when you sell out your brothers in arms to get fucking murdered by your enemies, you don't put it to a vote.

You don't have a fucking, you know what I mean?

You don't have like a like a like a truth and reconciliation commission before it happens.

See, Nate, this is why democracy fails.

These guys did not vote to feed themselves into the Spanish wood chipper, which only operates after 1 p.m.

But, Joe, the voting for everyone to die just because the dude standing beside you you hate is going to die is the most spiritually British thing ever.

I was going to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

A spiritually British action in an event that more or less like confirms every 19th century frenologist view of like the perfidious Irish.

So wait.

So hypothetically, McGee was a fucking tout, right?

Yeah.

To say McGee was a tout.

You're the expert you're the expert yeah McGee was a tout I just love that word I just love that word I'm sorry uh so after this you know wonderful display of democracy where everyone other than McGee tells McGee to fuck off McGee abandons his men still standing there in formation and locks himself in his room where this is true he becomes violently ill with tuberculosis um and that's because he'd actually had tuberculosis for a really long time and had been hiding it from everyone.

What?

Yep.

See, this is why you always have to make sure that if you create your party of all the different fucking classes available in 19th century Louisiana, you don't hire too many voodoo mages.

Because

if you happen to offend them, this is a liability.

Yeah, he gets struck down with that bio three.

He took off his reflect ring while he was cranking it out of sadness.

And that was the key moment when he needed it.

He had to take off his ring of protection while Salicetta was absolutely plowing him.

I love the idea that you have to take off your reflect ring during sex.

In the Final Fantasy universe, all of the battle protection things also apply during sex.

That pause is an interesting thing.

Yeah, I mean, I suppose that means you have to unequip your materia.

Yeah, exactly.

You know what I mean?

The materia has an unintended effect of causing ED.

Yeah.

Like Power Bottom Final Fantasy character has a permanently blinking limit right bar.

So yeah, he locks himself in his room and gets deathly ill and the army command follows to a guy named Samuel Kemper Kemper is from Virginia, but he had years of experience fighting the Spanish during the wars in Florida and Kemper told his soldiers that they would not be complying with that bullshit deal McGee made and when Saliceto sent a messenger to La Bahia to say like hey why aren't you guys leaving yet?

Kemper just told him to fuck off.

Pissed that the revolutionaries had gone back on their deal Salaceto Salaceto orders an all-out assault on La Bahia, which broke on the town's walls.

Kemper then orders a counter-attack, driving the Spanish forces back and breaking off the siege.

Then, as if this entire saga wasn't weird enough, as soon as the battle of La Bahia is over, McGee dies in his room.

Now, depending on who you talk to, he either finally dies of his tuberculosis, or he had been made so weak from his disease that he knew that the men were going to kill him for cutting that deal.

So he shot himself, but nobody's sure, which tells me he probably didn't shoot himself, or someone would be like, That motherfucker shot himself.

I can tell due to the bullet wound.

I mean, because, yeah, like obviously with tuberculosis, famously, you spit blood, but I mean, even the worst case of tuberculosis is going to be distinguishable from a bullet going through your head.

Like, you might cough up a decent amount of blood, but like, I mean, even the best makeup artists in like pre-fucking, you know, CGI Hollywood would not be able to take that and be like, yeah, tuberculosis, gunshot wound to the head, entirely indistinguishable.

I just thought the guy always looked like Val Kilmer from Tombstone.

Like that was just like he,

that was just his vibe.

He looked like the guy who had been bitten by a zombie and hid it from the group.

Yeah, I mean, I love the idea you can cough so hard that you turn into Nick Stahl and in the bedroom.

That's a fucked up joke for people who've seen that movie.

That is some of the most harrowing VFX I have ever seen in my life.

Just as a side note, great movie.

Do not watch it expecting it to be like a heartwarming story.

Like very few movies get gun violence what good.

That one is, I still remember it 20 odd years later, just as a warning.

But yes, Nick Stahl gets shot and killed and it looks like it does in real life.

And then they've never done that again in a movie because it disturbs people too much.

Anyway, point being, if the guy was already so weak that he retired to his room and was coughing and didn't come out when this battle was happening, it does seem like it's pretty easy to say, okay, he died of the illness.

Yeah, or he was also so weak someone could have just, I don't know, ran over and pushed a thumb through his soft skull and killed him.

I don't fucking know.

I love the idea that like tuberculosis is also like, it's like putting an egg and vinegar for a lunch.

I don't think that actually happens.

There were probably diseases in that era that did do that.

He's got bonitis.

It makes his skull real soft.

The army continued to march, chasing Salicetto as he retreated towards San Antonio.

As the revolutionaries marched again, more and more people joined them.

This included bands of Native Americans who were seeing the fuck Spain train and really didn't want to miss it before it left the station.

Thousands of people were now in the army.

And Salacedo would task Simone D.

Herrero with checking the revolutionaries' advance with an ambush at a place called Rosilio Creek.

And Herrera was qualified and capable commander.

Now, I looked into his military background and the only really real thing that stuck out to me is that it stated that, quote, he had served in the Spanish Royal Army since he was nine years old.

What?

Yeah, you get a promotion like veteran child soldier.

So, like, are we talking drummer boy?

Are we talking some like Charles II shit where like he was like a regimental commander when he was nine years old?

No, it was something like that.

It was, it was something kind of similar how like the royal navies worked in a lot of ways, where you got brought in as a cadet very young, uh, depending on your family and your connections, And you kind of worked as an aide, worked your way up.

And yeah, but he had been in a military capacity as a cadet and an officer since he was nine years old.

And he had been shipped all over the Spanish colonial empire.

And that should tell you just how hard of a dude this guy is because he did die of disease.

But also, like, I'm sorry, like, I'm a parent.

I like to think of myself as being pretty good with kids too, but like, I wouldn't want a nine-year-old aide.

I'd be like, hey, have you got like meetings organized for me?

And he gives me a picture of like, I drew, what if a car was always on fire?

Like,

what if, what if a car could play tennis?

Here you go, dad.

Like, imagine, like, I'm imagining, because again, I was an enlisted guy.

You were an officer, but like, not from like, you know, you're not a West Point grad.

I'm not.

So imagine we show up to work, you know, like Corporal Kasebi and Lieutenant Bethay show up to work and like Captain Herrero walks up.

toddling back and forth because he just woken up from his nap and he's cranky.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

I'm going to kill this child.

I have, like, I have to murder this nine-year-old, or he's gonna kill me in battle.

Like, yeah, so it's like, yeah, he's in a really bad mood right now because we were too busy.

We couldn't have a funeral for the dead squirrel that he saw, and he's really upset that animals die because he hasn't really reached that stage of development yet.

He didn't internalize the concept of death on the battlefield because, you know, the numbers are so great

he can't understand it.

And you go to like the sand table meeting to figure out how the next patrol is going to go, and it just, and it's just like nine-year-old fucking Captain Herrera smashing action figures together.

I'd be like, go do that.

Go do that now.

Yeah, I guess

the decisive point of the main effort is this gigantic talk.

Sir, we regret to inform you that we don't actually have Transformers.

We understand that on the table, we have Optimus Prime and Starscream, but...

You should know that we, those things are not real.

And the horses, um, I know you're using a ponyta picture to to illustrate the cavalry detachment, but horses don't actually shoot fire, sir.

Uh, we have to figure out how to translate this term that the uh the aide-de-camp is using.

I guess it's la los tortugas ninjas

now.

Uh, at this point, I Here's not nine years old anymore, but like I was using that as a as an illustrative of like how long he'd been in uniform, and mostly because by sheer statistics, he should have been killed by disease during all of his years working in the colonial empire but his army outnumbers the revolutionaries by hundreds and he had the high ground setting his men up along a ridgeline now Kemper probably would have been fucked but a Spanish soldier under Herrera's command deserts and joins the revolutionaries promptly telling him the army's over there uh so Kemper flakes the waiting Spanish army The battle lasts minutes, and Herrera is captured.

I like, again, to believe that he is still nine years old and they have to like follow correct customs and traditions of keeping POWs and a man of his rank, but he is nine years old.

Like, well, sir,

we have all your toys here.

We have a nice movie.

We found something called Bob the Builder for you to watch.

It's like, what the fuck, man?

Like, how did we get flanked?

I specifically said, put Thalsa Doom in a blocking position.

Here's your prisoner ration of mac and cheese with your little spoon.

With hot dogs cut on top, just like you like, sir.

I mean, quite frankly, that'd be better than a lot of MRE meals with

besides the point, yeah.

Salaceto, sitting in San Antonio, got word of what had happened at Resilio Creek.

His last real army had gotten smoked, and he officially surrendered unconditionally to Kemper's army on April 1st, 1813.

Kemper decided that it would probably be for the best to keep Saliceto, keep Hereira, and now all of these POWs that they had captured alive.

I mean, they're bargaining chips to use with the Spanish government when it came to securing Texas's freedom or really any negotiations.

It's a good thing to have on hand.

But De Lara disagreed.

And one thing I haven't pointed out is De Lara is actually in command of the army.

He's not a military commander.

He has no military experience.

So Kemper is in tactical command.

But when it came to actual command, it's all De Laura, which makes sense when you think of what this mission is meant to do, right?

They had to put him in charge.

for this freebooting army to make any sense.

But using that authority, which De Laura had never used before, he orders a detachment of Mexico-born Spaniards to take the prisoners away from the Americans, march them out back, and execute every single one of them.

Kemper watches this, tugs on his collar a bit, and realizes now that Spain is never going to rest until everyone is involved in this mass execution is put firmly in the fucking ground.

He then tells DeLora, uh, I gotta go back to Louisiana for a bit.

He fucks off, and and most of the American volunteers go with him.

Though not all.

There's a handful left behind.

With Kemper gone, command fell to a guy named Ruben Ross, who resigned when nobody would listen to him.

I couldn't find out why.

But yeah,

everybody just says, no, fuck that guy.

Then command falls to a man named Henry Perry, who was not a military officer, but he was a doctor.

which still isn't saying much because it's 1813.

He's telling everybody that they got bad blood in in them or their teeth are haunted or whatever.

However, the revolutionaries really loved him because during the Battle of Rosilio Creek, they watched him kill a Spanish officer in one-on-one combat with a sword.

That is so fucking cool.

Look.

It's really cool, but it also makes me wonder how bad was that Spanish officer with the sword that he got got by a doctor with no training at all.

Yeah, I mean, you do, I don't know, maybe it's like the cultural hegemony of bad portrayals of these things, but you would assume that like the Mexican guy or the Spanish guy is going to be like on some Zorro shit with a sword.

Yeah.

You'd expect like a giant Z to be carved for the doctor's chest.

Yeah.

Instead, the doctor is just like, well, this is basically a big scalpel.

And then

excision complete.

Wounds been debried.

So what you're saying is he's a doctor from the 1300s.

He's using it like a scalpel.

He cuts the officer very, very slightly.

And the officer dies weeks later from a terrible infection because he'd wash his hands.

Like a scalpel for Gallagher.

That's basically like a big Swiss halberd or something like that.

Or it's like a doctor just like doing a really quick movement, like Zora.

And the guy looks down and he's like, I'm unharmed.

He's like, check your penis.

And he's circumcised.

Yeah, yeah.

Something like that.

I learned how to fence from my moil.

Yeah, yeah.

The first time a guy with a last name Perry says, oh my wow, move.

God damn it.

Soon the Spanish effort in Texas was flipped from solidly siesta to war.

And Ignacio Elizondo and Joaquin de Erredondo, solid names, were put in command and backed by nearly 1,000 soldiers.

These were mostly actually line soldiers of the Spanish Empire, not simply militiamen.

They were augmented by militiamen, but this is the first real army this Republican army of the North would have to fight.

And Perry, held up in San Antonio, managed to get his army to hold the Spanish army back.

But But still, inside of San Antonio, things were going really, really badly.

Now, Shaler was still around, and he was fucking pissed at De Lora.

He saw De Lora's execution of the Spanish prisoners to be directly against American interest in Texas.

Now, when you think about it, it kind of makes sense.

The U.S.

can't really be seen to support these guys openly.

who are executing Spanish prisoners because that would be bad for America.

Obviously, this is something that America would eventually grow out of caring about, but at the time, it was bad.

So he thought, you know, I can't lead this organization, I can't lead this mission with this mass murderer in charge.

Again, another thing America would grow out of over time.

So Shaylor attempted an internal coup of De Lora and replaced them with their hired gun from Cuba, Toledo Du Bois Jose Alvarez, who he had waiting in the wings this whole time.

Jesus Christ.

Even better than that was Alvarez had his own homemade general's uniform made up and packed with him because he knew he was always plan B.

So as soon as like Shayler's like, activate Agent Toledo, he throws on like the world's shittiest like Etsy ass fucking general's uniform.

and strolls into like the the the fucking command center of san antonio to take command it's like listen up y'all's dripcon 5 okay i'm in charge now

you've got hit with this cia dripcon 5 so obviously this causes a massive rift between the american faction being led by shaler at this point and just about everyone else including the american volunteers who hadn't fucked off back to louisiana who really did like delura but eventually the majority of the army switches sides to fall under alvarez due of course massive massive bribes that Shayla gave the ball.

Now, Alvarez orders the army to move away from San Antonio, marching south towards Medina with an army of about 1,400 men.

They camp there on the night of August 17th, and they plan to wait for Eredondo's army and fight them in the open field, which is dumb enough as it is.

But it gets dumber.

The next morning, Spanish Royalist scouts ride up in front of Alvarez's army.

And what they do is they kind of just ride around in front of them for a while and then kick it to head back into a nearby forest.

Alvarez had standing orders for everyone to remain in place no matter what.

But the revolutionaries say, fuck you, and begin chasing him.

A lot of this is being commanded by a guy named Miguel Menchaca, who was a De Lora loyalist.

And he sees like Alvarez's orders as like, ah, fuck that guy in his stupid fake uniform.

We're going to chase after those guys, win this glorious victory, and then we'll be able to install De Lora as commander again.

Unfortunately for Manchaca and everyone else for that matter, this is the one time they probably should have listened to the Cuban Spanish guy from the proto-CIA.

That's a sentence I just said aloud.

Because as Menchaca takes his detachment out, it causes a trickle effect.

Soon, the whole army is chasing after them.

It's kind of that military version of FOMO we've talked about on multiple occasions.

And now pretty much the whole army is charging into the forest after these scouts.

And that's because the royalists had led the revolutionaries into a massive trap.

They had built defensive works all throughout the area, and Manchaca leads the revolutionary army into an outright slaughter.

The army is completely destroyed.

Anyone who wasn't killed outright and is instead wounded is executed where they fell.

Out of nearly 1,400 men who charged into battle, only 100 revolutionaries survived.

The Spaniards lost 55 men.

Fun fact, one of Eredondo's aides was a young man that will become very important later on in Texan history, Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana.

But

this was and still is the bloodiest battle ever fought in Texas.

And it was followed by brutal purges and reprisals all across Texas that caused a lot of these revolutionaries to flee into the U.S.

with that anger still burning for a few years and began to organize what would become known as the Texas Revolution.

Also, weirdly, this is despite being the bloodiest battle ever fought in Texas, nobody's entirely sure where it happened.

Like they have kind of an idea, but like they'd put state historical markers down in just very wrong places on at least three occasions.

Nobody can really pinpoint where it happened.

So the end.

I feel like Kempner is the one person who seems like he kind of gets away on this one.

Yeah, yeah, he went off to lead like a very successful political life after this.

I mean, it's like, yeah, respect to his political instincts that when you murder all the prisoners, you're probably not going to end very well for you.

Yeah.

Excuse me, sir.

I will be involved in free booting all across this continent.

I will steal land and slaughter natives, but I draw the line at executing Spanish POWs.

Yeah, he probably has to speak Spanish to this guy, so he has to say, like, pienso que has fuceado el pero.

That is the battle of Medina of 1813.

But, fellas, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion.

And if you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, you can donate to the show on Patreon.

You can ask us on Patreon or in the Discord, you'll also have access to, and we'll answer it on air.

Today's question is: You're playing an RPG, all of the hosts have to fall into a traditional party role of an RPG.

What are your roles?

I don't know, I but I know that Nate is a wizard for sure.

I don't know how else to explain it.

Nate, you do magic.

I do magic.

Okay.

Tom, you are a tank.

I'll take that.

I don't know what I would be.

I leave that to your judgment.

Tom is going to have the physiognomy of whatever RPG character holds a battle axe.

Yeah, tank, for sure.

That's why I said tank.

He's got the build.

I'm too tall and lanky to be a tank.

You're too tall to be a ranger.

He's a dragoon.

He's a dragoon.

I'll take that.

You're already going to look pretty impressive with your big-ass pointy hat because you're already like 6'3.

So you can jump really high for some reason.

That's not true.

Armenians fall into the white category when it comes to jumping ability.

But yeah, we said before, you're not allowed to leave the earth.

Bad things happen to you.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Also, as well, Joe, if you jumped more than like a foot off the ground when you land, your knees would just fucking obliterate like glass.

That's true.

My knees have the consistency of drywall.

We're missing a healer.

So I don't know who that would be.

Ani?

No, certainly Quinn or Ani don't fit the role of healer either.

Which role sleeps in the most?

Bard?

Yeah, I feel like Bards are sleepy.

I feel like Bards are sleepy.

Yeah, fair enough.

I don't know.

I'm kind of sad I didn't get picked to be a bard.

I'd much rather be a bard than a wizard.

I feel like you're a wizard.

I guess if I'm a wizard, I can cast musical ability on myself.

I feel like you're a wizard, but your wizard skills are like, are buffing.

Like, you're a buff guy.

I don't know enough about RPGs to know what that means.

So is that polishing the floor or I'm jacked?

You're a guy who went to like wizarding school to learn how to do like barrier magic and stuff, but you got really confused and now you just buff a really mean floor.

Yeah,

I went to wizard school and I had to spend decades unlearning the latent transphobia built into the whole system.

Yeah, exactly.

See, that's why thankfully

I went to Wizarding Community College and it just became a dragoon.

I'm obviously making reference to Hogwarts there.

Hope that being a wizard isn't transphobic.

If anything, you feel like wizards would be a translation.

That's one of the nice things about...

Are wizards trans-inclusive, the most heated debate in podcast history?

This is one of the nice things about fantasy tropes is they existed way before horrible transphobic authors used them to make billions of dollars.

So fuck them.

But gentlemen, that is a podcast.

You host other podcasts.

Plug those other podcasts.

Trash Future, What a Hell of a Way to Dad, Kill James Bond, No Gods, No Mayors.

They all have free content and bonus content.

You should check them out.

Beneath Skinner, show about the history of everything, told you the history of tattooing, and a new show called This Guy Sucked, where talk about guys from history who sucked,

told by the people who know them best.

Everybody, thank you so much for listening to the show.

This is the only show that I host, so consider supporting us on Patreon.

You get years and years and years bonus content, e-books, audiobooks, first dibs on live show tickets and merch.

You get every regular episode early.

And

whenever we eventually grow out of this and we decide to form our own free booting army, we will commission you a general.

You can design your own uniform.

Just keep it with you at all times, just in case.

Yeah, you can design your own.

Everybody, in fact, should design their own uniform.

I don't want any soldier standing shoulder to shoulder looking anything remotely identical.

You can become a general of the sovereign nation of Joe Nistria.

That's right.

The nation of Joe from Futurama.

And again, everybody, thank you so much.

And until next time,

commission nine-year-olds' officers and get them captured in battle.

I mean, I'm not even going to make that joke.

Have a good one, everyone.