Episode 384 - The Texas Revolution: Part 2

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Hello and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast.

I'm Joe and with me is Tom and Nate.

Things are getting especially heated here at the Buckies Revolutionary Council.

Several men have hung a large banner reading, come and take it, over the Mountain Dew display.

Others are stabbing each other over the proper amount of spice that goes into their no-bean chili.

While another man has crashed his lifted horse wagon through the wall.

It's truly the most beautiful republic on God's green earth.

Fellas, how are we doing?

You know, I realized that your friend, you know, former platoon mate who had gotten the lower back tattoo of Texas or whatever, he should have gotten come and take it with a cannon over his ass.

It's just a cannon that says come under it.

I mean, in this analogy of like the lifted wagon, we are once again, you know, within the Texas Houston rap scene of once again, you are gripping wood.

Yeah.

Well, also, like, I don't know if you're familiar with this, but with the Houston slabs and like some of the stuff they do with the neon lights inside the trunks, I've seen so many amazing things where it's like, you know, it'll be like neon art of cups of lean and you'll say like, this why you hoe missing or another one I saw was don't go broke trying to catch up.

Like genuinely just unbelievable.

I mean, like, it's a whole art.

And it's like Roman chariot spikes.

The swang is.

the great big spikes that sum out from the yeah from the rims yeah like i said it's just the whistle tips

no the whistle tip is a thing in oakland in the bay

Fine.

These cause problems and annoyance in a different way.

Instead of making noise, imagine if you had spikes coming out of the centers of your rim.

So like, yeah, people

basically doing like glad like chariot combat on that ass.

Cut open a horse.

It's just nothing but neon lights and like the glow-in-the-dark lean cup.

Like, yo, check out my busted-ass horse.

Oh, you got a series of candles underneath.

the wagon

well i mean it also kind of comes across the idea that like some of these things are just where even though we have modern reasons and manifestations of them, they're actually eternally occurring throughout the culture.

And if you went back to this day, like you said, guy would be gripping grain on the old horse wagon, but he would have the neon equivalent, I don't know, like candlelit painting, like a canvas candlelit painting backlit to make it glow.

It's like black Bart Simpson with two muskets or something like that.

They're going to have me turn back into the old me.

You got a whole bunch of like Texans sitting around sipping on promethasine lace chili.

Yeah, like I said, exactly.

It's like a throwback fucking, you know, historical retcon king of the trill.

That's what we're talking about today.

And I have to say this just in case it comes across like goofy white boy shit.

This is from a position of nothing but love and respect.

Yeah, I fucking love.

Yeah, we're making fun of the Texans in this situation.

I love,

I don't want to live in, Houston has some things about it that I don't like, like no zoning laws whatsoever.

An 18-lane highway or whatever the fuck it is now.

Yeah, yeah.

As a friend of mine said, it's like there's literally no reason why you can't have a street where there's

a daycare next to a a strip club next to a chemical refinery in Houston.

And there's no fucking sidewalks.

Yeah, look, we live in a wonderful, wonderful timeline of the continuous history of the Texas Mud Cup.

Yep.

When we left you last time, the revolutionaries of Texas, fed up with the Mexican government trying to take away their slaves and make them pay taxes, rose up against the centralist government.

of Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, culminating in the Battle of Gonzalez, a confused, mess of a fight that resulted in that come and take it flag that every American knows due to it being like a literal modern-day bumper sticker-based red flag for whoever is driving the truck that just cut you off in traffic.

Once word of the Texan victory gets out both throughout Texas and the United States, thousands of men run to join the fight.

We have to start this episode by going back just a little in time.

In mid-September, Santa Ana set a force of 500 men under the command of his brother-in-law, General Martín Perfecto Cos, to land at Capano Bay.

From there, they were supposed to advance inland and expel illegal settlers back across the American border, as well as disarm the Texans.

The Battle of Gonzalez really only sucked in the hardliners, those settlers who were already joining militias against government orders, the ones willing to square off with Mexican soldiers when they came to town to take a cannon.

even if that cannon happened to be government property.

Cos is about to do the one thing that no government wants to do during a revolution, and that is, motivate normal people to side with the revolutionaries.

As Kaas and his men advanced from Capano Bay, they came across mostly peaceful settlers, but also towns populated by Tejanos.

According to the government, the Tejanos were now as much a settlers as the Texans were, and soon orders went out that everyone had to hand over their guns.

Then, news of the Battle of Gonzales got to them.

Texas and Tejanos got together in the town of Matagorda and decided that the time had come to stand up a militia of volunteers and elect their leadership, deciding on George Collingsworth from Mississippi as captain, Dr.

William Carlton as his second, and C.D.

Collingsworth, George's brother, as his third.

Together, the three men decided the best course of action was not to wait for the Mexican forces to advance on their town, but rather to strike out where they were stationed, at La Pia.

Though, some of this had to do with something else.

For example, there is a very loud rumor that Cos took with him a stash of money worth about $50,000 back then in Mexican silver.

This wouldn't have been too unheard of, as generals did often take money with them on the march so they could pay their soldiers.

So the battle plan boiled down to attacking La Bahia, stealing the money, and kidnapping Cos so they could then ransom him back for money to Santa Ana.

This volunteer force of only about 20 men set out the same night, and immediately they began bickering with one another over the mission until another vote was held.

Dr.

Carlton was fired, and C.D.

Collingsworth replaced him from third to second.

And another man, James Moore, was promoted to third.

They sent word out to other settlements for reinforcements, which they got, and included in this was dozens of vaqueros, or Tejano cowboys.

We aren't entirely sure how many men Collingsworth ended up recruiting because the man just did not bother to keep any paperwork.

But the generally accepted number is about 120.

Just to be clear here, these men were revolutionaries, but they were not, let's say, Texan nationalists.

Not yet, anyway.

Instead, they all swore an oath to defend the Federal Republic of Mexico and its Constitution of 1824.

But by the time the men had gathered, Cos had left La Bahia, and he got word of the Battle of Gonzalez and quickly marched for San Antonio, meaning their entire human bank robbery scheme had fallen through, though the garrison itself was left pretty much empty, leaving only 50 men behind to guard it.

So the volunteers moved in anyway, maneuvering around the fort in the middle of of the night, and they promptly got lost and trapped in a mesquite thicket.

But you know that lunch is going to be fucking slopping once they make those campfires.

Yeah, I will say for like I was stationed in Texas and had the joy of getting lost.

Well, not necessarily lost, but wandering through a mesquite thicket while doing land navigation.

Shit is thick.

It's real, real unpleasant.

This mesquite, if I'm not mistaken, it's not really big trees, right?

It's kind of like bigger juniper trees, isn't it?

Like it's, it's kind of or am I thinking something different?

It seems like a giant bush for those

kind of

how juniper trees kind of I mean they're trees, but they're like what if bonsai trees got fucking zapped with a big like the honey I blew up the kid ray?

Yeah, like they're so I figured mesquite was probably a similar thing.

Now, what's weird is they were not the only person trapped that specific mesquite thicket.

Like some kind of RPG side quest giver, they ran into a singular other man who was just chilling in the thicket named Benjamin Rush Millum.

He was out there trying to invent barbecue to commune with the forest.

They were wandering through the thicket and just saw a guy sitting there with an exclamation point above his head.

I feel like I need to talk to this man.

He's like, the spirit of the hills and the forest has told me that some important thing is going to be revealed to me in this, in this mesquite thicket.

I need to go there and just wait.

And it's like, well, yeah, because you got to smell it.

And they'd be like, what if I burned this on some meat?

That's how Texan Christianity was created.

Yeah.

Yeah, the burning bush.

Then you're throwing in racks or ribs on top of that shit.

Don't listen to the burning bush.

Just cook on that motherfucker.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, burning bush, but that's just forgetting the glaze to hard.

You actually have to cook that shit.

You got to simmer it beforehand.

You know, you got to do the boiling, braising, whatever.

Holy.

Wow.

We could really ruin this episode script and take it off track starting talk about fucking barbecue.

So I'm just going to be quiet.

Millum was one of the very first Americans to ever settle in Texas back in 1819.

And when he moved there, he just kind of moved in with the local Comanches who were just like, all right, whatever, white boy.

It seems like an unending list of just crazy ass white boys who end up with Native Americans.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, because one community was much more welcoming than the other.

Yeah, true.

Yeah, I mean,

basically, you could join the Comanche.

Like, your family didn't like you having face piercings or something like that.

It's sort of like 1800s goth kid.

And you're like, these people, it's like finding the kingdom of the bees from the end of that blind melon video.

But your dad is now Magwa from fucking last week.

I know I'm mixing it up.

I'm sorry.

I just.

Much like Texas and, you know, Blind Melon, there's no rain.

There is no rain.

Feel free to boo me on that one.

Oh, before we go ahead, I was thinking about the last episode, and I said the only good thing to come from Texas is ZZ Top.

I need to correct myself on that before we proceed any further.

At the Drive-In and Butthole Surfers are also from Texas.

They are.

They absolutely are.

Somehow I didn't know that At the Drive-In was from Texas.

Yeah, El Paso.

El Paso.

Yeah,

okay.

yeah.

Yeah.

I was also going to say, too, that.

A lot of good things come from Texas, begrudgingly, we must admit.

Yeah.

And also,

bringing it back to Blind Mellon, I was going to say, like, Shannon Hoon from Blind Mellon has really lived the Indiana dream of becoming a rock star and dying from heroin at the same time.

So, you know,

I thought he died of cocaine.

Heroin.

Oh.

It was the 90s.

Yeah.

Yeah.

From living with the Comanches, Millem joined a freebooter expedition, which failed, landed him in prison for several years, and from there he joined the Mexican army as a colonel under Santa Ana.

And then Santa Ana gutted the government.

He lost his job and Millem joined several other Mexican Federalists in the rebellion against him.

But his unit got smashed, leaving him one of the few people left alive.

And then he jumped on a horse and rode about 400 goddamn miles till he got stuck in that thicket.

Jesus Christ.

Upon seeing that the men in the thicket with it were Texan, he was like, yeah, all right, I'll join you guys too.

And he went from colonel to private.

Everyone is just like Santa Ana maxing at this time.

He's like switching sides at every possible turn.

You taught me everything I know.

I also just like the idea of this being like, you know, it's like a weird mini-series kind of thing in an episode two.

It's just like the entire episode is confined to a fucking forest.

And it's just constantly more people getting lost in the forest and running into each other in the forest.

And it's just really.

That is actually how like, you know, 19th century remilitary operations went.

It makes more sense if it was a forest, but it's literally just a thicket.

Everybody's just stuck in some small bushes.

Everyone's doing the military equivalent of cruising in Hamstead Heath.

It's the military version of Hobur Simpson backing into the bush, but as he backs in, he runs into several Texans.

Yeah, I was just thinking about this, that it winds up becoming like a Samuel Beckett play of more and more people trying to jam themselves into the bush and pretend that they just walked into it by mistake somehow.

The Texans demanded that La Bahia surrender, to which, of course, they refuse.

So the next night, the Texans snuck into the fort, hacked down the commander's door with an axe, and captured him without a fight.

Only after the resulting shouting match of him getting captured at gunpoint did the other soldiers realize that like, oh god, there's enemy in our fort, and began firing at the Texans.

Though once the Texans returned fire and the Mexicans realized their commander was being held at axe point, they decided to surrender.

La Bahia and the nearby town of Goliad fell in about 20 minutes.

This is obviously a massive victory for the young rebellion, but in more than one way.

La Bahia was between Caas' army and Capano Bay, meaning not only had they cut off his route of withdrawal, for those unaware, again, Texas is bigger than you think it is, and Capano Bay was Caas's only way of resupply and reinforcement.

Unless, of course, he marched all the way out of Texas and into interior Mexico, which would take days, if not weeks.

Meanwhile, with the main political movers of Texas, revolt was turning into war.

A political body named the Saint-Philippe Committee for Public Safety was formed.

And in case that name rings a bell, there is a French revolutionary motivation behind it.

It was chaired in the provisional Texan capital of Saint-Philippe, and Stephen Austin went before the committee and declared that they were clearly at war, petting a now very well-known letter that called for the people of Texas to fight against, quote, military despotism.

The committee then circulated this letter as far and wide as they could.

It ended up being reprinted in like American newspapers and things like that.

Though, if there was going to be a war, they would need an actual army, and that army would need a commander.

Austin was probably the most well-known man in Texas because he's kind of Texas's singular founding father at this point.

And he was immediately selected to be the Texan army commander, despite having no real military experience to speak of.

He dubbed this new army the Army of the People, and it numbered about 300 dudes.

Texans' first target was clear.

Mexico had one large garrison in the area, and would you know it, they had kind of accidentally cut it off from the sea, costs at San Antonio and is now 650 men.

However, San Antonio and the men inside it were hardly prepared for open war.

Life on the Mexican frontier, like we said, was very hard for everyone, soldiers included.

And it's why nobody wanted to move and and work there.

Again, soldiers included.

Your average Mexican soldier in Texas would do anything they could do to get out of frontier duty.

So border garrisons are normally badly understaffed and reinforced with men given a choice, prison or Texas.

Death or Texas.

Yeah.

The only thing that's certain in life is death or Texas.

This was something known by the government and the military.

These were the runoff of their army, I guess.

And they purposefully left them chronically short of supplies of food, uniforms, even boots.

Sometimes they just didn't bother to pay them because they didn't want to be there.

The government hated them because most of them were convicts.

So fuck them.

As a result, their morale was about as bad as you could imagine.

Though, I shouldn't point out the flaws of the Mexican army in Texas without also talking about the Texan Army of the people.

For starters, it was an army in name only.

Most of these men in the ranks had no formal training, though there was a few veterans from the War of 1812 kicking around, especially veterans of the Battle of New Orleans due to, you know, most of these guys being from the South.

They had no logistical network, no standardized recruitment pool or armament to the point they didn't even have canteens to carry water.

Something that is very important in Texas of all places.

Also, it's like anyone who's a veteran of 1812, like they're quite old.

Yeah.

Like unless they were fighting like as a teenager, they're old as shit.

Yeah, especially for a frontier life.

Yeah.

instead at this point your average texan volunteer carried water in a hollowed out gourd yes we need to bring back the look at they had gourds they weren't worrying about micro plastics no yeah i don't have pieces of gourd in my ball sack but i do have micro plastics i'm sipping on my chili out of my gourd the chili gourd hey man you know what it's basically succotash because it's like a fucking squash and it's got chili inside of you it's all good i was gonna say too is that it's funny to me because the french word for like a water bottle is un gourd which i didn't know i would have have said un bouté, but like, yeah, they always call the little plastic little sports bottles un gourd.

And I guess like having a gourd that you carry is just a thing that's just transcended, you know?

They may have started it there, but it made its way back with like the last dude to get his ass booted the fuck out of Mexico, back to France.

They brought the drinks.

God damn it, Steven.

You're not supposed to eat the gourd.

Sipping chili out of my gourd.

Man, don't fucking say that.

People are going to start coming to live shows with like hollowed-out pumpkins full of chili and shit.

Do it.

Do you bring me a hallowed-out pumpkin to sigh?

Yeah,

then I can eat a bit of it and do the Texas limit break, aka shit myself.

Some men volunteered without even owning a gun, which I know sounds shocking because we're talking about Texans here.

The ones that did bring their own guns, obviously, they don't have enough gunpowder or shot at home for an actual battle, you know?

So everybody's short of everything.

The men also had zero discipline.

The first order that Austin passed after being elected was a calm reminder for the men to please obey the orders of their elected officers.

His second order was to beg them to stop indiscriminately firing their weapons into the air, quite literally going,

so that's where that stereotype comes from.

Yeah, I like the, you know, it's very on brand for a quote-unquote army of people who've been banded together under the auspices of, I'm not going to do what you tell me to do.

Exactly.

Yeah.

The third order was to demand that men stop drinking and coming to duty drunk.

They're exactly the kinds of dudes you would expect would volunteer to settle in the frontiers.

It is quite hard to, you know, do a drink check on a gourd.

You know, everybody upend your gourds.

This is like the soft plop, plop, plop of a chili coming out.

God dominate a widened my gourd.

Maybe that's why there's no beans in it because beans will be quite hard to pour into a gourd.

Yeah, it's all just meat and spices.

Sip it on that Texas lean out of my gourd, baby.

I got one gourd shoved inside another and I'm double cupped up.

Another big ass gourd has a funnel to pour it into the smaller gourd.

Whipping around on

my tricked out wagon drinking Texas mud cup chili out of my gourd.

I mean, I feel like they obviously they had like metal smithing and casting at this point, so they probably could have made a metal funnel, but it is very funny to imagine like Texas Assembly light is just dudes walking, carrying gourds, putting them under the metal funnel like the chili truck with yeah, the canned paintings.

Yeah, exactly.

This why your hoe missing written on the side of it.

He's just dumping chili into it.

This why your beans missing.

Hey, come fill up your chili gourd out of the chili hoes.

I really wish this episode would come out before our live show and we could all just bring howled out gourds on stage to drink from.

But if we did it now, we'd just look like insane people.

Now, just because Cos and his soldiers were only slightly more soldiers than the Texans, it didn't mean that they were doing anything.

They had dug into San Antonio and reforced their position with about 20 cannons and trained cavalry.

A lot of the veterans on the Texan side knew this and warned Austin that our guys are brave to a fault and they might be itching for a fight, but they are still quite literally an untrained militia.

If you want to fight and win, stay to the brush, stick to the ambushes, you know, fight like the Cherokee do.

Because like obviously the Mexicans haven't been able to defeat them.

Austin said, fuck that, and the army was marching towards San Antonio.

Though he did try to offset his lack of trained dragoons, because like the Mexican army at this point is famed for their like Napoleonic tradition of dragoons, mostly because Santa Ana was obsessed with Napoleon.

He called himself the Napoleon of the West.

He made his uniform look Napoleon-esque.

Things like he was obsessed with the guy.

Certainly nothing anybody in this podcast has ever done.

I mean, that implies that Santa Ana was also a feat guy then.

It can be assumed, yeah.

So he tried to offset this lack of dragoons by simply creating some.

Dragoons, just to bring it back to military history and not our riff on Napoleon, dragoons, if I'm not mistaken, are kind of like a light cavalry, right?

Yeah, they're cavalry skirmishers, light armored, armed with lances or sabers.

And they typically like they do cavalry stuff, like you said, cavalry skirmishing, but then also like part of being a dragoon is then dismounting and having dismounted fighting as well.

Yes,

they carry carbines on them most of the time, so they can dismount and fire in a skirmishing line.

But weirdly, the Mexican dragoons seem to be more used and a more correct term, you'd call them Lancers.

But Santa Ana always explicitly called them dragoons.

Which is funny because Dragoon sounds badass, but like, you know, it starts being like, oh, yeah, I know that job class from Final Fantasy Tactics, much like Onion Knight.

But

there was a military rule.

The Mexicans are going to hit them with the Dragoon jump.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Santa Ana's formation just disappears for one turn when it shows up again.

But it falls exactly where it jumped before.

So you just sidestep it slightly.

The Texans catching a flying dragoon spear from the top of the head as they do a superhero landing.

You thought you were going to beat his ass, but oh no, Santa Anna changed his job class back to Squire, and he just keeps using yell on himself because that's what he loves doing.

And now he has 30 turns to every one of yours.

So he can literally defeat you by just slowly but surely caressing your feet until you give up.

You're just giving me horrible flashbacks of my time playing Final Fantasy Tactics.

Now, this unit was nicknamed the Gonzalez Lancers.

They were not Lancers.

They didn't even have Lances.

The Gonzalez Lancers now sounds like a really shitty high school fucking sports team.

It might be.

It probably is, yeah.

Takes one to know what I was the fucking Carmel Greyhounds.

So, like, there you go.

I was the Corsairs.

Actually, all of my schools from elementary to high school were named after pirates.

I was the El Dorado Dust Devils, New Mexico.

Clay Trojans, whatever, Clay King High School, and then the Carmel Greyhounds.

And then

I don't know what IU Hoosiers, can you define what it is?

It's just, you know, inscrutable thing that just roams around.

I don't know.

So, mascots, man.

The Hoosiers are cryptic.

According to Francis, Hoosier is a slur in Mrs.

Missouri of being like a sh like a strike breaker.

Oh.

So, like, we call ourselves Hoosiers proudly.

And he's like in Missouri, if you bear a Hoosier, that means you're a scab and you're a piece of shit.

I was like, all right.

I mean, if you're a clay Trojan, does that mean like you're there?

And he's like, hold up, babe.

I just need to stick my dick in the kitle for like 13 hours.

it's a literal dick helmet

by university obviously famously michigan state spartans uh nothing problematic connected nothing bad ever happened there nothing problematic connected to that name or university the gonzalez lancers were just some guys on horseback and instead of lances they had cane poles that someone fastened sharpened files to the end see it's got a bit of sharpened metal wrapped around the end of these poles just hold up a second let me like scrape this against your face for 15 minutes.

Let me do your nails real quick, motherfucker.

The horses nor the men knew how to fight in this capacity.

Obviously, it takes a lot to train a horse to do things in a military manner because no animal is just going to run headlong into combat.

It's against anybody's survival instinct.

So yeah, just some random dudes with fucking military prison shivs on horseback.

It's also very funny what you point that out because it's like, obviously, you know, soldiers famously were not very smart either, but you know, there's a better communication, and people get bullied and shamed into it.

Whereas, I don't think you can really shame a horse.

You can scare a horse, but I don't think you can shame a horse.

I think we should try.

No, but a horse shamer is like 100% a job that would have existed at this point.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, exactly.

Just love the idea.

The first person comes around and be like, yeah, your hooves look fucked up.

One of those.

You just have to look at those long-ass teeth freak nice fucking weird tail that you just use to scare flies around with you weird fucker i don't know how to shame a horse we could do eat hay you bitch

actually i was gonna i'm not gonna make joe uncomfortable with this but there's this there's an excerpt of uh ronaldo arena's uh memoir before night falls that uh if you read it you'll know exactly what i'm talking about about shaming a horse or rather a shameless horse a ways in which horses and it's not to do with mr hand shit or whatever it's subtler than that but i feel like we've already done too much with turning Joe into the world's most aware of gay things, non-

Your baby mama having foals with someone else.

Ronaldo Arenas describes riding home on a horse with his mom, and it was a female horse, and then like an unharnessed male horse came up.

And the female horse they were riding on basically like kicked and whinnied and forced them off and wouldn't let them stay on because she was like, no, I need to get fucked by this male horse.

He's like, both me and my mom are like, oh, I really want to get dicked down like that, too.

I mean, so it's just.

Yeah, that might, that he would have been like 13.

So it's like it's a deeply horny book.

It's weird, but they made a Julian Schnabel made a movie out of it.

So I know about it.

I feel like that's not something that shames the horse as much as it shames the riders for the horse not wanting to fuck them.

Like, what, I'm not good enough.

It's horse cook-holding.

Yeah, I got horse cucked.

Oh, my God.

You're right, man.

But then the horse is also the cuckstool.

Yeah.

This is like that tweet I saw the other day.

Just do horses know their vehicles?

The army's march towards San Antonio was pretty uneventful, other than running into a Mexican scouting party who broke contact and ran back to the garrison.

Now, the Texans took this as a victory, other than, you know, scouts doing their job.

And when Austin got a good look at San Antonio's defenses for the first time, he saw he might be kind of fucked.

Not only because of the cannons, but because he had found he was also outnumbered two to one.

Now, there were a few bright spots.

For one, More Mexican military commanders were rising up against Santa Ana, and a lot of the nearby Tejanos were pretty sick of Kos and his soldiers.

So Juan Seguin was charged with trying to recruit as many of them as he could.

And he did.

He recruited a ton of Tejanos, a lot of Vaqueros, and this pretty much saved the Texan army.

Because Austin realized an assault was impossible, they would instead need to besiege Kos.

It meant that he would be tied down without any logistical system to support his siege.

The Vaqueros turned into that support system that Austin had not even thought of.

They ran foraging missions for the Texans so they didn't starve.

They acted as something of like a pony express so the various parts of the Texan rebellion could communicate.

And they became guides so random settlers didn't get lost and die on the frontier while trying to make the way to the army.

Another important thing that Austin realized is that he didn't really know the defensive layout of San Antonio.

As was normal for a former Spanish colony, there's a lot of missions that had been built around the town.

Think of forts.

Like the Alamo.

The Alamo is a mission.

They're like, they're forts built to ward off native attack.

Don't think of them as castles or anything like that.

So Austin needed to find out just how many of them are still being manned by Mexican forces.

And to do that, he put together a column of 90 men commanded by a guy.

I think a lot of people listening that know at least something about the Texas Revolution were waiting for me to introduce.

James Bowie.

You might know him better as the guy who has a knife named after him.

Oh, James Bowie, yeah.

Oh, yep.

Bowie knife and all that.

Yep.

Yep.

Famed American frontiersman.

And by that, I mean an unhinged, insane serial killer of the American native population.

He's probably best known for two things.

The massive knife he carried on him at all times, which, of course, is named the Bowie Knife.

It was pretty much the size of a machete.

And his eventual death, which we will get to.

Okay.

He was also a crippling alcoholic who needed to be slightly soft at all times lest he start getting the shakes.

I mean, I feel like that's just part and parcel of being alive at this time.

He was such an alcoholic that other people involved on the frontier remarked on it.

That's how much of a booze hound Jim Bowie is.

Known for being a racist in the antebellum South, basically.

He went to above and beyond the call of duty of being a frontier alcoholic.

And with him was James Fannin, one of the only men in professional military training and education, even if that happened to only be two years at West Point before he dropped out and became a slave trader.

Heroes of the Revolution won it all.

Well, that's the thing, right?

You didn't have to be an LLC Twitter bullshit back in these days if you wanted to just be a complete fucking asshole.

There were so many different jobs available to you.

I mean, it was horrible.

I'm not saying it's funny or good.

I'm just saying, like, when you think about it, it's like, oh, what are you going to do?

Well, actually, school isn't really working out for me.

So instead of it's like, oh, I'm going to go work on the oil patch or I'm going to join the military.

I'm going to fucking go to trade school.

It's like, no, I think I'm going to abduct people.

I think I'm going to go become the president of Nicaragua.

Whatever.

Be the snake oil salesman.

I'm going to die of putting Mercury in one of my orifices.

I'm going to form a breakaway state in the middle of the Mexican desert.

I've got to discover alchemy again.

Lots of people said they couldn't fix it, but I can.

I'm different.

Yeah, I understand the law of equivalent exchange after what happened to my brother and I.

Jesus Christ.

Bowie's column marched for Mission Concepcion.

with the clear orders not to go that far, only to get a good look at Mexican positions and to turn around and come back once they did.

Austin was worried that if they were gone longer, the larger Mexican force would catch that the smaller Texan force had split and corner one half of it and destroy them.

Bowie immediately ignored these orders and had his men camp out overnight.

Cos alerted to Bowie's column thanks to a nearby priest slash spy and had a force of 400 soldiers, 300 of whom were mounted, and 100 of whom were infantry, to ride out that morning and attack them.

Bowie, despite probably being off his face drunk, had seen this as a possibility.

So not only did he set guards ahead of the main force, but he set his men around a bend of a nearby river in something that resembled a V shape.

Bowie knew an L shape would probably be better to catch a larger force than something that Nate and I could attest to vividly.

We're talking about some L-shaped ambushes.

Yeah.

But he was worried that his idiot-ass, untrained soldiers would shoot one another in a crossfire.

Which, to be honest here, we've been doing the show for nearly a decade.

This might be one of the smartest things, but simultaneously most simple things we've ever talked about an officer doing.

Most of the time on this show, we talk about a battle like this and the officer lines his men up in a way that's the most tactically proficient, but are shocked to find them shooting at each other because they know so little about their own men's capabilities.

Bowie knew his own men and knew they did not know what they were doing.

So really, really quickly, I promise this will not take more than a minute, Joe, just so people understand.

The biggest thing is, like Joe just pointed out, doing ambushes is to put things where when everyone is shooting and they're going pointing their weapons in the right direction and not at each other.

When you're like, oh, what if we shot from both sides?

Like, no, you'll just shoot each other.

Yeah, we just talked about that in the different battle of the broken British square of them all just gutting each other down at point-blank range.

Literally, like, in the doctrinal way that we were taught, obviously, this was different back then, but like, this lines up with a lot of stuff because so much of the tactics in small unit things in the U.S.

military are based on shit they started doing in like the fucking the 1700s and like the seven years war it's literally just what is the thing that we use to initiate it what are the left and like the furthest extent on either side of the ambush and then what are you going to do afterwards and then everyone gets out and it's like it's so crazy when you hear this like wow this sounds like mega ultra tactical stuff or like super contemporary stuff and it's like well no if you paid attention to like how do i avoid getting shot by my own guys and having my own guys shoot each other it makes sense to do it this way as as sick as it would fucking be to do double pincer flanking maneuvers and shit it's like that doesn't even work now when we've got GPS and night vision.

Like, what do you think it was like back in the days when no one could read and everyone was drunk?

Yeah, meanwhile, like, you got fucking Bowie swaying back and forth, one hand on a nondescript brown jug that just says XXX on it, and the other hand at a shotgun is like, I got a fucking idea.

Don't move until you hear my mark.

Yeah,

well, at least we always know where the casualty collection point is going to be.

He also places men in elevated positions on a downward slope covered by trees, which meant they could rise up, fire, take cover in the trees, and the Mexican cavalry would not be able to maneuver into them.

I'm going to say one thing, too.

I don't know a ton about Jim Bowie, but I will say this.

This does strike me as somebody who has managed to be like, oh, here is how you not get killed by Native Americans, because this is 100% the shit they knew very, very well.

Bowie's only military experience up until the revolution was being a quote-unquote Indian fighter, which was a term used for men who killed a lot of native people, a lot of whom were unarmed women and children.

Jim Bowie, famous for doing this, which probably is why he drank so much.

But also when you were actually fighting against braves and fighters from, there were certain things where the cost of you performing badly was

get buried up to your neck in ants and or have your dick turned into a polygon sculpture.

So like there is an incentive to get good at your job.

He probably learned this from fighting natives because the natives famously fought in ambushes.

And he's like, I should learn how to do that before I die.

Yeah, I was going to say it's exactly what I was thinking when you described them.

Like, oh, wait, you picked terrain so they actually were like, they were in Dephilade, could then pop up and fire and get down and not like that.

That sounds exactly like, oh, if only we had known to use the terrain after this dude, a guy with a fucking hatchet cut everyone's scalp off.

Like, it's just the nature of it.

It's often put as like, oh, the Texans knew how to do this because they're fighting in their own backyard.

That's not true.

Jim Bowie had not been in Texas for more than like six months.

Like Sam Houston just showed up.

The vast majority of dudes in Texas right now, as a population, had been there less than two years.

But it's also very funny that

this guy who's like this outside fucking counterinsurgency expert, you know, like fucking tracker, scout sniper dude shows up.

He's like, yeah, I'm going to drop some knowledge on you guys.

If you stand behind a tree, they can't see you.

I was like, look, look,

I learned a lot of, you know, great tactics from my time with the fighting the Native Americans, but the greatest tactic I learned was from a baby playing peekaboo.

Many people don't know.

Let me show you.

He has like all of the volunteers gather around him.

He's like, peekaboo.

Famously, Object Permanence was only developed for soldiers in 1914.

Yeah, exactly.

That cover turned out to be the most important part of Bowie's battle plan because by 8 a.m., the Mexican forces marched in and began shelling the the piss out of them with cannon fire.

According to one Texan veteran, because they were taking cover behind pecan trees, each time a Mexican cannonball went flying at them, harmlessly crashing amongst the bushes and whatever, it rained pecan nuts directly onto their heads, which was great because none of them had eaten anything recently.

So they just began squirrelbacksing.

Yeah, because like

I would assume all these guys are like wearing quite ostentatious hats for the time.

So it's just like collecting in the brim.

One time when I was doing field trading at Fort Lewis in the summertime, we were stopped at a short halt, and I took a knee pulling security, and there was a raspberry bush right next to me.

I was like, just reaching out, holding the M4 with one hand, the reaching,

and it was just like, this is.

Everybody turns into a goblet at some point.

I know.

And what you've just described is like,

yeah, raining plenty.

All you got to do is like, okay, can we have them fire a couple of cannon shots at the peanut butter MM's tree as well?

The Mexicans are shelling them, but the whole time the Texans are there just catching handfuls of pecans and putting them in all of their fucking

poured out pockets.

One guy's like, oh, fuck, why did I have to pull security under the charms tree?

I'm not allowed to eat these.

Tom, you don't get it.

There were these shitty, fake, like, hard candies that you would get in MREs.

They were called charms.

And it was like a folk legend thing with us in the army.

Like, if you opened them up, you were cursing your unit.

And like, if you were in the field, you'd get rained on.

So you weren't allowed allowed to open them ever.

If you ate charms on any tank I had ever been on, you'd get slapped around for it.

There's a lot of weaknesses in the Texan Army, owing it to being a collection of frontier randos, but they did have a specific strength, marksmanship.

Texans were not armed with the standard brown best musket like the Mexican soldiers were.

Instead, they brought their own weapons.

Many of them were Kentucky long rifles, probably the best rifle in the West at the time.

And they began picking off Mexican artillerymen manning the two cannons.

Consider this a retinet counter battery, if you will.

And each time a new soldier ran forward to man the cannon, that got their skulls blown apart and just heard a chorus of,

pew, pew, pew, pew.

The accurate long-range gunfire was enough to force Mexican soldiers to open fire from equally far distance with their muskets, which was far beyond their effective range.

So for people who are not gunheads, like none of us here are gun people, but a musket is a smooth bore weapon, right?

That has no spiral within the barrel to give it a twist that makes the bullet fly further, so to speak.

Make a very long story short.

While a rifle does.

So a rifle's range can be sometimes two times that of a musket.

And so the Mexicans open fire with their brown best muskets from as far away as the rifles are firing.

And the Texans, multiple Texan volunteers, write about feeling a doll slap against their body and looking down and just see they've been hit by a musket ball.

It wasn't a musket ball or like a pecan.

Yeah.

Like the musketballs hit them with the power to only bruise them at that distance.

Yeah, I mean, that's the thing is that with also with rifled barrels, hence the term rifle,

rounds fired through rifled barrels, also not just the distance, but like they're more accurate at closer distances too.

Far more accurate.

Muskets are basically like the principle of the potato gun that it's probably going to go kind of in the direction that you point it, but there's no guarantees of it being pinpoint.

Like, obviously, nothing's perfect, but yeah, rifles are far more accurate.

Which is why, like, a tactic for a musket-based military was a full volley in the general direction.

So also, it's firing all that black powder.

It's basically like the obscuration on your position at the same time.

Well, it's not like the rifles had smokeless powder either.

No, I know, but yeah, they were, it was much more likely for every time a Kentucky long rifle fired to drop a dude.

I did find one very funny passage from a Texan volunteer that rose up on the other side of the hill to fire and got smacked right in the balls with a musket ball.

It didn't blow his dick and balls off or anything, but he was counted as wounded because he couldn't fight anymore.

Ow, my balls.

Fighting for Texas.

They blew apart my ball sack.

Jib Boo is just there like, what's going on?

Got my dick in a literal sling afterwards so I could heal.

Just imagining, yeah, 18, you know, early 19th century fucking dick sling, what that's going to look like.

A buoy ordered a detachment to reinforce them, but to remain behind the riverbank so as not to expose themselves to Mexican gunfire.

However, Texans, you know, if you haven't picked up yet, they really like to ignore orders that require them to stay away from fighting.

So as one Texan unit ran to reinforce the center, because the Mexican forces train very classical line fighting, which means firing a couple volleys and then charging to break the center, right?

Simple enough.

They start charging.

Bowie has to order a unit to support the center.

One guy decides, well, it's a lot faster if I just cross the top of the hill and run directly there.

So there's this thing called silhouetting, which happens when you stand up with no background on a, say, a defensive parapet to gunfire, which means you stick out more than any human being known to man.

You're the human equivalent of having a glowing red box behind you like a boss fight.

And one Texan does this and every Mexican soldier on the battlefield immediately pivots and shoots at him,

shooting him like dozens of times.

He's the only Texan killed during the battle.

Get my dick blown off by a Mexican called out of Blunderbolsy.

Shut the fuck up.

Now, I bet you're probably thinking that once the Mexicans close the gap with the Texans, their advantage would switch.

Remember, these are Kentucky long rifles.

They're for hunting.

You can't can't mount a bayonet on them.

Then they're going to lose because they have no hand-to-hand combat training.

But not every Texan had a Kentucky rifle.

In fact, there's probably less than half.

The other half were armed with shotguns and whole bandoliers full of pistols, like fucking Yosemite Sand.

Meaning, as soon as the Mexican forces charged through a hail of shotgun pellets and then like several yee-haws worth of wild pistol fire, they broke and ran.

They're like, fuck this.

Jesus.

Yeah, it's just like guys pulling out like the entire armament of fucking Captain Jack Sparrow heaters and pointing at people just like weird bent out of shape kind of guns fucked up guns guns with like, you know, bedazzled parrots carved into them or whatever.

Like, it's just, you don't want that.

Shot center mask called out a dead man's chest.

Tom's just dropping like the fourth, what, the fifth recording in two days.

So Tom's just decided he's going to drop bars the entire time.

Yeah.

Finally, the Mexicans began to flee, and then the Texans counter-charged.

And when the Mexicans broke from the battlefield, they left behind one of their cannons, which the Texans then stole, spun around, and began lighting them up with canister fire into their backs.

Casualty rates here are all over the place, but it's thought that up to 70 Mexicans were killed in the fighting, while one single Texan were killed.

Seeing such a crushing victory, Austin was convinced that they should immediately go on the attack directly into San Antonio.

He went as so far as to order it, but then his subordinate commander was just like, no, that's stupid.

We're not doing that.

As Texans scavenged amongst the Mexican dead, they found another good reason as to why they won that day and probably a better reason as to why musket balls are slapping against them like paintballs.

The quality of the gunpowder that the Mexican soldiers had been issued was so bad that Texans compared it to, quote, crushed charcoal.

And despite burning through most of their powder in the battle, Bowie and his men refused to resupply off the dead men, worried that the shitty powder would ruin their guns.

And they didn't even take the Mexican guns to drop them.

They just like piled them all up.

I always think sucked.

While the siege of San Antonio wore on, Texan advances continued in other places.

A detachment of volunteers left Golia to take out a nearby Mexican fort at San Patricio.

and just so happened to rock up to its gates while its 20-man garrison was actually out on patrol of the nearby town.

So they just like walked in and squatted.

Then the patrol returned.

The two sides, shocked and surprised, fired wildly at one another until the Mexicans decided, fuck this, and surrendered.

Though weirdly enough, inside that fort, the Texans found the former Mexican governor of Texas, Viesca.

He had been in prison there this whole time.

And he was like, oh, thank God you guys have liberated me.

I can go back to being governor of Texas.

They all just kind of laughed at it and were like, no, homie, that ship has sailed.

The shit's changed.

Situation's been updated, bro.

We're under new management.

This led to a huge blow up between Texans and Tejanos in the area around Goliad.

Remember, the Texans were not fighting for a Republic of Texas, at least not yet.

Their entire thing was to be fighting for a federalist uprising against the centralist, for now, Santa Ana.

Viesca was the federalist governor and a Tejano, whose brother was the previous governor of Texas.

It's safe to say that the non-Texan population, the Tejanos, really liked him.

So when the commander of Goliad, Philip Dimmet, refused to acknowledge his authority, something of a Goliad civil war erupted between the Texans and the Tejanos.

They began ambushing one another, and many regional Tejanos decided, fuck this, and threw their lot in with Santa Ana after having their governor rejected.

If that wasn't enough to push them in that direction, then Dimit's burning and looting of Tejano villages was probably a good reason.

Small side note here, but eventually Austin heard what Dimit did and fired him immediately and then invited Viesco back to the consultation, which had been postponed till November due to so many delegates volunteering for the army that they couldn't have a vote.

Viesco did turn up, and then Austin and the Committee of Public Safety refused again to recognize him as governor.

Meanwhile, with the siege, Austin demanded Kaus' surrender in a letter, which Kaus returned without opening, with a little note on top saying it would be like against his honor to take a letter from a rebel commander.

Austin had reinforcements coming, including an 18-pounder cannon that had been captured somewhere else in Texas that maybe was strong enough to breach San Antonio's walls.

But he was worried about the siege nonetheless.

The stress of keeping an army in the field was a lot to ask of people who were not really soldiers, especially as the weather began to get colder and rations began to get smaller.

Texans came and went out of the army at will, and Austin was worried that he wasn't going to be able to keep his army together as long as it would take for reinforcements to get there and then again after that long enough to take San Antonio via siege.

Then things began to get a little weird.

Austin, the elected commander of the people's army, didn't really seem like he could hold the weight of the position.

He kept putting the conduct of the siege to a vote with his subordinates, which is not something he needed to do.

And to other officers, it read to them as he was being indecisive or maybe even cowardly.

Men began to get restless and getting blind, drunk, and again, firing their weapons at random intervals.

Officers started doubting Austin as a commander.

Bowie simply resigned and wandered away, as did others, while still other officers didn't resign and just went home.

Other officers like William Travis just kind of ignored orders and did whatever they wanted, all while the siege evolved into random firefights between different patrols in the night.

Desertion became such a problem that Austin tried to mandate morning and evening roll calls, but people just ignored them.

According to the Texian Iliad, by November 5th, all discipline broke down inside of the various volunteer units to the point that nobody was even sure of who was in charge of them anymore.

And one man remarked, No good will be achieved by this army except by the merest accident under heaven.

But one bright side was beginning to emerge for the Texans.

Two months into the war, the American volunteers are beginning to trickle over the border.

Real reinforcements.

With a lot of money and a lot of guns.

However, the americans had no

idea what was going on in texas they had no understanding of let's say the texan context here they raided communities without caring or knowing who lived there including texans tejanos and mexicans

it's like oh thank god the americans are here this like gets shot the shoulder like

they're gonna take my gourd

Some of these volunteers had organized themselves into paramilitary units with adequate supplies, actual uniforms, and even experienced commanders.

But probably the most well-known of these is the New Orleans Greys.

They were formed in a New Orleans coffee shop and bankrolled by a German-born businessman named Adolphus Stern.

Stern even managed to purchase a cannon and send it with the men because America was really cool back then.

I'm going down to the hardware store.

I'm going to get me a cannon.

They were like, this is from now on, for time immemorial, we are who they're going to think of when you talk about the Stern gang.

just just this guy showing up like the white version of barrett from final fantasy with a cannon fused to his arm however there's a small problem when it came to the cannon they dragged it all the way to texas and then only then realized like ah we forgot to pack ammo so they just like left it a ditch tom i'm for the listener i'm not very well right now i've caught infinity toddler diseases and tob just Basically, he made me think of Kush got me feeling like the white bear.

I'm just going to be spun up on that forever now.

Another bright spot on the organizational front was the fact that so many men had left the army that the consultation could officially take place.

And the committee quickly went to work trying to draw some very confusing outlines for the rebellion.

They made their provisional government official, but as the provisional government of the Mexican state of Texas within their envisioned federal Mexico.

This was obviously to try to smooth things over with the Tejano population, but also a clear sign they didn't care that much because they elected a new governor, Henry Smith, who is an avowed slave owner, racist, and Texan nationalist, who vocally said that Tejanos have no place in Texas.

So nothing has changed?

Nope.

Austin finally resigned or was fired, depending on which story you believe, as commander of the Texan army and was given the assignment of effectively becoming the Texan ambassador to the United States.

Smith then appointed Sam Houston to replace him.

And for a lot of people, this would be the first time meeting Sam Houston, who did not cut an impressive figure.

As we already established, Houston had one hell of a track record in American politics.

But since he left the U.S., he had dove headfirst into a bottle and by all accounts, looked like he lived exclusively out of a dumpster.

He smelled so bad and looked so greasy that every single person in the Texas government remarked on it in their memoirs.

According to some people, Houston spent most of his time at the consultation getting hammered with his close personal friend, Jim Bowie, who had staggered back into town after residing outside of San Antonio.

Two guys you hate to see together.

What's funny is, politically, they would hate one another.

Jim Bowie has never seen a Native American he didn't want to kill, while Sam Houston pretty much ruined his political career attempting to defend them.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, but apparently the 19th century makes even stranger bedfellows.

And in this case, literal bedfellows.

To be finally turned Joe.

Houston may have looked and smelled like a trash monster, but he fully understood the weakness of the movement.

He and others in government point out that they needed an actual army, organized on standard lines, rather than a gaggle of volunteers who could leave whenever they wanted.

So they came up with an idea of a contracted, professional army supported by volunteers.

Some men would serve for two years while others would volunteer on a rotating basis until the end of the war.

Since Texas was virtually broke at this point, they couldn't pay them.

So they would be paid in land grants rather than money.

Though this would all take time to build, and spoiler alert here, this army would never actually be made at all.

But it was an idea.

Austin was still sitting outside of San Antonio and was determined to end the siege before Houston came to replace him in order to save some face.

Mexican deserters told him that life inside San Antonio is getting pretty fucking bleak, giving Austin hope that he had a chance to close out the deal.

So he wheeled his cannons into position and had his artillerymen go to work.

Small problem though.

They didn't actually have any artillerymen.

They just had some guys.

They had no trained artillerymen in the ranks.

They're just kind of guessing as they open fire.

It's really funny because it's like so many times people doing like, you know, demonstration days accidentally pull on the fucking lanyard and fire.

Hopefully not a real live round, you know, blank rounds, whatever.

But it's like when you actually want to fuck around and find out how to shoot a cannon, you can never do it.

It always requires at least one person who knows how to do it.

Yep.

Yep.

Nowadays, you just watch, you know, YouTube.

Like, have a guy bring a crate of daguerreotype plates with a dude, like, explaining how to

do it.

Have a guy just show up, like, ye old YouTuber, and like, and today we're going to show you how to use the field howitzer.

Yeah, exactly.

He just basically what he's he sets up like an organ grinder thing with like a frame so it looks like you're watching a moving picture and he just sort of like gestures around it's like basically a moving puppet show and one of the puppets is doing the mr.

beast face while pointing back at the cannon yeah but the problem with doing that is when the cannon gets to the point where the cannon actually fires everyone will freak out because they think it's real what would mr.

beast they'd be like jebediah Beast.

Yeah, monseigneur creature.

But also, that kind of implies that, like, in order to promote their educational entertainment, they have to drive with a wagon with painted canvas on the side of the guy doing the Uber driver sucked me off.

Well, there was that guy in the last episode named Old Paint, so maybe that's how he got his name.

Yeah, but there was also a guy named, what was it, like Lancelot Smithers?

Yeah, Dr.

Lancelot Smithers.

Dr.

Lancelot Smithers.

He didn't go to four years of Lancelot school to be called Mr.

Smith.

An Arthurian knight who's really deeply closeted.

An Arthurian knight who had afforded time so he could live out his dreams of being a Texan slave owner.

Now, men were literally betting with one another over who could hit what and bartering with musketballs because they had no money.

According to Austin, none of them hit a fucking thing, but he ordered his men to ready themselves for an attack anyway.

But the men still refused.

It was clear that if the siege was going to continue, even just long enough enough for Houston and his new regular army to march in, Austin was going to have to give up command because everybody had lost faith in him.

So he did, and the men elected Colonel Edward Burlson to replace him.

He had served as a captain during the War of 1812, but had seen very little combat, and was only elevated to the rank of colonel in Texas owing to the fact that that limited amount of service was still more than most.

Then Bowie, dead drunk, showed back up at the siege to take command of his detachment, something nobody opposed.

Burrelson at the time was in communication with Houston, and the two men were slowly coming to the realization that abandoning the siege in order to save the volunteer army from imploding was probably the better idea.

That was when scouts reported that the Mexican reinforcement column was marching towards the city.

Now, this is another game of telephone here.

There was about a hundred or so dragoons.

The men heard that.

Then the rumor mill began to go into overdrive.

Soon the hundred dragoons were actually accompanied by a mule train of 100 mules.

And it...

did have a mule train, but it wasn't that large.

But rather than carrying supplies for the San Antonio garrison, which it probably was, the men began to talk as carrying a stash of silver to pay the men inside.

It's starting to be like some pirates' gold shit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It feels like this is just the thing that goes through history.

It's like dudes just start telling stories and then people think they're real.

And that's why we have Turning Point USA.

Had.

Well, had, actually.

Turning point did happen in the USA yesterday.

Yeah.

Well, I will say that this story about silver being in this mule train has more holes in it than charlie kirk

we made it two episodes we're we did so well yeah we're recording on uh the greatest of american days uh 9-11 and uh charlie kirk is dead yep yep burleson ordered buoy and his men to scout out the column to see what they were doing whether they were preparing to head towards town or preparing to attack the texans above all else bowie was ordered not to attack the column He was a scout, do a scouting mission.

But that did not matter.

Once the volunteers saw Bowie and his men riding out, they assumed they were going to attack against that column full of silver, and if they didn't go with them, they'd miss out on the booty.

So, fuck it, and everybody started chasing after Bowie.

Then Bowie also ignored orders and immediately ordered a charge on the column.

As they were butchering one another, Cos from inside San Antonio saw what was happening and ordered his infantry to move in to reinforce the dragoons.

Bowie ordered his men to fall back to a dry creekbed, and once anchored in there, the Mexicans counter-attacked, but again, the long range of the Texan rifles broke up the attack, and eventually they fell back into San Antonio.

That left the mule train.

The Texans fell onto it, ripping all the crates apart, expecting to find sweet, sweet loot, but instead found that the wagons were just full of grass for the Mexican horses, leading to the Texans to jokingly refer to the battle as the grass fight.

The siege would drag on until December, and another refusal by the officers in command to attack San Antonio when it was proposed by Burlson.

This time the men damn near mutinied.

They demanded an attack.

Others said that if they weren't going to attack, they would simply go towards Matamoros in Mexico and attack there.

Still others, several hundred, said, fuck this and went home.

So after seven weeks, Burleson ordered that the volunteers would return to Goliad and camp for the winter.

The siege would end.

That was until our favorite thicket monster, Ben Millem, reappeared from a scouting mission.

Despite Burlson's orders, Millem told everybody, no, we're not doing that.

We gotta keep the siege up.

Burlson contested that he was in command, and Millem said he didn't care.

He would take volunteers himself and assault San Antonio.

Burlson, feeling he was about to lose all control, caved and said Millem could recruit enough volunteers, he would keep the rest of the army back here to cover him should shit go sideways.

300 men, more than half of the army, volunteered to go with Millum.

He organized his force into two columns and enlisted the help of three guys, Eurastus Smith, who, due to him being deaf, had earned the very creative nickname Deaf, and his son-in-law, Hendrik Arnold, who was actually a freed slave.

And another guy, Jesus Queller, a former Mexican army officer, turned deserter and now scout for the Texans.

This is putting together the dream team.

These are like, you know, random NPCs that you would meet in Red Dead 2.

That's fucking absolutely correct.

Eurastic Smith, a.k.a.

Death.

I mean, that also kind of sounds like you created Texian mayhem.

Yeah, Eurastus Smith, before he went on scouting missions, also breathed in a bag with a dead dove in it.

Yeah, but that was normal back then.

They didn't have deodorant.

Yeah, it was perfume.

At this point, the Mexican forces under COS had split, sending a group to the nearby Alamo mission.

So they would need to pin them in place while the attack on San Antonio commenced.

The volunteers rolled cannons into place and began to hammer the Alamo, hoping to keep the soldiers there undercover, but also distract everyone to thinking that the Alamo was their primary target, while the main assaulting force moved closer to San Antonio.

This worked perfectly.

The assaulting force was so undetected by the Mexican sentries in San Antonio, that they were mostly just huddled around fires on the perimeter not really paying attention, that The Texans walked right by them and didn't even bother to shoot them thinking that if they would alert the the soldiers inside the town.

The two columns advanced 200 meters from San Antonio's town square without resistance.

They literally just walked inside.

However, once there, they ran right into Mexican cannons and began pumping canister shot into them.

The volunteers turned, broke into nearby homes for cover, beginning what would turn into four days of brutal frontier urban combat, which was something, weirdly enough, that the Texans ended up being really good at.

The riflemen quickly climbed the roofs of the the houses, and these were traditional Mexican homes that all had a parapet on top, which happened to be perfect to set up sniping nests with your rifles.

It's just wild because it's like, yeah, you think of

Dust Bunnies and Saguaro Cacti, and it's just a really, you know, quiet, desolate desert.

And instead, it's like, no, we're doing military operations in urban terrain, except it's the city from Apocalypto.

With my eight-foot-long rifle.

Yeah, exactly.

It's just like stupid log rifle, just full-on like fucking cruise serve rifle because it's meant to shoot elephants.

I brought my punt gun, boys.

And other men armed with shotguns and pistols crashed through doors and assaulted Mexican soldiers at close range.

I'm going to throw this one out there to start to interrupt you, Joe, that much like the weird long-ass cars that become the car that like the Penguin drives in the Batman movies, when a gun is really long, much like when a car is really long, it's codes that's both weirdly horny and stupid at the same time.

Yeah.

I hope I'm not going too far out on a limb here.

But the idea of like the gun is just dumb, long and you're swinging around, there's something pre-apic about it.

I don't know why.

They're just trying to impress all the horses.

No, you're trying to shame all the horses.

That's right.

This is how weird it looks when your huge dick sticks out.

I forgot.

We're trying to train horses via shaming.

Oh, yeah.

We're trying to make horses self-conscious.

We're trying to make them doubt themselves.

I'm giving horses body dysmorphia.

We're doing reverse psychology and shaming people with big cocks.

It's like, oh, yeah, look at you over there with your big dick.

That is literally the whole myth of Preempus and the fucking Greek mythology that it's like just, you know, vulgar and ridiculous.

Whereas like, you know, well, a dignified man has a tiny penis.

The Greeks, man, they were on something completely different.

Everybody knows the true Texan revolutionary heroes are all sporting micro penes.

Yeah, you're really uncomfortable skinny jeans, aren't you?

Fucking baggy pants.

The Mexicans had turned some houses into what were effectively block houses by reinforcing them.

And in order to break into them, Texans took over the rooftops and began hacking through the ceiling with axes, having no idea how far they were going to fall when they broke through.

After more than one man dropped several stories and broke their legs in a room full of enemies, the Texans instead deployed blankets so they could lower men in, dual-wielding pistols and shotguns.

So I guess this is history's first air assault?

At least America's first air assault.

But by the fourth day, it had rained so much that virtually no men had any dry powder left, so the battle grinded on with hand-to-hand weapons.

This went on until December 10th, when Cos ordered his subordinate, Sanchez Navarro, to ride into town and attempt to parlay with the Texans.

A few hours later, the Texans came to terms of surrender.

The Mexicans still inside of San Antonio would be allowed to leave for the Alamo, where they'd be allowed to leave, get their shit together, treat their wounded before packing everything up.

and further retreating into the Mexican interior, where the Texans promised they would be safe during their journey.

Men from the San Antonio area or Tejanos in Mexican service were simply allowed to go home and every soldier was forced to swear an oath not to violate the Mexican Constitution.

With cause's retreat and the Texan victory at San Antonio, it meant there was no organized Mexican army remaining in Texas.

But that did not mean the war was over as much as the Texans kind of thought it was.

And that is where we'll pick up on part three of the Texas Revolution.

Yee-haw!

Yee-haw.

I'm not doing it.

I'm from the north.

Do it.

We got the Irish guy doing it.

Yeehaw.

There we go.

Yep.

Yee-haw indeed.

Yee-haw.

Yee-haw.

There is a country song from the 90s where there's like the sort of ironic, flatly delivered Yee-Haw.

I don't know what song it is.

If you can remember, let me know because I'm struggling here.

I mean, like, Yee-Haw is just like the Texas version of saying Alhamdulillah, really lately.

I'm just, Joe, this is, I can't believe it, man.

How are you?

We're just abandoning any kind of sense of regional pride in our own identity?

Like, we should be saying whoop, whoop.

You know that.

Look, when we eventually do something more on the Midwest, we will go back to whoop-whoop.

I mean, a guy with fucked-up, weird, dirty hair and dreadlocks swinging a fucking cleaver would fit in with what we've just described.

Yeah, put them in buckskins and they'll be able to tell the difference.

Exactly, yes.

Same amount of alcohol consumption.

It's similar quality and purity.

What you see, you have there is a Kentucky long rifle.

What I brought is called a catalytic converter.

Thank you very much for coming to my sideshow.

I want to tell y'all about a good friend of mine called the Great Malenko.

I believe the Texas revolution should be formed around the political ideology of the dark carnival.

I know that many of y'all enjoy smoking the heathen Indians tobacco, but I've got a thing that I've discovered and feel as though I should introduce to y'all is called K2.

Methamphetamine.

I'm going to whip shitty on this horse where I'm grinding my teeth into dust.

Whipping shitties on a horse.

That's just cantering.

Let's just do horse training.

The problem is when you externalize it from horse.

You whip shitties on a horse and it's normal.

But a vehicle shouldn't do that.

If you do it too fast on the horse, their legs all just break and flop around like an octopus.

Or it has like, I don't know.

I just you do it too fast on a horse that it becomes like centrifugal force in their horse.

Their legs just go sideways.

Once again, we're coming back to rotating a horse.

Slowly rotating a horse with a jungalow on top.

Yay!

Yay!

Whoop!

All right, fellas, that is the Texas Revolution Part 2.

But you host other podcasts.

Plug those other podcasts.

Trash Future, what a hell of a way to dad.

Kill James Bond, their gods, no mares.

Check them out.

Beneath the Skin, show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing.

Books on beneathskin.com.

And keep eyes out for November when I have some some new stuff to announce.

This is still the only show that I host, so thank you for listening to it.

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One, rotating horse with broken legs with a chocolate on top, perhaps.

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And until next time, yay!

Defend Texas, Shamahorse.

Come and take this.