Episode 384 - The Texas Revolution: Part 3

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Hello and welcome to the Lions of My Donkeys podcast.

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

We're losing control of the Buckies Revolutionary Council.

Two men have taken control of the snack aisle and declared themselves king.

Another man has gone into a bathroom and refused to leave.

The smell coming out of there is something I cannot describe.

We've dispatched a column of men to break into the bathroom.

Upon smashing open the door with an axe, they found the man missing.

Only his shoes remain.

we begin to question god fellas how are we all doing the picture of health the podcast lineup we're all coughing and dying hi how's everybody doing

i'm doing good i love that i told joe um

was it yesterday or the day before uh about how

i went to the gym last week and i came back and i was like obviously sweaty or whatever and i was like i need to use the toilet so sat down on the toilet and my shirt was sweaty so i took that off and then

took my shoes off.

And when I got up, just walked out and went and took a shower.

And then a couple of hours later, I like went and opened the toilet door and my shoes were just sitting there like I'd been fucking raptured.

Like in perfect like wide stance position, like someone had just taken a dump.

Similar thing happened to me one time when I walked outside and realized I had left my garden shoes outdoors in our place in London and they were

like strewn across the yard, one and like one side, one on the other, because a fox had been chewing on them.

But it kind of gave the impression, like a similar thing, like I'd been hit with a death ray, and all that remained of me was my fucked up shoes.

But they had like teeth marks on them and like some of the like the stuffing coming out of them.

I'm sick as fuck, man.

I'm sick, so sick as fuck.

That happens because of all your shit talking about ferrets that you've been like raptured by the ferret god.

Well, no, I mean, like, I was unaware of this, but obviously, like, urban foxes are a thing in England in general, and certainly in London.

And what I didn't realize was, like, foxes really, apparently love stealing your shoes.

I don't know.

I guess it's like foxes and, like, dudes on the New York City subway in the 80s and 90s.

They just run through that shit.

Foxes are really in defeat.

Yeah, foxes are just like run those air forces.

Fox wearing all black horses.

I mean, yeah, exactly.

He's got to rob two people so he could have fucking four shoes on his four paws.

Someone had set up like a remote camera thing and like a wildlife photography thing.

And I'm dead serious and maybe I can fight it for you.

But there was a photo that went viral because they had another camera set up and it took a photo of one of the foxes coming up, staring dead into the camera and sticking its tongue out while it took a shit.

It's just like, oh, wow.

That's their personality, all right.

And then once you live amongst them in England, you're like, ah, yeah.

All right.

Cool.

The building that I live in in the bushes behind it is like, it's like a fox cruising spot.

So like occasionally at night, I will just hear like screaming from foxes fucking in the bushes.

Right.

Right.

So this is the thing that no one tells.

There's two things no one tells you when you move to the United Kingdom.

Number one is that the sun sets at like three o'clock in the fucking afternoon in the winter.

Number two, foxes make horrible screams when they're fucking.

You will wake.

The first time it happened, we moved there in August 2018.

And I remember waking up one night and being being like, someone is torturing a dog to death out there.

Someone is killing an animal.

This sounds like a war zone.

I was like, oh, it's just foxes.

Right, my Ena.

She's a foxes.

And it's like, so there's horrible screams of like banshees being like fucking speared or whatever.

That's just the background in England.

Foxes need to get their nut too, man.

And when we left you last time, the fragmented forces of the Texan Revolution finally stormed into San Antonio and seized it, effectively freeing Texas from the man who is rapidly becoming a military dictator, Santa Ana, at least temporarily.

Before we move on, we should talk about what was going on in the Mexican government, because you would think such a rapid turn of fortunes would send Santa Ana into a panic, but it didn't.

In reality, he thought nothing of any of this.

Until the fall of San Antonio, nobody in Mexico thought anything of the Texan revolt, because it's important to remember here, there is about a dozen other revolts happening throughout Mexico.

Texas is not the most serious one.

Though afterwards, Santa Ana published what was known as the Tornell Decree.

Remember how we talked about before?

He oftentimes comes up with really fucked up stuff and then puts it on someone else to take the blame?

Well, the reason why it was called the Tornell Decree is because it was named after his minister of war.

And it dictated that any foreigner caught fighting Mexican troops was to be executed on the spot.

Meaning pretty much anybody in Texas.

He saw them all as foreigners, to include Tejanos, to be fair.

So like, then he named it after his Secretary of War.

Santa Ana, who we've said, proclaimed himself the Napoleon of the West, surrounded himself with feckless yes men, or failing that, other men who had been given traditional Spanish military education.

For example, his chief of cavalry, Joaquin Ramirez Sesma, dressed into his role to include his uniform to kind of be Santa Ana's personal version of Murat.

And the Mexican government, faced with a defeat, circled their wagon, so to speak, speak, and just began juicing each other up.

Like when your idiot friend starts getting into a fight at a bar.

Like, no, bro, you can totally do this.

You got this, man.

You got him right where you want.

We all have that friend who's been the president of Mexico 18 or 19 times, bro.

It's really sure.

Hold me back, bro.

Hold me back.

I love to be Santa Ana's hype men.

Guerrilla Warfare.

I don't know how you say that in Spanish.

I mean,

my brain's not working, but guerrilla in Spanish.

Literally, gorillas.

You know what I mean?

Much like the men they were fighting, Santa Ana and his inner circle were racist to a fault.

And if there's one thing we've talked about countless times on this show, it's how allowing racism to seep into military planning is a surefire way to underestimate your enemy.

Santa Ana and his officers saw the Texan settlers as crude and, quote, not compatible with the manners practiced by the people of good breeding.

Going further, they believed that the common Mexican soldier was intrinsically superior to the, quote, mountaineers of Kentucky or the hunters of Missouri, which is a weird thing to believe after those hunters and mountaineers had just driven you out of all of Texas.

But like Santa Ana and the other people kind of believed in a like a rubbit that like clearly we are the superior ones to this, which is funny because the other side believed the same thing too.

They sure did.

One thing I would say too, we've talked about this before on other things, it's just the degree to which like Spanish colonial society in the Americas was incredibly like not just racist, but like weird old timey fucking scientific scientific racism in the sense that they were really obsessed with codification and they were really obsessed with purity and like the only way to be like sort of of the the sort of racial elite was to be either of pure European Spanish blood born in Spain or born in the colonies but like they had a word they had a delicate designation for every possible racial combination they could think of and like a hierarchy of it like they were it it's so intensely weird to see the artifacts of it but like that mentality was already there in terms of how they perceived race in society and so of course elites of the military and government made up almost entirely of what they would call peninsulares or criollos, like people born in Spain or people born in the colonies, but of white European stock, they would have these viewpoints.

But it's not the same as like, you know, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant fucking settler colonialism in America.

It rhymes, but it's, it's, it's odd.

You know what I mean?

Like, and it's, yeah, it leads to the same outcomes, but it's just, it's, it's a very strange thing to encounter.

It's like a fucked up mirror of our own society.

Now you could see how that tends to lead someone like Santa Ana, a guy who had that education and upbringing, to be like, no, clearly we are going to smash these white dudes from Alabama.

And meanwhile, the dudes from Alabama are shouting their own slurs from the other side of the battle line.

But it's also as well, like the kind of popular conception of like modern European racism based in kind of eugenics wouldn't come about until maybe about 40 years later.

Right, correct.

Yeah.

So like this was much more, like you said, Nate, like social hierarchy based on racial purity to the country that colonized said country rather than, oh, even if you are like a purebl Spanish person born in Central America, you're like still inferior just by like your surroundings.

Look at the brain pan on that Kentuckian.

Well, yeah, and also something too, I think, is that like they didn't have a kind of one-drop rule, but they were really into kind of like designating and ranking.

And also, I think, too, like, yeah, as you said,

what we think of is a much later conception of it.

But when you think about this mentality, like they grew up in such rarefied circumstances, completely separated and like trained to be sort of the elite, seen themselves as the elite.

It's the same with kind of like planter gentry in the South in America.

It's just that it just manifests it slightly differently.

It's very funny to see that sort of like tripping over your own dick because you think that you're like the new mensch.

It's basically like you guys both think that you're like, you know, designated by God to rule and subjugate and you're you're basically just two different variations of like former Yugoslav countries calling each other Turks.

And it's like, all right, cool, man.

Let me know how that fucking works out for you.

Normally, dictators are ignorant of the capabilities of their own armies.

They're fed by lies, by their circle of yes men they empower around themselves and they take over.

We've seen this multiple times throughout not only, let's say, modern history, but also in the annals of our own show.

Those dictators tend to assume their yes men are too scared to lie to them, when in reality, reality, it's the opposite.

But Santa Ana was different.

He was a middle-class guy who received a professional military education and worked his way up into the Spanish and then Mexican political scene due to his skill and, of course, famously, his willingness to switch sides at the drop of a hat.

Yeah, I mean, like, you change sides to be involved in so many different revolutions and wars.

I think you pick up a thing or two.

You would think.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What side are you on in the situation?

He's like, I'm going to be honest with you guys, I don't even remember.

I don't even remember if I'm president or not, bro.

He quite literally knew better.

Santa Ana knew the Mexican government was broke.

And instead of confiscating church funds, like the last government he was a part of, which was obviously wildly unpopular, he began to take a pile of loans from the church

with very high interest rates.

And then when that wasn't enough, he did private fundraising for his army.

He's posting a GoFundMe.

Yeah.

Santa Ana's Army of Texas brought to you by Coinbase.

It's like doing a bake sale for the IDF, except they're going to kick off another pastry war somehow.

He knew after years of Civil War unrest and unpopularity, his army was relying more and more on conscripts when he wanted to be staffed by professionals.

He knew men who wanted to be there fought better.

It's not a revolutionary idea.

Many conscripts took the first opportunity to desert.

But one Mexican general joked that the army was, quote, created by bayonets and now had to be upheld by them too.

He knew even then that his formation struggled to fill the ranks even when relying on conscripts because people would do anything they could to get out of it.

The average Mexican infantry company was under 50% strength.

However, both Santa Ana and the Mexican Minister of War, Jose Maria Tornell, thought that that wasn't so bad.

Or, as some of their subordinates pointed out, It didn't really matter.

They're only fighting Texans.

They saw the Mexican army as a hardened beast of a thing, staffed by men who fought, as one man put it, 20 years of war.

When in reality, virtually the entire army was as green as grass.

This was the army Santa Ana was massing for his renewed operations in Mexico, this time under his own personal command.

However, he could only find around 2,500 men ready for service in the Mexican interior, so once again, he filled the gaps with more conscripts, namely freed convicts trying not to serve a prison sentence, raising that number to around around 6,000.

So we have like Mexican Wagner Group.

They're privately funded.

They're all getting out of prison sentences.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, based on the immigration patterns and sort of who gets sorted out into certain categories in society in Latin America, it would just be El Grupo Wagner.

But Santa Ana's loans ran out.

He stopped paying his men.

And even though the army stepped out to march in December, he purchased no winter clothing for them.

Then the mule drivers of his 1,000 or so pack animals went on strike because he didn't pay them.

And instead of, you know, coming up with money, coming up with some way to force them into doing it, he just said, fine, we don't need you.

And now his already miserable conscript soldiers became their own pack animals, literally dragging wagons behind them and artillery.

So I've had like effervescent cold tablet, four cups of coffee, two cups of tea, 36 milligrams of methylphenidate, and I just heard you say it may think that the mules went on strike the animals personally the animals themselves actually has chained a kind of like sentience and conception of the labor theory of value and decided to go on strike

the mules are reading

my daughter's got a book about that it's called click clack moo about the cows going on strike and writing the threat letters on a typewriter so it can happen the drivers really wanted to go on the march but the mules themselves formed a picket line it's you know i know i've said it before on like other series and other episodes but, you know, in the grand scheme of things, there is like a handful of mistakes that it seems everyone seems to make.

Not having water, not having food, not paying the people that are supposed to kill your enemies.

And the most important part of any army, logistic system, is like, fuck it, don't eat it.

Let's just make these emaciated, miserable fucks drag the wagons behind them as they go.

It's vibe-based warfare.

See, that's the other thing that like Santa Ana and a a lot of other napoleon fanboys don't get and they fundamentally do not understand about napoleon is that napoleon was obsessive about logistics yeah they just see the cool uniforms and cannons and shit like i want to do that part i don't want to look at wagon manifest and before you know it your mules are on strike napoleon was known to whip it out but the thing that he whipped out the most often was a huge spreadsheet he had invented 18th century microsoft excel yes rip napoleon you would have loved eve online i mean that's the thing that people don't realize about the the military i mean i'm sure this is like this with militaries all over, but certainly the U.S.

is like, it runs on the Microsoft Office fucking suite.

Like, so much of it was just spreadsheets, spreadsheets, spreadsheets.

But a lot of that is because of the organization of things.

And that's stuff that's, you know, variants of this existed back then.

But like as professional military education increased, one of the things about it is like, yeah, you got a lot of things to keep coordinating.

You got to make sure that everybody's got, you know, food and water and socks.

And like, you know, if you're going through like the swamp that has leeches, like leech medicine.

You know what I mean?

Fun fact here, Nate.

Hold that thought about swamps until later.

What I was gonna say is, like, the modern version of this is like, everyone wants to be like soap McTavish from Call of Duty or the End from Metal Gear.

And it's like, no, you are not prepared to lie on your stomach for two days straight and shit in your trousers.

Nobody wants to be the guy that's like, actually, I'm the one in charge of counting individual beans to make sure you don't starve to death.

Have you thought about the collective bargaining agreement with the mules that have since lapsed?

We have the mule labor attorney in the office.

It's just like a donkey in a suit.

Warfare runs on beanocracy.

Yeah, but also it's one of those things where all the fucking people are combat arms like me and Joe were, and then you get more into crazy shit with fucking operator, you know, like spec ops things, and everyone's like, I don't want to fucking hear anything from these bean counters.

And like 30 minutes later, like, oh, I didn't get enough beans.

Oh, no, my beans.

You shortchanged me on beans.

Yeah, when you're freezing cold and are dying for a cup of coffee, you wish you like pleased the bean counters.

Yep.

Now the movement of the Mexican army was very slow owing to the fact that the mules have gone on strike and the conscripts were now the mules.

But eventually Santana ran into his brother-in-law Kos in his retreat from San Antonio.

Virtually everyone in the command staff thought marching to the coast and advancing towards Goliad was the way to go because it goes without saying, if you're near water and you own a navy, it's easy to be resupplied.

Texas did have a navy, kind of.

It was like three converted gunboats, gunboats, but they weren't really in the mix.

They weren't going to slug it out with the Mexican Navy, you know what I mean?

But instead, Santa Ana split his forces, sending Colonel Jose Durreya and about 500 men towards Goliad, while he and the bulk of his forces would continue marching towards San Antonio because he saw the taking of San Antonio as a personal slight against him because they beat his brother-in-law and his honor needed to be restored.

So we've got one side that has most of its like conscripts dragging wagons behind them and laden down with bags of beans.

And then you have the other side, which is essentially trying to fight with a navy entirely made of granddad's crawdad ship with a cannon on it.

Like the fan boats with a, with a punt gun on the front of it.

I should point out here like Dury Rea seems to be like the only Mexican commander who's constantly rubbing his temples like, oh, Santana is so fucking stupid.

But like, that will come up up as a big problem for Santana later.

But yeah, he's constantly like, you fucking idiot, why are you doing this?

It feels as though there's like, in every

military catastrophe, there is always the sort of some subordinate officer who's still in a senior echelon or subordinate commander figure, whomever, who's basically the wise uncle who's like, oh, fuck.

Wise uncle, stupid nephew combination, but stupid nephew is in charge somehow.

I feel as though, like, because every time you describe this, it's just like, oh, god damn it.

Santa Ana thought San Antonio would be an easy target, owing to the fact that he had a lot of spies, and they pointed out that a lot of Texan volunteers had relocated to the coast in preparation for an expedition towards Matamoros.

This brings us back to the Texan government, which was in complete fucking shambles.

For starters, nobody in government was entirely sure of what they were still fighting for, self-rule as a state within Mexico or as an independent republic, despite their earlier pledges to uphold the Mexican Constitution, there are a fair amount of voices within the committee advocating for full independence, especially now that they effectively controlled Texas.

Then in mid-December, without consultation from the rest of what, let's say, past For a government sitting in San Philippe, a group of 91 Texans and Goliad simply declared independence for Texas without them.

They penned the declaration as like the San Philippe Declaration, and then they handed it over to the Committee of Public Safety for ratification.

And those guys just kind of like put it in a cabinet somewhere and pretended it never happened.

Yeah, I mean, like, it is an interesting move to trust

essentially like a newfound state in the hands of like a guy with three teeth and 70 children called John Murder Boot.

It's very funny that they ratified this at Goliath.

It had it sent to San Felipe, expecting there to be a republic.

Meadwild, the interim president, is just like, oh, we got another one.

Just put it in the garbage can.

He just crumbles it up, throws it in.

There's just so many other declarations in the beam.

We talked a little bit before about the proposed Matamoros expedition in our last episode, but arguments had not gone away since the fall of San Antonio.

They had only gotten worse, and volunteers were suddenly freed up.

Governor Smith was staunchly against the idea, as was Sam Houston, Burleson, Bowie, and virtually everyone else who had been doing the fighting up until that point.

They saw how tenuous their military capabilities were over a long period of time.

And so for people that can have a little bit of a map in their head here, Matamoros is not in Texas.

It's in Tama Lipis, Mexico.

So, it would require invading Mexico, a long campaign that the Texan military had simply never done before, and they didn't have the capabilities of doing so.

They hadn't suddenly sprouted up a logistical capability.

Their mules weren't on strike.

They simply didn't have any mules.

I mean, even calling them a military at this point seems really tenuous.

They're just a random disparate group of volunteers.

They call themselves an army, but it's just some dudes with guns.

But the Committee of Public Safety itself was in strong favor of the Matamoros expedition, thinking that extending their war into Tamaulipas would inspire other Federalist leading Mexican subjects into rising up against Santa Ana, while having the added effect of giving bored Texan volunteers something to do over winter.

Because they were worried that unless they gave them, you know, some war, they would get bored and just go home, leaving nobody under arms should and win Santa Ana reinvade Texas, which they were all certain was coming.

Or the alternative and arguably worse option is to just start fighting among themselves.

That was also happening.

Yeah, there was more than one random dude shot in the streets in San Felipe over nothing.

Despite the governor's objection, the committee authorized the expedition anyway, which infuriated Governor Smith, who demanded they rescind their authorization or he would fire them.

They responded by removing him from office via vote.

Now, interestingly enough, nowhere in any written document agreed upon between the committee, any delegations during the consultation, or the governor gave either man or body the power to fire the other.

All of this was illegal under their own tenuous legal rights.

The committee then appointed James Robinson as governor, but again,

Smith was still governor.

Again, we have another anti-pope situation.

So we have an anti-anti-pope.

But they're all in San Philippe.

But at this point, nobody had any faith in this provisional government, owing to the fact they now had two governors who were all arguing with the government who was authorizing expeditions they were incapable of doing.

And soon other military officers who saw this entire thing as a complete joke began convincing men to not go on the expedition.

Sam Houston being the paramount among them.

And he decided, fuck this, and he quit the army.

And he went on his own unauthorized mission to go hang out with the Cherokee tribes and be like, let's all be friends, ally together and fight Mexico, and you'll have all of the lands you currently have.

He was not allowed to do that.

He did it anyway.

And then Smith just kind of became governor again.

Robinson just threw his hand up and was like, this is so fucking stupid.

I'm going home.

Facing collapse, the government decided they need to have another convention and vote on more delegates, which caused another meltdown as several people argued that all men, Texan or Tejano, should be allowed to vote.

After all, they're all fighting for the freedom of Texas.

While others, namely Governor Smith, thought that voting should only be the right of white men, including the American volunteers who just showed up last week.

A growing segment of Texans viewed the war in Texas specifically along racial lines because they brought this idea over from America.

As one Texan politician named David Burnett, who would eventually go on to be the first interim president of Texas, put it as, quote, a war to defend their property against a mongrel race of degenerate Spaniards and Indians.

Ooh,

not a good sign for Texas's future.

That's a little bit spoiler alert for part four.

I mean,

that kind of seems like the politics of a lot of Texans still.

Yes.

Burnett was popular.

Cool.

We get David Allen Co.

versus David Alejandro Co.

When some American volunteers showed up to vote, they were refused, resulting in a group of armed men nearly murdering a judge in Nagydoches for their insisted right to vote before the judge literally backed down at gunpoint and was like, vote as many times as you want.

I don't want to die.

Nobody is entirely sure what the convention was for, how long the voting would take or how it would work.

Nobody had published any rules.

The Committee for Public Safety simply told every colony in Texas, you run your own voting, which is insane.

Meanwhile, the entire Matamoros expedition broke down as the different factions of the Texas volunteers got each other's throats over dwindling supplies, separating into smaller and smaller groups led by their own captains, until it just kind of petered out.

And then one group of them was wiped out by a detachment of Mexican dragoons.

Voting at the convention went ahead and was unstable and insane as anything else happening in Texas at the time.

Gangs of armed men in some places threatened people if they didn't vote for a pro-independence delegate, while in other places those same armed men were the delegates running for office.

People had so little confidence in the committee or current government that virtually none of them were selected for these roles of elected delegates.

And the majority of people who did get elected as delegates were either from the United States, they fought with the volunteers or were related to those who had.

Nearly half of all delegates had been in Texas for less than two years.

As the elected delegates made their way to the meeting point, it was decided that they should meet at the town.

that is just wonderfully named Washington on the Brazos.

It's just interesting.

It's like basically like the battle of the transplants.

It's like

you got transplants coming over from fucking Mexican or you know, Mexican efforts to colonize and resettle this territory.

Similarly, you have, hey, Alabama's gone woke.

I have to go someplace more racist.

I'm going to move to Texas.

And it's like, they're all facing off against each other to gentrify the Brazos River, I guess.

Meanwhile, Sam Houston just hanging out with the Cherokee, insisting them like, you can trust us while everything is on fire behind him.

Yeah, this is just what's going on in London and like specifically areas like Clapham between Irish and Australian people.

Yeah, Sam Hewson hanging out with the Cherokees and be like, yeah, you know, I'll keep them under control.

They may seal them a little unruly.

And you look back and it's like they're building the Hollywood sign, but it just says racism.

The glowing racism side.

Santa Ana's army continued their march towards San Antonio, bleeding men the entire way.

Without winter clothing, the Texas winters were colder than you probably expect.

Temperatures dropped to freezing and began dumping what amounted to be about a full foot of snow right on top of them.

This killed dozens of men, if not hundreds.

Santa Ana was really not keeping track of any of this, which again, another knock against him for not really studying the man he had a love affair with, because these are all things that Napoleon would have noticed.

1812 notwithstanding.

Yeah.

And if that wasn't bad enough, about a quarter of the men began shitting their brains out from endemic dysentery.

And if that still wasn't bad enough, You remember Sam Houston's whole meeting with the Cherokee?

Well, he also made friends with the Comanche, and they all agreed that, like, we'll do our part to fuck up the Mexicans.

So, as Men got sick and began falling out of Santa Ana's army, they fell directly to the arms of waiting Comanche war bands who are just waiting in the periphery to slaughter anybody who fell out of ranks.

Like, imagine being the conscript who's just like, oh, thank God.

I've officially deserted for the army.

I could go.

Stop dragging wagons around.

I can get warm.

I can have a pair of boots.

And there's just a guy on a horseback saying, nope.

You're about to die die real bad.

Can you see the faint glimmer of a bead in the distance?

We've made the ring wraiths real.

They just wait for people to fall out from this rock march.

But regardless of their losses, they were heading towards a place that everyone listening has heard of.

Alamo Mission.

At the time, it was garrisoned by 100 men under the command of James Neal, and Neil spent the better part of a month demanding the government send him some supplies and men, saying, quote, if there is so much as a dollar, I have no knowledge of it.

The government sent him nothing.

Because to be fair, the government was too busy getting into literal fistfights with one another and declaring each other governor.

Once word of Santa Ana's march got out, he warned them again, saying he would hold the best he could, but at, like, no matter what they did, they were only prepared for maybe four days of battle.

Sam Houston, once again floating back to the surface of command, decided that the Alamo was too undermanned to defend and sent Jim Bowie along with 30 men to help Neil and his men pick up their shit and move to a better position.

But upon hanging out, Neil and Bowie decided that Houston and that mess of a government were all very wrong and the Alamo should be held.

Bowie wrote a letter to Governor Smith asking for more support and saying, quote, Colonel Neal and myself have come to the solemn resolution that we would rather die in these ditches than give them to the enemy.

Now, the way this is kind of seen is that Jim Bowie and others were not in fact determined to die.

It was more of like showing their determination to the government to force them to give them what they needed.

This did not work.

And in fact, everybody would die, but that's more of what it's believed that the letter meant rather than he was on some kind of suicide mission.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Though Jim Bowie also was probably shit-faced when he wrote it.

Those of us who are about to die salute you, and then everyone else is like, hey, wait, what?

What?

Governor, you got an asta.

Don't quit.

He's like, no, no, no, no.

It's just a formality, guys.

It's just a formality.

It's like, you sure?

I mean, the whole about to die part kind of got me fucking weird here.

As Jim Bowie's covering his own face in blood and stripping naked.

Yeah, exactly.

Once again, it's written like Charlie Kelly.

It's always sunny.

And it's like trailing off at each sentence going down the page.

Governor Smith is squinting at the paper like, does anybody know what the fuck this guy wrote?

He's trying to read the letter and it's like trying to read House of Leaves.

I imagine if he was on a suicide mission, like, what is a Jim Bowie suicide mission kind of representation?

And I'm just going to cadge all these tons of different mixed metaphors and like anachronistic references.

And it's basically he's Nicholas Holt and Fury Road as the war boy, except he's crashing into one of those liquid trucks hauling nothing but Jack Daniels just saying, oh, happy day.

What a lovely day.

Witness me.

While the government did try to send a few reinforcements, other men just decided to go on their own, including legendary American frontiersman and another guy that a lot of people have probably been waiting for me to introduce, former U.S.

Congressman Davey Crockett.

Wait, David Crockett was a real person?

Oh, yeah.

He was a real person.

For about two more weeks.

Yeah, Daniel Boone, Jim Bowie, Davey Crockett.

They're all real, man.

They all existed.

And they're all about to get vaporized that they are.

Crockett is a very interesting man from American history and has a lot of similarities with Sam Houston.

He fought as a militiaman during the Creek War, but found that the way that the Americans were fighting the Creek people to be fucking abhorrent.

He did not have any animosity towards the native people and decided that he would rather become a hunter for the militia to feed them rather than a soldier because he couldn't bring himself to conduct that kind of warfare.

He eventually got tired of that too and simply hired a guy to take his place so he could go home.

Though I should stop and point out here that despite Davy Crockett's seemingly compassion and empathy for the native people of America, he was a fucking bastard.

He was a slave owner who owned at least two people throughout his entire life, which is interesting because he himself was sold into indentured servitude by his own father when he was 12 years old.

So you would think that he would kind of come to the conclusion, wow, slavery bad when he ran away from servitude, but nope.

He was very pro-slavery.

David Crockett needed to read Trauma and Recovery or the Body Keeps the Score.

I think every man in the 19th century needed to read those books, quite frankly.

He eventually got elected to the Tennessee House and the U.S.

House of Representatives, where he's a staunch opponent of President Jackson's genocidal policy against the Native Americans, a stance that was wildly unpopular at the time to the point that he lost his seat in the next election.

Upon losing, he told his constituents, quote, you may all go to hell, but I'll go to Texas.

And so he did.

He simply packed up and moved to Texas in 1836.

He pretty much went right from like the Tennessee State House to the Alamo, decked out in buckskin clothing and a coonskin cap.

The neurodivergent part of me is just like so many rough textures on your skin and it's so sweaty and you're ever so gross.

I mean you have to imagine these dudes have smelled worse than any of us ever have.

Which is saying a lot.

But with those men inside, there still wasn't enough men to mount a defense.

Neil knew it and passed command to William Travis and rode out to find more volunteers in early February.

By February 23rd, Texan lookouts saw Mexican soldiers approaching the mission, which really shouldn't have surprised Travis.

He had been warned that they were coming, but Travis dismissed the reports, assuming that the inferior Mexicans could not possibly get to the Alamo before March.

Texans quickly ran back into the mission, taking as much food and water as they could.

Some of them drove entire herds of cattle inside.

Oh no, my cows!

Maybe they heard about the donkey strike?

They're like, oh, we don't want the cows to get the ideas.

We don't want the cows involved in bovine Bolshevism.

Better to have the cows inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.

Cows just pissed straight down, so I think this is probably a problem.

Travis sent a writer to Gonzalez begging for more men, saying, Quote, We have 150 men and we're determined to hold the Alamo till the last.

Against them was 2,000 Mexican soldiers.

The Mexican army marched towards them, flying a red flag.

This is a traditional sign being that no quarter would be offered nor given to the men inside the Alamo, which, owing to the order that Santa Ana himself had published, does make sense.

Though a messenger rode up to the fort demanding they surrender anyway, which is very confusing to everybody involved.

Travis told the men to wait and they would give him an answer.

The Mexican messengers rode back to the army, and the Texan defenders answered by firing their cannon directly at them.

Which makes sense.

Like you're flying a red flag.

They already know that you're going to start executing people probably.

So it's like, no, if you're going to kill us, we're going to make you work for it.

Yeah.

Soon afterwards, the Mexican army responded with at least a dozen cannons opening opening fire on the mission's adobe walls.

I might be using the term fort quite loosely here because that's what a mission is.

But the ELMO is not built with this kind of thing in mind.

At best, these various Spanish missions in Texas and elsewhere were constructed with the idea of warding off native attacks.

They were built with the idea of fighting off rifle fire and bows and arrows, not a bombardment of artillery.

It didn't have gun ports, bastions, centralized strong points.

It didn't have shit.

It was effectively just four walls.

It didn't even have a firing step for the Texans to fire over the walls.

They had to build one badly, I should add, with rickety bits of wood.

Their entire defensive plan boiled down to: we need to hold off as long as possible until reinforcements get here, because there's no hope for the men inside without them.

They did not think they were going to be able to break Santa Ana's attack against the walls.

And Santa Ana knew this as well.

Nobody thought the alamo is more than a speed bump that would fall after a couple of hours, or maybe days, when their nerve ran out, or their food supply ran out, or whatever happened first.

As the fort was bombed, Mexican detachments were sent out in every direction to cut off any incoming reinforcements.

And the Texans almost immediately began running out of cannonballs.

But thankfully for them, the Mexicans were firing plenty at them.

So they literally just sent detachments of dudes with like shovels to dig the cannonballs out of the ground in the walls at night and then fire them back at the Mexicans.

It's a circular war economy.

Yeah, exactly.

We've invented perpetual warfare.

Reduce, reuse, recycle.

I think at that point, you're just playing explosive catch.

Yeah.

It's all fun and games so you have to scrape someone's bits of skull off the cannonball so you can reuse it.

I hate being the worst type of ball cleaner.

Putting the cannonball in the bowling ball cleaner and waiting for your turn to fire your cannon.

I mean, at least they were probably the only balls that were clean at the Alamo.

For sure.

I mean, I'm just trying to think of what would be a worse job than being that kind of a ball cleaner.

And it's just sort of like, I don't know.

I mean, I guess the first thing that came to mind, if I'm being perfectly honest, is like the person who cleans bowling shoes, but at the combination bowling alley and erotic club.

It's oldly staffed by foxes.

Fuck.

Yeah, exactly.

That also implies that foxes love bowling.

It's like doing Sonic the Haghog shit and turning themselves and just rolling themselves down the lane.

I love the idea.

The bowling alley for foxes.

There's no bowling balls because

they turn themselves into the balls and there's only bowling shoes so they could eat them.

Just a weird fox eyes wide shut full of bowling shoes.

Look, I only have a membership there because draft beers are really cheap.

They got two for Tuesday.

You go, you get two beers, you know, for a price.

Fox gets you a beer and a slice of pizza.

So you you know what?

I don't really like the weird howling noises that sound like murders happening in the bathroom.

But, like, you know, it's hard to get a meal and a good slice around here.

I mean, like,

you're just going there to bowl, and then you look down at your hands, like, oh, that's a fox.

You look down at your shoes, they're gone.

You just see the fox running away with them, and all you hear from the bathroom is, ah!

Yeah, I took a date there.

There was no second date.

I mean, that just describes what it's like going to Rowan's in Finsbury Park.

Then you look up on the wall and you see

a photo of a fox that bowled the perfect game on 9-11.

So as the Mexican forces got closer and closer to the mission, teams of volunteers snuck out in the middle of the night to set nearby homes on fire to deny Mexican forces cover and concealment.

As other Mexican units maneuvered around, they found themselves getting sniped by rifles.

Though there's not nearly enough defenders to cover the entire perimeter of the Alamo.

The Alamo is actually quite large.

I will admit, though, I've been to the Alamo.

After hearing all the stories of the Alamo, it is kind of disappointingly small and nondescript, but for a hundred or so dudes to cover, it's too big.

So a group of men were sent running around to counter any Mexican move towards the Alamo, forcing Texans to stay awake and alert and on guard constantly.

And also, most importantly, there's always cannons being fired at them.

They're never allowed to sleep.

I hate being stuck in the Alamo during the cannonball bukake.

I mean, it's basically the scene from Carry On up the Khyber where they're having the dinner party and they're just getting cannon blasted non-stop.

It's just sort of that, but like, instead of it being a parody of British people permanently jamming their heads in the sand, it's just, oh no, this is just a...

Apparently, people are going to remember this a lot, but it kind of sucks to be here, though.

There's not even any pecan trees to rain me down nuts so I have something to eat.

The real problem with the Mexican plan had nothing to do with the Texans, but rather something that Santa Ana did to himself.

Owing to the fact he couldn't pay for more mules to haul his heavier weapons, and his men could only drag the smaller field guns without dropping dead from exhaustion or hypothermia, his heavier siege guns were days away.

So those guns could have probably cracked the Alamo's walls within a couple shots.

And instead he's forced to just kind of pepper it with smaller field guns.

But as the days wore on, things inside the Alamo got worse and worse.

Like I said, there weren't enough men to rotate anybody out.

So if they fell asleep at all, it was more of passing out for a couple seconds and then immediately waking back up because a cannonball just came close to their head.

They lacked the mental acuity to rotate a soldier in their mind.

Yeah, that's right.

No one had conceptualized a camel to rotate slowly.

Rotate a coonskin hat in your mind.

The weather also got brutally cold for Texas, which is something nobody was prepared for.

So soon, everyone inside the Elmo is starving, wildly sleep-deprived, and freezing cold.

What they really needed to do was, you know, man the walls with like hardcore dudes from Boston who like wear shorts in the winter.

Yeah, shorts and a hoodie.

Yeah, I was thinking more like those guys who brought herds of cattle inside.

We're like, well, the inevitable.

We either cut them off and sleep in them like a taunt on, or we cuddle up with the cows.

We get to know them really well.

That cow is my wife.

Yeeeehoo!

At no point did Santa Ana or the Mexican forces fully encircle and successfully close off the Alamo because there's a constant stream of dispatch riders and a slow trickle of reinforcements and supplies coming in.

Eventually, Travis dispatched a rider with a plea for more reinforcements.

This letter famously became known as the Victory or Death Letter, and I'll read it in full because it's also kind of funny.

Okay, hate me.

To the people of Texas and all Americans of the world.

Fellow citizens and compatriots, I am besieged by a thousand or more Mexicans under Santa Ana.

I have sustained a continual bombardment and cannonade for 24 hours, and I have not lost a man.

The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion.

Otherwise, the garrison are to be put to the sword.

If the fort is taken, I have answered the demands with a cannon shot, and our flag still waves proudly from the walls.

I shall never surrender or retreat.

Then I call on you in the name of liberty, of patriotism, and everything dear to the American character to come to our aid, with all dispatch.

The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily and will no doubt increase to three or four thousand the next five days.

If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain to myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor and that of his country.

Victory or death.

William Barrett Travis.

P.S.

The Lord is on our side.

When the enemy appeared in the site, we had not three bushels of corn.

We have since found in deserted houses 80 or 90 bushels and got to the walls 20 or 30 head of beeves.

What the fuck is a bee?

It means cow.

It's an old-timey word basically of like plural for beef cows, like referring to cows as beef, beeves.

The plural for some reason is beeves with a V.

B-E-E-V-E-S.

I'm going to say this.

My brother, who imagine me, but

well,

I'm probably the well-adjusted one.

My brother, one of his favorite things to do, and this is saying a lot, is go on to Wikipedia articles about various rappers and putting in grammar edits to say that the correct form of rap beefs is beefs.

He would fight with the Wikipedia monitors all of his

fucking 50 cent in his various beeves.

I do love the facts, like, don't worry, we have found a ton of corn.

We're all fine.

Please send more corn for our beeves.

Answering their call, men begin to trickle towards the Alamo in whatever groups they could, though Travis' call to patriotism did nothing to stop the infighting.

James Fannin, 320 men, several cannons, and wagons loaded of supplies, set off for the Alamo before collapsing into one argument after another, traveling less than a mile.

They then turned around.

However, Fannin, the government like authorized reinforcements to the Alamo, never told anyone, I'm not going.

I can't go.

We're too busy fucking yelling at each other, whether it's beefs or beeves.

So everyone just assumed he was always on the way to the Alamo, to include Travis.

He's like, oh, don't worry.

Fannin and his hundreds of men and cannon are on the way.

But reality, they were just sitting in town screaming at one another.

Another group of 32 volunteers did make it all the way to the Alamo, and the defenders immediately opened fire on them.

Only stopping when they heard the volunteers begin to curse at them in English.

Like, oh shit, sorry, bro.

At least 100 other men managed to sneak their way into the Alamo over the course of 13 days in small groups normally.

Some of these groups did run into Mexican picket forces and were driven back.

There's thought to be like another 100 men who attempted to make the journey, but were turned away in one way or the other.

But over that course of time, the cold, the enclosed space, the lack of hygiene caused disease to sweep through the ranks of the defenders, rendering a lot of them bedridden, including Jim Bowie.

Travis must have finally come to the conclusion that real help wasn't coming.

Because at some point he gathered his defenders together and told them, look, we're going to stay at the Alamo, but we're going to die.

If you don't want to stay with us and fight until the last, you need to go now before it's too late.

According to Alamo legend, only one man named Louis Rose decided to leave.

The story often goes that like Travis, drew a line in the sand with his knife and said like if you're with me, you stay on this side.

If you're against me, you cross.

And Rose crossed the line.

But that's probably not what happened.

Rose's story has also changed multiple times.

A lot of people come up with different stories because they call him the coward Louis Rose, things like that.

But it was not uncommon for militia commanders to give their men one final out before a battle comes up for the simple fact is if they don't want to be there, they'll flee anyway.

Yeah.

Though eventually Travis would send more men out for one reason or another.

But Rose is considered the only man who voluntarily left.

On the morning of March 5th, Santa Ana passed orders to his officers to prepare for an assault to begin that night.

As the sun went down, Mexican cannons stopped firing for the first time in over two weeks.

But what was interesting is the assault did not begin right then.

Santa Ana waited until 5.30 a.m.

on the 6th to order his men to advance.

The reason for this was He assumed that the Texans, given their first set of silence in two weeks, would fall asleep.

And they did, because who the fuck wouldn't?

And I need to point out here that this is not the only time that suddenly dropping to sleep is going to be a very important like kink in the battle plan.

The Mexican army moved three columns and marched under a cloudy night sky.

So it was like pitch black.

Yeah.

They got all the way to the walls of the Alamo before letting rip with bugle calls and shouts of Viva Santa Ana, which finally woke up the defenders, which, oh boy, that had to suck as a wake-up call.

Because I mean, there's there's thousands of dudes outside the walls.

Imagine, like, do you fucking hear somebody yelling Spanish at us?

So they peek over the walls.

It's just a sea of soldiers.

Yeah.

Like, well, I do believe we're fucked.

Please save my cow wife.

They had the Texans dead to rights.

However, the composition of the Mexican army would still make literally shooting fish in a barrel much harder than it needed to be.

To support the army of terrified conscripts, Santa Ana arrayed his veterans around them and kept the conscripts in the middle to keep them from fleeing.

But because they're in the middle, they cannot safely fire up at the Alamo defenders without possibly shooting their buddy in the back.

They didn't know that because they had barely had any training.

So with that, the first volley of gunfire coming from Mexican forces collapsed directly into the skull of the dude in front of them.

Despite this, they made steady progress over the walls, with Travis being one of the first defenders to get shot and die while leading over the walls to fire his shotgun.

The Texans fell back into the barracks and chapel buildings inside the mission, where they planned to be like their last stand.

They had knocked holes in the walls to give them firing ports, something they couldn't do with the mission's walls because they're too thick.

Though, in their panic to run, they hadn't disabled their own cannons, so the Mexicans simply swiveled them around and began pounding the barracks.

This smashed the walls open, rendered a lot of the dudes inside like too concussed or confused to fight, and the Mexican forces charged in to start fighting them in hand-to-hand combat.

Jim Bowie died in his sickbed, either completely paralyzed by his illness, unable to fight.

Some stories go he went down fighting, a pistol in one hand, his famous knife in the other.

Still, another story is the Mexicans kicked open the door.

He assumed that he was going to die really badly, so he just shot himself in the head.

Okay.

We aren't entirely sure what happened.

One Texan volunteer with the wonderful name of Robert Evans

died while trying to blow up the Alamo's magazine, which still had enough gunpowder in it to pretty much touch the Alamo off like a small nuclear bomb.

But he got gunned down by like a dozen dudes before he could set it off, which might have been a good thing because hiding in the chapel was dozens of women and children.

I love knowing that the nominal determinism of being called Robert Evans just makes you that guy for time immemorial.

Remember, we made the point that, like, if you, if you enter Texas, like, there's just an eternal spirit there that can potentially turn you into Dale Gribble.

Yeah.

He's just a sort of a youngian archetype that exists in the territory.

Similarly, I guess being Robert Evans is just a thing that happens to.

It can happen to you if you live in Texas.

Maybe being Robert Evans is a lot like being the Highlander.

It just gets passed on, and there could be only one Robert Evans.

It just so happens that the one that's alive now is a podcaster and has been on the show multiple times.

A previous iteration, instead of podcasting or adventuring, just opened a chain of of bad breakfast restaurants in the greater Great Lakes region.

That's Bob Evans to me, man.

I'm sorry.

Yeah.

Bob Evans, before I met our friend Bob Evans, Bob Evans to me was the kind of gross diner that all of the church people went to after church on Sunday.

We used to go to after Saturday swim practice because it was cheap.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The assault on the Alaba was over between 90 minutes or a couple of minutes.

No one's entirely sure.

As the story goes in in Texan telling, it was a proud last stand that went on for an hour plus.

Though, depending on which letters you read, this was over very quickly.

However, whether that happened in an hour, an hour and a half, or 10 minutes, what happened next made it go on a lot longer, which was Mexican soldiers, now in control of the Alamo and very, very confused and still hearing gunshots, just kept shooting.

Gunfights erupted within the mission from different squads of Mexican soldiers as they confusingly ran into one another because the inside of the Alamos, it's dark from not only it being the sun not being up, but also tons of muskets going off.

The gun smoke has made everything a swirling, confusing mess.

And the gunfight just keeps going on, despite the fact the Texans are all fucking dead.

This caused so much chaos that Santa Ana was eventually forced to order retreat out of the Alamo so his soldiers would stop shooting each other.

So you're probably asking, what happened to Davy Crockett?

It's kind of up for debate, but the most evidence points to the fact that he was wounded in the initial fighting, probably mortally, because these are musket balls we're talking about.

Once they smash into your insides, you're generally not long for this world.

I was like, yes, and my body is now full of metal rice krispies.

So then he and several other wounded Texans were dragged out back against the wall and executed.

The women and children in the chapel were allowed to leave, as was Travis's slave, Joe, who was ordered to go back to the Texan government and tell them what happened,

meaning to scare them into submission.

Unbeknownst to the Santa Ana or the Texans who died fighting in the Alamo, in the middle of all of this, on March 2nd, the convention in Washington on the Brazos had voted, declaring independence for the Republic of Texas.

I mean, like, definitely the government would be scared when Joe showed up because of like the two possibilities of what actually happened at the Alamo, but the Mexicans are freeing slaves.

Yeah.

Well, to be fair, they were.

Yeah.

Also, fun fact, that means in the Alamo, there was both Robert Evans and Joe.

Here we go.

It's often said in Texan lore that the heroic defense of the Alamo gave Sam Houston enough time to raise a professional army, but that just isn't true.

He had been at the convention and this imagined professional Texan army never existed at all.

He was given command of whatever whatever volunteers were still around and traveled to Gonzales to take command of Fannin's 400 men, who were still just sitting around doing nothing but arguing.

Once there, he learned that the Alamo had fallen and Santa Ana continued his march towards the main Texan settlements.

So he ordered a total evacuation to the east of Texas.

And this created a retreating saga known as the Runaway Scrape.

As he, the newly declared government, and anyone else who could ran away from Santa Ana, generally towards Galveston.

Galveston, oh, Galveston.

A place that smells very bad, from my experience being in Galveston.

Galveston, Corpus Christi, Port Arthur.

They smell interesting.

Put it that way.

That's a certain

spice in the air.

And by spice, I mean oil factory runoff.

Swamp gas, oil runoff, pollution.

Way too many.

I don't know, when I was there, it was a long time ago, way too many Chevy suburbans just farting out, fucked huge amounts of smoke.

It's, yeah, maybe it's changed.

Places that I only know about because of like Glenn Campbell.

Yeah, Glenn Campbell and like Cohen Brothers movies.

Yeah.

Probably in your best interest to keep it that way.

And also UGK because they're from Port Arthur.

True.

The Mexican army outnumbered the Texans nearly six to one at this point.

And the stories that the civilians who survived the Alamo didn't scare anybody into putting their weapons down.

Rather, it did the opposite.

Instead, the battle cry of remember the Alamo drove more and more people to volunteer.

However, the withdrawal from Gonzales went really, really badly.

Again, mostly thanks to Fannin and the completely broken nature of the Texan command structure.

He had a detachment of men stationed at Refugio, and he ordered them to withdraw, but they just didn't, leading to them getting pinned in place by advancing Mexican forces.

This led to a horrible effort to hold the Mexicans off until one group of Texans under Eamon King tried to escape only to be overrun.

They surrendered, but were promptly executed, leaving the only other detachment under a a guy named William Ward.

Fannin didn't want to abandon Ward, who was technically his subordinate, but he also didn't want to send anyone to relieve them.

He didn't want to retreat towards Victoria like Sam Houston ordered him to.

He just kind of sat there inside of a place called Fort Defiance, unsure of what to do next.

He sat there so long until Mexican forces surrounded him, cutting off his route of escape.

So of course, once the Mexicans got into position, Fannin decided, you know what?

We should probably withdraw.

And he did this at like the drop of a hat with no previous planning, despite Houston's orders, despite the realities of the situation on the ground.

He never packed anything.

He didn't destroy the cannons or weapons stockpiles.

He left them all behind.

And somehow his detachment did break out of the Mexican encirclement in the middle of the night, just walking through a gap in the lines.

However, in their escape from the fort, nobody had packed any food, additional ammunition, or water, which they found because six miles from the fort, Fannin Fannin decided we've made it far enough.

Let's camp out here.

Now, six miles is not that far in any stretch of the imagination, but especially when you're fighting an army that's famed for the use of dragoons.

So they just camped in the middle of an open prairie.

When virtually every other officer in the group objected doing something so stupid, Fannin insisted he knew what he was doing because of his vast war experience.

And I should point out here, his war expertise was limited to a 30-minute long firefight outside of San Antonio a couple months ago, and he was not even in command.

I mean, I know a lot of people with less who were in command caught that, but that's a whole different story.

Their break gave the Mexicans enough time to catch up with them, and the detachment of their cavalry rode around and cut them off, trapping them inside Coletto Creek.

Bennon ordered his men into a square formation, which is a formation that weirdly enough keeps coming up on our show.

This actually worked despite the fact that the Texans had no formal training in forming the square.

This was mostly thanks to the effort of Francis Petrusowicz, a Polish immigrant who fought as a member of Napoleon's Grand Armée.

Fuck off.

Imagine that guy being in your formation and he starts getting worried.

Yeah.

Like, oh, if that dude's nervous, we're fucked.

Having flashbacks.

Petrusowicz invaded Russia with Napoleon and survived his horrible retreat.

Fucking hell.

Yeah, like this guy has seen some shit.

And then he ends up in Texas.

Yeah.

I'm not making light of what happened.

I'm just saying that there was a similar situation here where stuntman, who had been doing insane stuntman his entire thing, his entire career, is working with John Landis for an episode of The Twilight Zone and says,

this sounds like a fucking bad idea, dude.

I think this is going to go bad.

That's their family without.

Please don't get in the helicopter.

Yeah.

Please don't get in the helicopter with those children.

And then.

The square worked because someone's cow wife was in the middle and it's like dating slowly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now, Protrusiewicz barely spoke English, but he ran around just shoving men into position and multiple points, threatening them at gunpoint.

Just shooting a Texan in the kneecap.

Protect the cow wife.

Eh, squer poprosa.

Curva.

The square held the Mexicans back multiple times.

But each time they were formed and attack again.

And again, each time the Texans held with a very angry old polish man whipping them into line each time like fanon pretty much just relinquished command of petrusowicz yeah petrusowicz is just turning to the cows like uh kohamshete i love you i love you i love you my sweet cow kohamshete korna back in the square then it began to rain now without cover that meant that their powder and rifles were effectively ruined Then, as if all of that wasn't bad enough, the town of Victoria, where they were supposed to be falling back towards, felled the Mexican forces.

This meant the men were trapped in the creek with nowhere to go.

The next day, Fannin sent out a messenger to discuss surrender terms, to which the Mexican commander simply shrugged and said what boiled down to, there are no terms, but if you want to surrender, that's your business.

If not, we'll just keep attacking you until you're all dead.

Fannin took this as being, we can surrender.

He returned to the camp, told the men that if they surrendered, they'd be promised honorable treatment, which is not true.

He was never told that, and we aren't sure why he lied to his men.

But his men believed him and they put down their weapons, surrendered to the Mexican forces.

They were marched out in three different directions and executed in what became known as the Goliad Massacre.

The Mexicans hoped that the massacre, like the one at the Alamo, would scare the Texans into submission, for them to lay down their arms and decide that this is a lost cause, this shit is simply not worth it.

To convince Americans to stop coming over the border and to convince the United States, like, stay the fuck out of Texas.

But, like the Alamo, the opposite happened.

Soon, remember Goliad became another rallying cry as more and more men joined the ragged remains of Sam Houston's army.

And that is where we'll pick up next time in the conclusion to our series on the Texas Revolution.

Yeeeeehaw!

We have our first Polish Texan.

Rest in peace, Petrusowitz.

You tried your best.

Imagine surviving Napoleon's campaign into Russia only to get speared by a dragoon somewhere in fucking Texas.

I mean, at the end of the day, though, it's like it starts to come to

weird mystical shit.

It's like you survived the Grand Armée, the retreat from Moscow, you know, the world's first infographic where the line gets really, really tiny and you manage to make it through that.

And then it's like the last thing you see is some kind of like, I don't know, weird.

feels like, I don't know, practically hallucinatory images of like, we're building a great big square with a cow inside it and it's turning around in circles for some reason.

Oh, he's opening up like one of those

lockets that soldiers had with his

wife and it's just a it's just a symbol of or the logo for bookies.

He's struggling to go to Moje Misco, Moje Misco.

And by all accounts, like Petrusiewicz constantly talked about how offended he was that Santiana called himself the Napoleon of the West,

which is very funny.

He stole in my logo.

That's why he joined.

Jesus Christ.

That's so funny.

I love Patricia Win so much.

It's like really cold in Texas.

People are like freezing.

He's like, you have no idea what cold is.

I still can't feel my feet and I ate my homie.

What?

I haven't felt my feet since Nizhny Novgorod.

And you don't even want to know about how I feel my dick.

He's like, you know,

retreated from Russia, ate my homie, pause.

I'm protected by cat wife with this square.

Fuck you mean, hair.

This episode is dedicated to Francis Petrusiewicz.

May you be in cow haven with the beeves.

Yeah.

That is part three of the Texas Revolution.

However, you guys host other podcasts.

Plug those other podcasts.

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

I'm involved in some capacity for all those shows.

They have a free feed and a bonus feed, which you can enjoy if you are interested in hearing more.

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

And my books are on beneath skin shop.com.

And keep an eye out in the next two weeks.

We'll be announcing a new show.

This is the only show that I host.

Thank you for listening to it.

Consider supporting us on Patreon.

Just five crisp American dollars gets you everything to include seven plus years of bonus content, side series, e-books, audiobooks, discord access, every regular episode early, and one rotating cow wife while supplies last.

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Until next time, protect your cow wife.

Form a square, protect your cows.