Artifacts reshape 1813 Battle of Medina
Musket balls and lead fragments from artillery, presumably prepared for or fired in Texas’ deadliest battle ever, are being unearthed in record numbers south of San Antonio.
They’re reshaping an old question, if not yet answering it: “Where exactly did it happen?”
Historians have described the 1813 Battle of Medina as a “running fight” but have assumed there was a focus, a main encounter. Now they’re not so sure.
A button, possibly from a Spanish military uniform, was among dozens of recent finds in northern Atascosa County that have extended an already large archaeological map of the epic clash.
Similar items have been found in southern Bexar County, where podcast host Brandon Seale and a team from American Veterans Archaeological Recovery have been at work on private property for the past two years.
Some things about the fighting on the hot afternoon of Aug. 18, 1813, are well known.
It lasted about four hours, ended the first Texas revolution against Spain, added a painful chapter to San Antonio history and gave a young lieutenant named Santa Anna some combat experience.
But at least 10 sites in Bexar and Atascosa counties have been theorized as locations for the battle. Three have state or private historical markers. The new evidence is starting to organize this wide-ranging guesswork.
“I’ve long thought that this battle stretched out for miles. Now I believe it even more,” said Martin Gonzales, chairman of the Atascosa County Historical Commission.
Kay Hindes, a former archaeologist for the city of San Antonio who’s tried for 40 years to find the battle site, said she has changed her opinion of how it was fought — perhaps not with a main battlefield but a string of engagements.
Unlike the Alamo, whose location and evolution as a mission, burial ground and singular battle site has been well documented, the Battle of Medina could someday be commemorated as a national historic battlefield “route,” based on discoveries at locations along historic roads of the early 1800s.
“What I thought I knew when we went into this has proved that no, the battle unfolded in a very different way than we thought,” Hindes said. “There are a number of skirmish sites now, and so what we’re finding is this battle was spread over great distance.”
In 1812, local Tejanos, possibly with covert assistance from a handful of American opportunists, declared an independent republic and executed the Spanish governor and 13 other prisoners. The colonial authorities in Mexico City sent some 1,830 men under Gen. Joaquín de Arredondo to put down the revolt. About 1,400 rebel troops marched south from Béjar to meet them.
On the day of the battle, the
Spanish force killed more than 1,000 rebels while losing only 55 men. In the following weeks, Arrendondo’s troops brutalized the people of Béjar, executing about 300 men suspected of aiding the rebels and imprisoning 500 women in a small house known as La Quinta, near today’s Main Plaza in San Antonio. Children were left to beg for food.
The traumatic events had a lasting impact for people on both sides.
Antonio López de Santa Anna, then 19 and a lieutenant in the Spanish army, later became president of Mexico, which won independence from Spain in 1821. According to Santa Anna biographer Will Fowler, the 1813 battle shaped his views on how to quell revolts and forged a “personal attachment” to Texas that drove his decision to “personally take it upon himself ” to defeat a second Texas revolution 23 years later.
That meant the Texian forces didn’t just defeat a Mexican army at San Jacinto in 1836. They captured the president himself, forcing the withdrawal of all Mexican troops from the new republic.
Gonzales, 46, has acquired the same fascination with locating the Battle of Medina that has moved people to pore over old maps and take metal detectors down gravel roads since at least the 1930s, when the first marker was erected in southern Bexar County.
A descendant of the historically prominent Navarro family of San Antonio and South Texas,
he was a jail administrator for the Atascosa County Sheriff ’s Office for 22 years and now is a sales rep for NCIC Inmate Communications.
In September, researchers in Atascosa County secured a private landowner’s permission to search about 2 miles south of Leming, near Galvan Creek. They found more than 20 lead fragments, possibly left by Spanish soldiers who molded their own ammunition.
Todd Ahlman, director of Texas State University’s Center for Archaeological Studies, tested the artifacts using X-ray fluorescence and determined the metal content, characteristic of the early 1800s, matched those of more than a dozen lead balls found by AVAR in 2022.
It also matched a lead ball found in 1968 among human skeletal remains with some copper buttons a bit northeast of the latest Bexar County search area.
The Atascosa site yielded a pewter button bearing the number 13 in a stylized font. Hindes believes it may be from a uniform of Spain’s Extremadura Regiment, which had soldiers in the battle. Two tacks that experts have said could have been part of a saddle or butt of a firearm also were found.
Gonzales and county historical commission volunteers recovered about 30 more artifacts at the site in February and March, including more lead ordnance and another button from the Spanish colonial era.
Archaeologists have long been worried that lead battle relics may have sunk beyond range of ground-penetrating radar, which varies from less than 3 feet to up to 100 feet, depending on the soil. Northern Atascosa County’s sandy, loamy ground is good for growing strawberries. But the county’s name, dating to the 1780s, refers to a Spanish word describing boggy ground that made travel difficult.
Gonzales said people of the area sometimes documented “getting stuck in the sand as they crossed the Atascosa River.”
“We’ve been on that place that they’re talking about, and yeah, it’s almost like quicksand. You can’t dig a hole in it, and a wagon would probably be hell to get through it because it’s going to get stuck and go into the ground,” he said.
But the latest artifacts were no more than 6 inches below ground. Hindes, who began looking for the battle site in 1984, when the city of San Antonio was trying to develop a surface water source, said she’s “thrilled with all the work that has been done.”
“These are incredible finds,” she said. “From my perspective, it’s been a long search.”
Hindes credits Ahlman’s analysis and the cooperation of the anonymous Atascosa County landowner for the latest discoveries. But it may be several years before archaeologists and historians gather enough artifacts to fully understand the battle.
“It is going to be a good while,” Hindes said. “I don’t think we’ve found all those sites.”