Hundreds died at Battle of Medina, but where was it?
LEMING — San Antonio is famous worldwide for its Mexican heritage, but the city’s connection to Mother Spain sometimes gets overlooked. Even Texans, I suspect, sometimes forget that one of the state’s oldest cities was founded by Spaniards in 1718 and that Texas itself was part of Spain for more than 130 years.
With San Antonio’s tricentennial celebration in full swing, the spotlight for the next several weeks will be on Spain, with a spectacular exhibition of paintings by Spanish artists at the San Antonio Museum of Art, an “Olé, San Antonio” celebration in the Pearl District and other Spainrelated events.
“Spain is such a fundamental part of what San Antonio is, and that is being recognized and celebrated this summer,” historian and urban designer Sherry Kafka Wagner told the New York Times last week.
Thanks to my old friend Sherry’s observation, I found myself standing in a field of grass and weeds off U.S. Highway 281 about 20 miles south of the city in search of another notable Spanish connection. In the morning stillness of the countryside, I tried to imagine the clang of swords, the roar of cannons, the screams of dying men who fought and killed each other in the field before me on a hot August day in 1813.
It’s called the Battle of Medina, and the history books have always given it short shrift, even though, with more than a thousand casualties, it’s the bloodiest battle ever fought on Texas soil. The engagement remains obscure, despite the fact that it prepared the way for Anglo-American settlement in the coming decade. We’re not even sure exactly where it happened.
Armies may have clashed in that field off U.S. 281; a small monument erected by an ama-
teur historian marks the spot. Or they may have met a few miles away, in what’s now rolling pasture land on the Toudouze Ranch off San Antonio’s Loop 1604. Old belt buckles, cooking items and musket balls have been found buried in the soft, sandy soil. Except for cows seeking shade under groves of oak and mesquite a couple of days ago, the rolling pasture land looked like it could have been a battle site.
Or the armies fought near the current intersection of two gravel roads in northern Atascosa County, near the Leming community. That’s where the state historical marker says it
may have taken place. The marker stands at the corner of an empty lot where barrel racers practice. Despite periodic pronouncements from historians and archaeologists, no one’s ever fixed the exact site, perhaps because it was a running battle, and artifacts may be buried over a wide area.
Here’s what we do know: At a time when Mexico and Latin America were in revolt against Spain and the United States was at war with England, Mexican revolutionary Jose Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara and U.S. Army Lt. Augustus Magee, with assistance from the U.S., organized an expedition to capture Texas. The self-proclaimed Republican Army of the North, flying an emerald flag, crossed from Louisiana into Texas on Aug. 7, 1812, and soon captured Nacogdoches and several small East Texas settlements before continuing westward.
In San Antonio on April 6, 1813, the rebels proclaimed independence for the State of Texas under the Republic of Mexico. Their green banner would fly over Texas for about four months.
On August 4, Gen. Jose Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois, a Cuban-born revolutionary, deposed Gutierrez. (Magee had died earlier in the year.) That same month, Gen. Jose Joaquin de Arredondo y Miono organized a Spanish royalist army of some 1,830 men and marched them from Laredo toward San Antonio to put down the insurrection. Toledo had an army of about 1,400 men comprising Anglos, Tejanos, Native Americans and former royalists. Hoping to spare San Antonio the ravages of war, the Tejanos in Toledo’s army persuaded him to meet the enemy south of town.
On the night of Aug. 17, 1813, as historian Robert H. Thonhoff tells the story in “The Handbook of Texas,” Toledo set up camp about 6 miles from Arredondo’s camp between the Atascosa and Medina rivers. Toledo’s plan was to ambush the royalists as they marched into a defile along the Laredo road.
The plan fell apart the next morning. Trudging through deep, sandy soil in dense woods, the republicans suddenly found themselves within firing range of the royalists, who had set up breastworks on high ground. On a hot summer day, the two armies fought from about noon until 4 p.m. in a furious battle involving infantry, cavalry and artillery. The republicans broke ranks and ran, and the battle became a slaughter, with some 1,300 men either killed or later executed. The Spanish lost 55 men.
The crushing defeat put an end to the rebellion, and San Antonio endured martial law. Arredondo had the wives, daughters and other female relatives of the rebels imprisoned, where they were raped, brutalized and forced to convert 24 bushels of corn a day into tortillas for the occupying army. Their children begged in the streets for food. For a month after the battle, Arredondo executed 10 men a day in the Plaza de Armas, now the site of City Hall, and placed their heads on spikes.
The Spanish forces, by the way, included a 19-year-old lieutenant who would find his way back to the San Antonio area some years later. In his official report, Gen. Arredondo mentioned “Don Antonio Santa Anna” as one of three men who “conducted themselves with great bravery” in the 1813 battle. It’s been said that the man who would later proclaim himself “the Napoleon of the West,” the general who would lay siege to a mission called the Alamo in 1836, learned his tactics both on the battlefield and off from Arredondo.