Battle of Concepción, 1835
Near San Antonio, Texas
On October twenty-eighth, eighteen thirty-five, ninety Texan volunteers occupied a bend in the San Antonio River near Mission Concepción and held off a Mexican force about three times their size. It was the opening engagement in the Siege of Bexar, and it established something the Texas Revolution would repeat again and again: the Kentucky rifle in cover was more than a match for massed infantry in the open.
The Texan force was led by James Bowie and James W. Fannin Jr., two very different men who shared a command and a river bank. Stephen F. Austin, commanding the larger Texan army camped outside San Antonio, had ordered them south from the mission at San Francisco de la Espada to find a defensive position closer to town. They found one in a horseshoe bend of the San Antonio River, where steep banks gave them cover and clear sightlines across an open field.
General Martín Perfecto de Cos, commanding the Mexican garrison in San Antonio, sent approximately two hundred seventy-five soldiers with two artillery pieces to drive the Texans out. The battle lasted about thirty minutes. The Texans fired from the river bank with a disciplined accuracy that killed or wounded most of the Mexican infantry and artillerymen who advanced into the open field. Three Mexican charges were repulsed. When the firing stopped, Mexican casualties were at least fourteen killed and thirty-nine wounded, with some estimates far higher. The Texans lost one man.
The captured artillery piece was dragged back to the Texan camp. The victory bolstered confidence in what had been an uncertain siege, and within weeks, Colonel Ben Milam would lead volunteers directly into San Antonio's streets, taking the city block by block until General Cos surrendered in December of that same year.
Mission Concepción itself, founded in seventeen thirty-one, is one of the oldest unrestored stone churches in the United States. It still stands at the site of the battle, its walls still bearing the marks of the morning that opened the Texas Revolution's decisive campaign.
