The Battle of Coleto: Surrender on the Prairie

This quiet stretch of South Texas coastal prairie was the site of one of the most consequential surrenders in American history. On the morning of March nineteenth, eighteen thirty-six, Colonel James Fannin led about three hundred Texian soldiers out of Goliad, carrying artillery, supply wagons, and wounded men. Sam Houston had ordered Fannin to abandon Presidio La Bahia and retreat to Victoria. The retreat started late. The column moved slowly. And on the open grassland near Coleto Creek, Mexican General José Urrea's cavalry caught them in the worst possible ground.

Fannin halted his men on a slight rise in open prairie, not quite reaching the timber at the creek's edge. There he formed a defensive square using wagons and artillery as the outer wall. Urrea's forces charged three times. Three times the Texians repulsed them. The Mexican casualties were heavy: fifty killed and roughly one hundred forty wounded. The Texians lost about ten dead and roughly sixty wounded, including Fannin himself, shot through the thigh.

But the terrain that protected them by day became their prison by nightfall. They had no water, almost no ammunition left, and they could not abandon their wounded to try a night breakout. The Texians voted among themselves and chose to stay. At dawn on March twentieth, Mexican reinforcements arrived with artillery. The math was impossible. Fannin arranged a formal surrender, and the soldiers stacked their arms.

The terms, Fannin believed, guaranteed his men would be treated as prisoners of war and paroled. General Urrea himself seemed to accept those terms. But Urrea did not make the final call. That order came from Mexico City.

Seven days later, on Palm Sunday, March twenty-seventh, the prisoners at Presidio La Bahia were marched out in three columns and shot. Roughly three hundred fifty men were killed that morning. Fannin was executed last, seated in a chair due to his wound, asking only that he be shot in the chest and that his personal effects be returned to his family. Neither request was honored. His body was burned with those of his men.

The battle site here marks where the road home ended. The subsequent massacre ignited a fury that carried Texian forces to San Jacinto three weeks later, and the cry "Remember Goliad" rang as loud as "Remember the Alamo."