The Grass Fight: Silver Dreams on the San Antonio Road

On November twenty-sixth, eighteen thirty-five, a skirmish took place on the outskirts of San Antonio de Bexar that entered the history of the Texas Revolution under a faintly comic name: the Grass Fight. It was comic only in retrospect. At the time, the Texian rebels believed they were about to intercept a Mexican pack train carrying silver to pay and resupply General Martin Perfecto de Cos, whose forces were besieged in the city.

The intelligence came from a scout who had spotted a mule train escorted by Mexican cavalry approaching San Antonio from the south. Word spread quickly through the Texian camp outside the city walls: silver was on those mules, enough to solve the revolutionary army's chronic shortage of funds and supplies. James Bowie led a mounted force to delay the column, and infantry under William Jack went after the pack train. They attacked the escort, drove the cavalry off, and captured the pack train.

The mules were carrying grass. Fodder cut for the horses of the besieged Mexican garrison.

The disappointment was genuine, but the tactical result was real. The Mexican cavalry escort suffered losses, three dead and fourteen wounded. The Texians lost four men wounded. More importantly, the garrison inside San Antonio was now denied resupply of forage for its animals, adding to the pressure on Cos to hold an increasingly untenable position.

Less than two weeks later, in early December of eighteen thirty-five, the Texians stormed San Antonio in a brutal five-day street fight and forced Cos to surrender. The Grass Fight was the last engagement before that assault, a small piece in the sequence that expelled Mexican military power from Texas, at least temporarily, before the events of the following spring at the Alamo and San Jacinto rewrote everything.