Welcome to the Man for Texas.

Episode 1, Blood in the Sand.

I'm Brandon Seal.

Their general was ordering a retreat?

30-year-old lieutenant colonel Jose Francisco Ruiz tried to process what it was he was hearing.

He repeated it back to Colonel Miguel Menchaca, his commanding officer, and the commander of the Tejano cavalry constituting the core of the Republican Army of the North, the as-yet undefeated Republican Army of the North.

The army that had made Texas perhaps the first province in the

Spanish New World to rid itself of a royalist presence and to establish for itself an independent

Republican government. The army whose leaders had sworn to, quote, sustain and defend this new

nation, until the last extremity. This was the army that this newcomer general

Jose Alvarez de Toledo was ordering to retreat in the face of what appeared to be a numerically

inferior enemy. Ruiz and Menchaca had wanted to like this Toledo. They had wanted to believe

that his noble lineage and time spent in the United States

would bring some kind of financial support from the sympathetic North American Republic across the Sabine.

They'd wanted to believe that the self-appointed general's liberal Republican reputation

from his brief time in the Revolutionary Cortes de Cades back in Spain was well deserved.

But the truth was that Toledo had been nothing but trouble ever since he started politicking for Jose Bernardo Gutieres Delara's job

from the safety of Louisiana. Unlike Toledo, Gutieres Delara was one of them, born on the Spanish

North American frontier. And he'd been anointed by Father Miguel Idaalgo himself, that carried the torch of Mexican independence.

Under his leadership, they'd been unstoppable, and Gutieres de Lara sure as hell wouldn't be

retreating right now. Of course, Ruiz and Menchaca appreciated that Gutieres de Lara had ruffled feathers,

mostly amongst the Anglo-American volunteers in the army.

...