Welcome to the Man for Texas. Episode two, Comancheros in exile. I'm Brandon Seal.

Jose Francisco and his fellow Tejano refugees had seen hundreds of their comrades fall on the Medina

battlefield.

They'd heard the volleys from the battlefield firing squads,

and perhaps even the screams of the prisoners being slaughtered and dismembered by Ardando's men as they fled from the field of action.

At least half of their 1400 or so companions,

who marched out with them that morning of August 18, 1813, had perished in the

shifting sands of the Encinale de Medina, maybe more. And yet even with that context, they had no

reason to anticipate the extent to which Spanish General Joaquin de Arredondo would extend his

vengeance to the people of San Antonio. His executions continued

even well after he occupied the town. Hundreds of men had been thrown into the priest's quarters of San

Fernando, 18 suffocated. Forty more were pulled aside and marked for execution every third day.

Chain gangs for some, death squads for still others.

The women were shown no mercy either.

500 San Antonio women were thrown into an old stone storehouse called La Quinta and forced to grind corn 20 hours a day.

And, of course, subjected to the unspeakable other things that happened to civilian populations,

particularly women in times of war.

Many Tejano refugees and some of their families had followed Jose Francisco to Goliad,

which actually wasn't called Goliad in 1813, it was still called La Dahlia or the Bay.

It wouldn't be renamed Goliad for another 16 years, and then as an anagram of the name of the priest, Ivalgo, who had started

this whole thing. A few days after the battle, though, Angel Navarro arrived, Ruiz's cousin, and a

lieutenant in the Royalist army during the Battle of Medina. But he'd been thrown out of the army and

...