Welcome to Finding Medina.

Episode 12, is this the battlefield of Medina?

I'm Brandon Seal.

In the summer of 1822, a group of San Antonio marched south out of town to greet the new governor of Texas.

It should have been a festive occasion.

This was the first governor to have been appointed by the newly independent Mexican government, free of Spanish control, a goal for which San Antonio's had

sacrificed so much. Yet as they crossed the Medina River, and the South Texas Prairie gave way

to a live oak forest, half-buried partial skeletons began to appear in the sandy soil, as if

trying to dig their way out of their graves, sobering

the mood of all present.

Most of these dead, many of them family and friends of the San Antonio's marching down the

Laredo Road now, had in fact never known a grave, by the direct order of that same General

Arredondo, who had defeated them at the Battle of Medina,

and who hoped that their corpses might serve as grim reminders of the cost of this loyalty.

The irony, of course, was that by 1822, General Arredondo was technically aligned with the cause that his enemies had died to advance.

He, along with many other Mexican royalists, had abandoned his loyalties to the Spanish king in 1821

when that king had been forced to accept an overly Republican constitution back in the home country.

By pledging his allegiance instead to the emperor of a newly independent Mexico,

Ardondo had been allowed to retain his position as military governor of the northeastern part of Mexico.

In 1822, the new Mexican government decided to check his authority, however, through the appointment

of a new civil governor. to check his authority, however, through the appointment of a new

civil governor. Unlike Ardondo, this new governor, Jose Felix Tres Palacios, boasted genuine rebel bona fides,

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