Welcome to a new history of Old San Antonio.

Episode 18, Texian San Antonio.

I'm Brandon Seale.

I'm a city, San Antonio. tonight I'm looking at your lovely life.

When the Alamo fell on March 6, 1836, San Antonio's didn't give up the fight.

After successfully leading the Immortal 32 from Gonzalez into the Alamo just a few days earlier,

John El Colorado Smith returned with a second relief effort on March 7th.

He was turned back, however, by Santa Ana's Dragoons, just as Juan Sagan's relief attempt had been a few days prior.

On March 11th, it was two San Antonioans that brought the news to East Texas of the Alamo's fall,

and it was Def Smith, that famed scout and

citizen of San Antonio since 1821, who discovered the Alamo's non-combatants plotting sadly across

the prairie just a few days later. There was only one thing now standing between East Texans

and Santa Ana's advancing army. Juan Sagine and 24 or so of his old San Antonio Rangers.

The Texas provisional government ordered

Sagan to slow down Santa Ana's Centralist Army and to leave no one and no thing behind, while the

rest of the population fled east in the so-called runaway scrape. For more than a month and across

a field of action that spanned more than 200 miles, Sigeen outmaneuvered some of the best-trained

cavalry in the world and despoiled the countryside, leaving no forage, shelter, bridge, or ferry behind.

His tactics effectively neutralized Santa Ana's famed dragoons for the rest of the campaign,

leaving them without nourishment, without mobility,

and without the ability to protect Santa Ana's lines of communication.

This made it possible in early April of 1836 for Def Smith to capture one of Santa Ana's unprotected messengers,

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