Welcome to a new history of Old San Antonio.

Episode 11, The Battle of Medina.

I'm Bram and Seal.

I'm a city of San Antonio

Tonight I'm looking at your lovely life

Colonel Miguel Minchaca salivated at the opportunity that lay before him

Somewhere on the other side of that outgrowth across the Medina River

was the hated Spanish royalist General Joaquin de Arredondo.

Just a few months before, General Arredondo had placed a $1,000-paco bounty on Colonel Menchaca's head,

thinking that such a sum would surely turn one of Manchaca's fellow San Antonio's against him.

But Aradondo hadn't appreciated how deep Manchaca's roots ran in his community.

His family wasn't just from San Antonio.

San Antonio could be said to owe its existence to his family.

Minchaca was a great-great-grandson of Jose de Urutia, one of San Antonio's first Presidio commanders,

and the Minchaca family had led the presidio and the militia in defense of the town for almost a century now.

Rather than betray him, San Antonio's turned out and forced to support him,

and some 8 to 900 mounted vicinos from San Antonio and other Texas settlements stood in formation

behind him. And it wasn't just the opportunity to draw down against the royalist governor

who had tried to buy his head that so excited Colonel Manchaca. It was a chance to avenge his uncle,

and so many other San Antonioans who had lost their lives at the hand of the Spanish royalist governor.

In the tumult of San Antonio's first aborted attempted revolution two years before, his uncle, Jose Felix Minchaca, had been swept up in a series of general arrest ordered by royalist governor Salcedo.

It was the execution of Menchaca's uncle and Salcedo's other retributions that helped push many San Antonioans over to the side of the Republicans.

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