The
‘Come and Take It’ Cannon
©Lee Paul
It was only a squatty little cannon---and a spiked one at that---but in the hands of a small group of determined men, it thundered as the "Lexington of Texas" and started a revolution with the most famous battle cry in the history of the world.
By the fall of 1835, the growing dissension between Mexico and the struggling Texian colonists began to assume warlike proportions. Fearing a full-scale uprising, Mexico ordered the colonists to disarm, and dispatched a legion of Mexican soldiers to insure that the orders were carried out. In the tiny hamlet of Gonzales, about eighty miles to the east of San Antonio, this order to disarm was the final straw. With set, determined faces, the eighteen men in the community mustered in defiance. It was the beginning of the end for Mexico’s claim to Texas.
The Texas issue began innocently enough. In December 1820, Texas was a land more than one thousand miles long and nearly as wide, filled with mountainous beauty and prairie grace, balmy temperatures and blue skies. It’s clean streams and abundant game made it a veritable paradise for settlement, and Spanish Governor Antonio Martinez, supervising from the Presidio of San Antonio de Bexar, the Spanish seat of government in the territory, granted permission for Moses Austin to settle 300 families from the United States onto Spanish soil, along the two longest streams in Texas, the Colorado and Brazos Rivers. These settlements would, by necessity, be grouped in clusters for safety, with most of them around the dozen or so Spanish missions dotting the corridor to the Presidio, the gateway to the north.
In 1821, however, Mexico gained its independence from Spain. Later that same year, Moses Austin died. Apprehensive about the future of his father’s Colony, Stephen Fuller Austin went to San Antonio early the following year to report to Governor Martinez. There were then one hundred families on the Colorado and fifty families on the Brazos. The Governor, fearing he may have overstepped his authority, advised Austin to journey to Mexico City to verify Moses Austin’s Spanish land grant with the new, independent Mexican government. Stephen Austin returned in August 1823 and was appalled to find the settlements overrun with hostile Indians.
In all fairness to Mexico, while Austin was gone, the governor of the Mexican province of Coahuila y Tejas, Jose Felix Trespalacios, divided the Austin Colony into two separate districts with a Texian alcalde in each to look after the details of local administration and justice. Trespalacios’ instructions stated that each alcalde was free to administer to the needs of the colonies without Mexican military intervention, as long as they adhered to Mexican rules.
Since the colonists were too few to effectively muster against Indian attacks, Mexican soldiers would have that primary responsibility. It could have been a peaceful step toward self-democracy for the Texians, only Governor Trespalacios overlooked one singularly important fact. The fierce Tonkawa Indians lived between the two major rivers, making it all but impossible to communicate effectively between the two colonies. Not only that, Texas had at least twenty-two other tribes of Indians in the same general area, most of them hostile. Mexican soldiers were totally inept to handle the Indians---an infuriatingly intolerable situation to the colonists. When Stephen Austin returned, he immediately hired the best marksmen he could find to protect the properties and lands. These "rangers" were ruthless and determined, answering to no one but Austin himself. In a matter of weeks, they were the law of the Colony.
Most Mexican authorities tolerated the interlopers, mainly because the Mexican soldiers weren’t successful in coping with the Indian problem, and the rangers were. But it made some in the Presidio in San Antonio uneasy to have mounted Anglos dispensing law on Mexican soil. When empressario George C. DeWitt founded his settlement of Gonzales on the banks of the Guadalupe River in 1825---a mere stone’s throw, so to speak, from the Presidio---the government at the Presidio, as a sign of good will, as much as an effort at regaining some control in the Colony, furnished to the citizens, six years later, a discarded, damaged cannon for defense of their city against Indian attack. It was a stubby, iron cannon, only twenty-one-and-a-half inches long, delivering a six-pound load at short range. A spike had been driven through it, rendering the old cannon basically useless, but the tiny hamlet was glad to have it as their one defensive weapon. They drove the spike out, leaving a touch-hole the size of a man’s thumb.
As Anglo settlement increased, Mexican unrest grew. By early 1835, the various settlements bulged with more than 30,000 Anglos on Mexican soil under Mexican rule. The situation prompted General Martin Perfecto de Cos, in command of the Mexican troops and brother-in-law to Mexican President Antonio de Lopez de Santa Anna, to decide that he had better get his canon back before the citizens of Gonzales used it against his army. He ordered Colonel Domingo de Ugatechea to send a detachment of five soldiers to Gonzales to retrieve it. The town, however, refused to surrender it.
Noises of revolt had been circulating for several years. In fact, John Sowell, father of Texas Ranger Asa J. L. Sowell, and grandfather to Texas Ranger Andrew Jackson Sowell, had journeyed to Gonzales in 1829 to help aid the Texians by making and repairing guns. Sowell also designed a great double-edged, razor-sharp knife at James Bowie’s request, a knife with a blade twelve inches long which still bears the name "Bowie knife." When others saw it, Sowell mass-produced a few more.
Now, Sowell was joined in his blacksmith shop by Noah Smithwick, a gunsmith recruited to forge ammunition for the cannon. Smithwick cut bar iron into slugs and hammered them into balls for the tiny gun. He also gathered all the files he could find, sharpened them into lances, and mounted them on poles cut from the banks of the Guadalupe, thus organizing a fighting force of "lancers." Together, the two men began turning out arms as fast as they could in anticipation of the upcoming fight.
Since the citizens of Gonzales decided the old cannon should not be surrendered to anyone who might effectively use it against them, especially the Mexicans, they buried it in George W. Davis’ peach orchard on September 29th. They then taunted General Cos with the message to "come and find it." General Cos reacted quickly. He sent a detachment of one hundred men under the command of Lieutenant Francisco Castaneda to forcibly retrieve it.
This action was not unexpected by the town’s leaders. With the little gun safely hidden among the peach trees, they sent out word to other communities for help. By the time the Mexican army arrived on the other side of the Guadalupe River, 160 Gonzales defenders had gathered on the opposite bank, including Colonel John H. Moore from LaGrange, Colonel James W. Fannin and his "Brazos Guards," and William B. Travis. Some of the volunteer force dug up the cannon, polished, loaded, and primed it, and mounted it on two wooden oxcart wheels.
On 2 October 1835, the village of Gonzales became enshrined in history as "the Lexington of Texas." Flying a home-made, six foot battle flag made from the white silk of Evaline DeWitt’s wedding gown, the Texians went to war. Evaline DeWitt was the widow of George C. DeWitt, who had died a few weeks previously. On the flag was painted a picture of the tiny cannon. Above the gun was a lone star. Beneath it were the words, "Come and Take It."
At the first blast from the 65-pound cannon, the Mexicans scattered, eventually retreating to San Antonio. Casualties were minimal. One Mexican was killed, and one Texian was wounded when he fell off his horse onto his face and suffered a severe nosebleed. The "Lexington of Texas" cannon may not have fired the shot heard around the world, but it did fire the shot heard throughout the Western Hemisphere. The Revolution was on!
After the Gonzales victory, a small group of Texians, fifty men under George Morse Collinsworth, marched on the presidio at Goliad, rousing the small Mexican detachment there. With the capture of Goliad, Stephen F. Austin took his tiny army to San Antonio. On October 28th, Austin’s officers, Colonel James Bowie and Colonel James Fannin, using frontiersmen-like tactics against their Mexican foes, defeated Cos’ army on the banks of the San Antonio River at Mission Nuestra Senora Purisima Conception de Acuna, commonly called Mission Conception, on the outskirts south of the city. The Mexicans had never seen such disciplined and accurate small-arms fire, and hundreds of their army lay dead and wounded in the long grass. During that battle, ninety-two Texians defeated an overwhelming force of five hundred of the enemy.
General Cos pulled his shattered troops back to the Presidio in San Antonio to seek refuge in the building surrounding the Main Plaza and behind the thick walls of Mission San Antonio de Valero, better known as "The Alamo" because of the gigantic cottonwood trees growing along the river near the church. Thus began a three-cornered conflict for the possession of Texas among three races: the Indian warrior, the Mexican soldier, and the Texian rangers. All were mounted on the best horses they could get, and all had the best weapons available.
With the old fort in San Antonio under siege by Texians, General Cos was unable to fortify his position, and on December 5th, Colonel Ben Milam and his Texians stormed the barricade from three directions at once. It was over in four days. The Mexicans were as brave as any when attacking, but they were not primed to defend themselves against the fury of attackers who relished fighting as individuals or in packs like ravished wolves. General Cos wisely surrendered. By Christmas Day 1835, the remnants of his army, the last Mexican troops on Texas soil, were back across the Rio Bravo (as the Rio Grande was then known) licking their wounds. To the Texians, who had lost but two men, compared to the more than 300 Mexican killed in battle, the victory seemed cheap and easy.
Meanwhile, news of the revolt had spread across America, and men flocked to Texas to aid their countrymen in the grossly unequal struggle. Big Foot Wallace’s brother Samuel and cousin William were among the many volunteers to enlist in the Texan army. With the Mexican army seething in defeat in Mexico, less than two hundred men were left under Colonel William Travis’ command to garrison San Antonio, the rest of his 1,000 plus volunteer army going home to their families.
Colonel Fannin took a detachment of four hundred men downriver to garrison Goliad at the great stone presidio of La Bahia, setting up camp on Coleto Creek. Sam and William Wallace were part of Colonel Fannin’s army.
The Presidio, charged by the Spanish with protecting the missions of Goliad, was the gateway to the ocean. The mission Nuestra Senora del Espiritu Santo de Zuniga and the presidio of Nuestra Senora de Loreto were originally built on top of a French ruin on Garcitas Creek in 1722. Together, they were called La Bahia, meaning the bay or the harbor, because they were located on Espiritu Santo Bay, now known as Matagorda Bay. In 1749, they were moved to their present site on the south bank of the San Antonio River at Goliad, near Mission Nuestra Senora del Rosario.
As a fort, La Bahia was the strongest ever built in Texas. It had walls ten feet high and three feet thick, enclosing more than three acres of ground atop a rocky hill with a commanding view in all directions. It was a key location in Spanish colonial wars and other conflicts, as whoever held it controlled the supply lines to Bexar and other crucial locations. General Cos had used it as a stronghold for arms, money, and provisions to San Antonio.
It was this state of affairs which totally unhinged Santa Anna. Within a month, he personally led a march of 6,000 troops in an invasion of Texas. Mexican soldiers who survived the 350-mile march from Saltillo to San Antonio remembered it as one of the worst experiences of their lives. The weather alternated between crushing heat under parched skies to sudden downpours of cold rain, with occasional whippings of snow and crusting ice. And the country was cruel, rocky, almost barren of life. But Santa Anna lashed on, showing no mercy in his determination to take back the land. When his big siege guns bogged down in a quagmire on the Rio Bravo, he pushed on without them. He reached the outskirts of San Antonio on 24 February 1836. Knowing the city well, having once lived there, he wasn’t surprised to find the Texians penned within the walls of the Alamo, although the once impressive church was a ruin.
With so many against him, Colonel Travis sent out desperate appeals for help. Messengers raced south to Goliad for Fannin’s cannon and east to Washington-on-the-Brazos for General Sam Houston’s 1,200-man Texan army. Colonel Fannin attempted to get his cannon to the Alamo, realizing that if San Antonio fell, everything north of the Rio Bravo would once again be in the hands of the Mexican government, but the carts broke down, and he was forced to retreat back to Goliad.
General Houston never got started before the Battle of the Alamo was over. On 6 March 1836, four days after Texians declared their independence from Mexico, and after thirteen days of laying siege, Santa Anna attacked the Alamo with 5,000 men. The attack was accompanied by the haunting bugle cry of the Deguello, a Moorish dirge with Oriental overtones which was used by the Mexicans to mean "no quarter." All the Alamo’s Texians, numbering 184 brave men, perished in what was to become the most desperate battle ever recorded in history.
Santa Anna wasn’t satisfied with regaining San Antonio. He meant to crush all the Texians, and with this in mind, he ordered half his troops to Goliad. Colonel Fannin and his men were caught and surrounded on the prairie at a place now called Fannin in honor of their heroic efforts. On the morning of the second day of the battle, with lack of water to cool his cannon and with half his men already dead or injured, Colonel Fannin surrendered to Mexican General Jose Urrea. The General told Fannin that he felt sure that he could persuade the Presidente, Santa Anna, to grant the Texian command the honorable terms of war. With that promise, the Texians, still ready to fight, peacefully laid down their arms and willingly marched back to Presidio La Bahia at Goliad, expecting to be released and returned to their families. Eight days later, on Palm Sunday, Colonel Fannin and his men were marched back out on the prairie and shot down without any chance for their lives.
General Urrea, sickened by the orders from Santa Anna, refused to attend the Sunday massacre. More than 300 of Fannin’s men were killed, including Fannin and Sam and William Wallace. Less than 30 managed to escape. The dead were dumped into a common grave, and the bodies set on fire. The pyre was poor consolation for Santa Anna, who saw 1,600 Mexican dead buried in unmarked graves in San Antonio---their reward for storming the Alamo.
It was this death by treachery at the hands of the Mexicans which so enraged Big Foot, but before he could leave for Texas, Santa Anna, the Napoleon of the West, met his own Waterloo. Five weeks after the Goliad massacre, on 21 April 1836, Santa Anna was defeated by Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto with the help of a mulatto woman, an indentured servant to Colonel James Morgan, named Emily---ever after remembered as the "Yellow Rose of Texas." Emily Morgan "entertained" the Mexican general in his tent so long that when the Texans attacked, order could not be restored. Texas finally had its independence. The revolution was over.
The "Come and Take It" cannon which started the Texas Revolution almost didn’t survive the Texas Battle for Independence. After its first famous shot, Stephen F. Austin, in command of the new Texian army, set out with the cannon and an assortment of troops from Gonzales with plans to capture San Antonio. It was pulled by two yokes of Texas longhorns, but the friction of the wooden wheels on the axles caused the wheels to smoke and then catch fire. The troops used their precious water to douse the fire, but it was no use. The gun had to be abandoned. The men buried it on a creek bank near the Old San Antonio Road, and there it remained for more than a century.
In 1936, Texas’ centennial year, a huge flood washed over Central Texas, and the old gun was found in a hole. But, no one remembered its story, and somehow, it ended up in the Gonzales post office, where it lay for another 32 years. It was then bought by a gun collector in Mexico, who kept it until it was displayed at a firearms convention in San Antonio, where it was promptly sold to another gun collector.
Finally, in 1979, Patrick Wagner, a physician from Shiner, Texas, acquired the gun. He set about working with military historians and laboratories in an attempt to establish the authenticity of the little cannon. In a book written by Noah Smithwich, the blacksmith who had bushed and restored the gun, titled Evolution of a State, scholars found what they were seeking. Smithwick detailed the account of the Gonzales affair, which included a thorough description of the cannon. From this material and from the scientific tests made by the experts at the University of Texas, all agreed that the tiny gun was, indeed, the "Come and Take It" cannon. It is the only surviving relic of the day Texans went to war to win their freedom.