Battle of Gonzales, 2 October 1835

The battle, stage by stage

1. 1831 – 25 September 1835

   A cannon for Gonzales

   In March 1831 the authorities at San Antonio de Béxar lent the DeWitt colony at Gonzales, the westernmost Anglo-American settlement in Texas, a bronze six-pounder cannon for defense against Indian raids, on condition that it be returned when asked for. By 1835 Santa Anna's centralists were dissolving state governments and disarming civilians, and Texian anger was rising. In September, Colonel Domingo de Ugartechea, the military commander at Béxar, sent a corporal and a handful of soldiers (four or five, by different accounts) with a cart to bring the gun back. Alcalde Andrew Ponton stalled, and the soldiers were detained. Ugartechea took the refusal as a challenge.

2. 29 September 1835

   The Old Eighteen hold the crossing

   Lieutenant Francisco de Castañeda arrived with about 100 dragoons (the 1936 markers say 150) and an order to recover the gun, by force if necessary but without open conflict if he could avoid it. He found the Guadalupe running high and the boats and ferry taken to the far bank. Eighteen Gonzales men, the 'Old Eighteen', stood on the east bank and told him the alcalde was away and he must wait. Castañeda camped on high ground nearby (Hardin says 300 yards from the ford; the 1936 marker names De Witt's, later Santa Anna, Mound). That day the townsmen buried the cannon in George W. Davis's peach orchard and sent riders to the other settlements for help. The crossing's exact site is not known; it is drawn near today's US 183 bridge.

3. 30 September – 1 October

   Volunteers and a flag

   Volunteers rode in from the Colorado and Guadalupe settlements. By the evening of 30 September there were more than 150 by one marker's count, and a Coushatta man told Castañeda that at least 140 had gathered with more on the way. The men elected John Henry Moore to command. The cannon was dug up and mounted on the fore-wheels of Albert Martin's cotton wagon, and loaded with scrap iron. The flag is credited to Evaline DeWitt and Cynthia Burns (the marker for Evaline's mother, Sarah Seely DeWitt, credits her too). They painted a black cannon, a single star and the words 'Come and Take It' on a length of white cotton about six feet long. On 1 October a war council voted to fight.

4. Night of 1 October – morning of 2 October

   Fog at Williams' farm

   At sundown on 1 October Castañeda moved about seven miles upriver to Ezekiel Williams' land, looking for a better place to cross. About 7 PM the Texians crossed at Gonzales, some 50 of them mounted, and followed him up the west bank. A thick fog came in around midnight. About 3 AM a barking dog gave them away near the camp and the pickets fired; a Texian thrown by his startled horse got a bloody nose (one account adds a slight gunshot wound). At dawn, from Williams' corn and watermelon fields, they opened fire; Lieutenant Gregorio Pérez charged with about 40 horsemen but the timber stopped him, and Castañeda pulled his men back to a low rise behind the camp. When the fog lifted the two commanders met between the lines. Moore said they were fighting for their gun and the Constitution of 1824; Castañeda, by his own account a federalist himself, said he had his orders. The talks failed. Where the camp and rise lay is traditional, not surveyed.

5. Morning of 2 October 1835

   "Come and Take It"

   Back in their lines, the Texians fired the cannon at the dragoons, by tradition the first shot of the Texas Revolution, and advanced under the flag, firing their rifles. Castañeda reported about 200 attackers with two guns. Mexican documents mention a small iron esmeril as well as the bronze piece, and some historians now think two guns were fired. Castañeda was outnumbered and had orders to withdraw 'without compromising the honor of Mexican arms', so he took his dragoons back toward Béxar. Mexican losses were one or two killed; Castañeda's Handbook of Texas biography says two. No Texian was killed. Hardin calls it 'really only a brief skirmish.'

6. October 1835

   The march on Béxar

   The skirmish turned a quarrel over a cannon into a war. Volunteers kept arriving at Gonzales. On 11 October they elected Stephen F. Austin to command what they called the Army of the People, and within days it marched for San Antonio de Béxar, where it besieged General Martín Perfecto de Cos until his surrender in December. The fate of the Gonzales gun is disputed. The Handbook of Texas says the bronze piece went on to the Alamo and was buried there after the siege in 1836. A small iron gun, abandoned at Sandies Creek on the march and uncovered by a flood in 1936, is the one shown today in the Gonzales Memorial Museum; whether it was fired on 2 October is still argued.