How Fannin's slow retreat led to the surrender at Coleto Creek — the prelude to the massacre.
As we come up on the fort, it helps to understand how the tragedy here was set in motion — because it turned on a few fatal days of hesitation. When the Mexican army came north in eighteen thirty-six, Colonel Fannin, holding this presidio he'd renamed Fort Defiance, was ordered to fall back and join the main Texas forces. But Fannin wavered. He delayed — waiting for scattered men, worrying over his cannon and supplies — and by the time he finally marched his troops out onto the open prairie, it was too late.
About nine miles east of here, in open ground at Coleto Creek, the Mexican cavalry caught his column in the open, with no water and no cover. His men fought well for a day, formed in a square, but they were surrounded and hopeless, and Fannin surrendered — believing, and telling his men, that they would be treated honorably as prisoners of war. They were marched back to this fort. What happened next, Boone will tell you. But it began with a good man's fatal indecision on that prairie to the east.
Photo: Ernest Mettendorf · Public domain
