The Battle of the Medina

San Antonio, TX

Enrique Esparza was an eleven-year-old boy when he sheltered inside the Alamo during the 1836 siege, where his father Gregorio, an Alamo defender, was killed. Hidden in a pile of hay, he witnessed his father fall, saw the death of James Bowie on his sickbed, and watched the bodies of the fallen Texans burned afterward. As one of the few survivors, Enrique lived until 1917, and the eyewitness account he gave in later years became an invaluable record of the battle.

San Antonio, TX

This San Antonio cemetery traces its origin to the Battle of Medina of August 18, 1813, when a Republican Army of the North — Mexicans, Anglo-Americans, and Indians seeking to free Mexico from Spanish rule — was crushed by the Royalist army, and hundreds of the dead were interred here. A chapel built over the soldiers' burial crypt grew into the church of Nuestra Señora del Carmen, and the site became a community cemetery for the surrounding land-grant families. Among those later buried here are Alamo survivor Enrique Esparza and French immigrant naturalist Gustave Toudouze.

Von Ormy, TX

Begun in the 1840s and still used by its founding families, the Ruiz-Herrera Cemetery holds Tejano patriots of the Texas Revolution. Among them is Francisco Antonio Ruiz, San Antonio's acting mayor in 1836 and son of a family of independence signers, and Blas Herrera, remembered for riding to warn the Alamo's defenders of Santa Anna's approach. The burial ground ties several generations of a Spanish-speaking Texas community to the founding struggle.

San Antonio, TX

On March 28, 1813, the Battle of Rosillo erupted near San Antonio as the "Republican Army of the North"—a mix of Anglo-Americans, Mexicans, and Native fighters—crushed Spanish Royalist troops under Governor Manuel de Salcedo. The victory came amid the Gutiérrez-Magee push during the Mexican struggle for independence, and it was darkened when captured Royalists were murdered on Colonel Bernardo Gutiérrez's order. The bloodshed helped doom the short-lived rebel republic.