Lost Cannons from the Siege of Bexar

      Eyewitness accounts, a community legend, specific artillery inventories before and after the Siege of Bexar, and a detailed count of the cannons in San Antonio on December 10, 1835 at the end of the Siege, all indicate that as many as eight Mexican cannons were rolled into the San Antonio River before daylight on the day the fighting ceased.  They were discovered by city employees in 1911 but not recovered then.  This article provides the historical context for the possibility that these guns are still buried in the river near the Alamo, probably under several feet of silt.  

      Who will mount an expedition to locate them and excavate them for exhibit in the soon-to-be renovated Alamo compound?

Click here for the details.  

Lost Cannons from the Siege of Bexar

San Antonio Arms and Ammunition in the 1830s

     Several inventories of arms and ammunition in San Antonio at various times in 1835 and 1836 provide clues as to events that occurred with the the Mexican and Texan armies in the Siege of Bexar and the Battle of the Alamo.  Click the link below to read how these inventories can be coupled with other historical archives to tell us more about what went on during those eventful few months at the start of the Texas Revolution.

San Antonio Arms and Ammunition in the 1830s  

Taovaya: From Quivera to the Red River

     The Taovaya were a tribe of Native Americans that lived for over fifty years on the Red River between Texas and Oklahoma, and played an important role in early recorded history of the region.  Their tribal predecessors lived in central Kansas, and were the first American Plains Indians visited by Spanish explorer Francisco de Coronado in 1541.  He named their villages Quivera, having gone there in hopes of finding another province like Mexico and Peru, full of gold and silver.  Soon after moving to Texas in the 1750s, Taovaya joined Comanche allies to attack and destroy the San Saba mission in 1758, then soundly defeated a Spanish army sent to their villages the next year in an attempt at retaliation.  Decimated by European diseases against which they had no natural immunity, they merged into other Wichita tribes in 1811 and lost their distinctive tribal identity.  Today many of their descendants live on their reservation in Oklahoma.

     Click here to learn about these early Texas residents:

Taovaya: From Quivera to the Red River