Four days of bloody house-to-house fighting followed. The siege of San Antonio dragged on until December 5, when Ben Milam and Frank Johnson led two columns into town. One Texas veteran wrote, “We wondered to see that their balls often fell short of us.” Several Texans, he went on, were “struck by balls which were far too spent to break the skin, and only caused an unpleasant bruise.” In one of the opening skirmishes of the siege, at Mission Concepción, the Texans’ Pennsylvania rifles picked off the Mexican artillerymen, who were powerless to retaliate. Most of the Mexicans were armed with English-made Brown Bess muskets, smoothbore guns with a range of about seventy yards. In the hands of a skilled marksman, they were accurate at more than two hundred yards. Their stocks were walnut or maple and were often heavily ornamented in brass, with boxes set into them that contained the patches used for loading. Their octagonal barrels were 40 to 48 inches long, and they fired. The “rifels” the rebels used were Pennsylvania long rifles, described by colonist and frontier blacksmith Noah Smithwick as “long, single-barreled, muzzle-loading flintlock rifles, the same that our fathers won their independence with and that the famous Kentucky brigade used with such telling effect at the battle of New Orleans.” Pennsylvania gunsmiths, mostly Germans, made these rifles from about 1725 to the early 1800’s. Hunter’s “yauger” was a Jaeger (a German word for “hunter”) rifle, a gun with a 36-inch barrel manufactured at the United States Armory and Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. While the army was still assembling at Gonzales, Austin wrote, “Arms and ammunition are needed we have more men than guns.”
LONG RIFFLE SKIN
The lock was tide on with a buck skin string & the stock & barrel was tide to geather with buckskin strings.” Some men may have had rifles, but others had no firearms at all. Robert Hancock Hunter, who was living in what is now Fort Bend County when he joined the company, succinctly described the army’s weaponry in his memoirs, which he wrote in 1860 and in which he employed his own spelling style: “We had about 150 men, & our guns were no a count, little dobble barrels shot guns. When the call to arms came, the soldiers picked up whatever was handy and brought it with them. Austin, called itself the Army of the People, and the people supplied their own weapons and equipment. The ragtag group that marched from Gonzales to San Antonio de Béxar in October 1835 was a bring-your-own-gun army.
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