Battle of Agua Dulce

Two plaques mark this fight, and neither says how it ended for Grant. His men were caught on open prairie by Urrea's cavalry and scattered. Grant, Plácido Benavides and Reuben Brown turned back, then ran for miles with soldiers behind them. Grant sent Benavides ahead to warn Fannin at Goliad. Soldiers then surrounded Grant and Brown, and Grant was pierced several times and died; Brown was captured. Urrea claimed forty-two Texans killed, while the old count is twelve, perhaps because it left out the Tejano volunteers who rode with Benavides. The six prisoners were spared against Santa Anna's orders.

What the plaque says

Battle of Agua Dulce During the Texas Revolution, Dr. James Grant (1793-1836), a Scottish-born physician, and Francis W. Johnson (1799-1884) recruited an army of volunteers to invade Mexico and capture the town of Matamoros. After Sam Houston expressed disapproval of the poorly-organized venture, many recruits left the expedition before it reached the settlement of San Patricio along the Nueces River in January 1836. Mexican general Santa Anna, who was organizing an army to attack Texan forces at the Alamo in San Antonio, discovered the Matamoros plan and dispatched General Jose Urrea to stop the advancing expedition. Urrea's cavalry, reinforced with 300 infantrymen, crossed the Rio Grande on February 16. Meanwhile, Grant and Johnson divided their troops to hunt for horses. Johnson's men were camped at San Patricio when Urrea attacked on the morning of February 27. Johnson and 4 others escaped, while 18 texans were killed and 32 captured. On March 2, Urrea's soldiers surprised Grant's company at Agua Dulce Creek (3.25 miles northwest). Grant was among the 12 Texans killed; 6 were taken prisoner, and 6 escaped. The brief skirmish occurred on the same day the Texas Declaration of Independence was signed at Washington on the Brazos. (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lipantitlán State Historic Site — 14 mi
  Five undeveloped acres on the Nueces named for the Lipan Apaches who camped here, where Mexico built an earth-and-rail fort that Texans took early in the Revolution.
• King Ranch Visitor Center — 18 mi
  The bus-tour gate to a working ranch of about 825,000 acres, founded on Santa Gertrudis Creek in 1853 and worked from the start by the Kineños, families from Cruillas in Tamaulipas.
• Lake Corpus Christi State Park — 19 mi
  A lake park in the South Texas brush country above Mathis, on a reservoir of the Nueces, with a Civilian Conservation Corps refectory and more than 200 bird species.
• Duval County Courthouse — 20 mi
  A red-brick Classical Revival courthouse of 1916 in San Diego, the seat of a county governed for decades by the Parr family machine.

More markers nearby

• Banquete, C.S.A. — 6.4 mi
• Banquete Cemetery — 7.2 mi
• Cattle Drives from South Texas — 7.3 mi
• Los Preseños — 8.2 mi