i told them they got stuck between the bernardos and there should be stuff there and he said, well, that's a lot of territory. that's what he told me. he said talk to the locals and i talked to the locals and we did find a local who had a cannonball. she directed me to some other people who had found a cannonball. sure enough, we found artifacts, and this picture on the right, the upper one is three young boys, the older of the ones is the one had found a cannonball, and this is the cannonball we found the first day we went out there and looked for more cannonballs. so how in the world did the sea of mud happen and what was the story about the sea of mud? this green one works a little bit. this general was italian by birth and second in command of the mexican army. he took over after the battle of san jacinto. the general and the mexican army had no idea what in the world happened to santa ana or the troops at san jacinto other than

it was a terrible disaster. they didn't know in santa ana was alive or dead. there were about probably 1500 troops, mexican troops, here at old fort and another 1,000 down here at columbia. he got reya to join him and they ended up at madam powell's near kendleton on highway 59. we have excavated and found a lot of artifact there is. they met there and stayed there for about a day and a half. now, they still had no clue what happened to santa ana. they had no orders from santa ana, but they had a meeting of the generals on april 25th, 1836, at madam powell's, and what they decided to do was they decided to retreat. they were going to go down to this crossing, which is the one that was used on the way north, and they were going to come down to victoria and they were going

to wait for orders from the mexican government. they didn't know what they wanted to do. they were going to get resupplied, they were going to connect with the thousand troops that were still in san antonio. so we got about 4,000 mexican troops still in texas, 2,500 of them are here trying to get to here, and they still have about 1,000 in san antonio, and then, of course, they've got other units spread out at victoria, at goliad. they're all up and down here. they're going to reunite. that's the plan, and they leave the morning of april 26th, okay? i forgot to say besides 2,500 soldiers, we had probably 1,200 to 1,500 camp followers, 1,200 to 1,500 mules, 800 wagons and 8 pieces of small artillery. they pull out on april 26th and they get here to the river right there and it starts raining. and as they get across the river, it really starts raining, and fortunately for them, they made it across before it really

hit, the flood. well, the next morning they wake up and they spend a whole night in the mud and in the rain squatting in the rain. they get over here to the west bernard river. now it's april 27th, and they get to the west bernard and they can't get across. about that time a mexican rider comes in with orders from santa ana. smith had captured in mexican rider and told him to bring the orders in the mexican camp. he brings the orders in from santa ana saying not to retreat out of texas. if you read the orders, that's not what they say. he told half of the -- he told the general's troop to go to victoria. the other troops to go to san antonio and wait there. okay? so he didn't order them to leave texas, but he did tell them that he was treating with the texans and he wanted to have a

cease-fire. well, this played right into their hands. this is exactly what they want because they want to wait until they get the orders from the mexican government. okay? so they don't have any problem with this at all. this is here on the west bernard river, april 27th. what they decided to do now because they can't get across the west bernard, they backtrack and they're going to go up the middle bernard river and go to the crossing which is where they had crossed when they were going east. so they know this crossing. well, this was a big mistake. they shouldn't have done this, but they didn't know at the time that they shouldn't have done this. they got into what's called the lissy prayer, and this was just like the worst road ever. they called it the contrabando road which meant the smuggler's road which should have told them it wasn't going to be a very good road. because smugglers don't usually stay on the best roads. anyway, they got stuck in the

mud big time. it should have taken them a day and a half at most to make this trip from here to here. it ended up taking them two weeks. they got into the sea of mud on april 27th, 28th. they did not finish crossing the crossing until may 9th. there's wonderful stories about it. of course, the generals have stories, other great stories but we can't get into all of those. it was said it was so bad they had to take the gear off the mules and move the gear. then they had to take the mules and basically carry the mules out of the mud. so it wasn't good. this gives you a little bit of an idea what it might have

looked like. this is a drawing my manuel minojosa in my book. i kept trying to get manuel to make it look even worse, but he's very excited about doing nice mexican army uniforms. i'm sure they didn't look quite this good. the artifacts that we found, there's a couple of thousand artifacts we found from the sea of mud. the vast majority of them are at the cushing library at texas a&m. the reason i donated them is i felt like the people of texas should own the artifacts and i also wanted them to be available to travel, so they are available to travel to different museums. they spent quite a bit of time at san jacinto, at the museum there. some of the best ones are at the alamo. if you go to the alamo gift shop, there are some on exhibit there. some of them are across the street at the state museum. a lot of people ask me what's your favorite artifact? i have to say it's probably the howitzer shells. the very first howitzer shell we ever found, it's 26 pounds and it's hollow. it's bronze. it was full of gun powder and it had a fuse in it. down here on the bottom, this is

a wooden fuse, and this -- so these things were armed, and we called up the state archaeologists office and they told us you need to call ft. sam houston and call the bomb squad and check these things out to see if they're dangerous. my dad was career army. i'm an army brat and i knew exactly what the bomb squad was going to do with these things. so we actually only had one at the time. they told me don't move it, but it was in my garage so we moved it out to the country and the army came out and they pulled the fuse. they said we can't get that gun powder out of there and they packed it full of explosives and blew it up. the remnants which are pieced back together are in the collection at the cushing library and i'm not sure that isn't one of the better artifacts. i could argue that the united states army blowing up that mexican ordnance was the last

shot fired in the texas revolution. [ laughter ] talk about lost texas history. this howitzer is at west point, and i'm convinced, i'm 90% sure this is one of the four howitzers that the mexican army had in the revolution. the retreating mexican army took two howitzers exactly this size when they retreated. i think there's an excellent chance that one of the howitzers, and remember two of the four fired on the alamo. so there's a 50/50 chance this howitzer fired on the alamo. i like to leave this slide in just because it's such a great slide. it always impresses me if you wanted to join the artillery at that time and you wanted to shoot canons, you were taking your own life in your own hands as far as i'm concerned. but i just love the picture of what it may have been like.

this is some of the arms that we found. this is canister shot. they would take the lead or copper shot and shoot it out of the canons like shotgun shells. they had large canister and small canister. the small they could put 30 or 40 of them in there and shoot them out. it was amazing how deadly that stuff was. these are brass or copper musket balls. they're pretty rare. we've only found about six. i found one not too long ago. it's fascinating story to me that this copper shot at the time was everybody understood it to be highly poisonous. i have articles from u.s. newspapers at the time talking about the vial evil mexicans because they used copper shot and everybody knew that copper was poisonous. the americans and the texans were civilized. they used lead and you can't get lead poisoning so that would be fine. little nose cap from a pistol, some iron shrapnel. this is an interesting artifact we found. we found it not in the sea of mud but at a site that i believe is the advance site. as the general was advancing

most people don't realize he got into this same area, the retreating mexican army was trying to take the same path back that he took forward, but we found this knife and it's basically a bowie knife and it's a coffin handled knife and it's just like this example of a james black knife. supposedly some of this experts say that james black made james buoy's knife. this knife could easily have been captured at the alamo or at the phantom battle site there. there were two units in the retreating mexican army but they were with reyes as he advanced as well that fought at the alamo and at the phantom battle. i'm not saying that's james bowie's knife. then again, i'm not saying it isn't.

one of my favorite artifacts also is a really piece of trigger guard which otherwise would have been insignificant but soldado, geronimo espina wrote his name on it. the mexican army was fascinating, they had some real characters just like the texans did. this is a belt plate. they had their bayonet strap that they held their bayonet scabbard and their cartridge box strap. where they met they put a brass plate. we found two of these. they're the only ones known to exist. they have a fancy "m" and that's for muralos battalion. we found this which is cool. i date it as pre-1821. after 1821 all the mexican eagles faced the other direction. you can tell this was older style with no snake or anything, but what's really neat about this is that it could easily come from an officer who fought in the army of three guarantees

when mexico won their independence in 1821. so the sea of mud was quite a story for me and i ended up having so much research and so much information i felt like i had to write a book. otherwise, i was afraid at best my papers would end up in a library where a researcher may see them on a very rare occasion. one of the sources that i used for my book was the analysis of the military diary of general jose oraya. it had never been translated. well, as soon as i finished my book a doctor in dallas who had an original copy contacted dr. jim crisp at north carolina state who sent him to see me who said i would be the guy to help him get this translated.

the doctor was willing to pay for it. it's amazing, if you have the money to get things done, you can get things done. we got ahold of john wheat who translated it. it's a fascinating account. he's much wordier than i am and my wife said i'm way too wordy when i write. it's a little interesting to get through but it has fascinating details. it says in the book but i really would urge you be very careful when you read this. it's very biased against the general. if you read the general's military diary all it is is an attack on filasola. luckily for texas historians, those two became bitter enemies and they kept writing books about each other. there's a lot of detail in there you will not want to miss. now, what did this open up for me doing the sea of mud? well, it opened up all kinds of avenues. i had a lady at a conference very similar to this one came up and talked to me and she was

from san jacinto and she was interested if i wanted to come out there and be involved, and i said sure. and a long story, very long story, we ended up getting to do archaeology under the supervision of professional archaeologists. none of this was done by amateurs. dr. roger moore has done most of the work and we volunteered to help him. he found out right away that archaeologists tend to be terrible metal detectorists. they don't know how to use the machine very well. they don't have the best machines. we were finding stuff right away that they had gone right over when they tried to do the metal detecting. but it was really fascinating getting to do archaeology at san jacinto. talk about saving texas history. i don't know if you're aware, no archaeology had ever been done prior to our work to try to find out where the battleground was. the generally accepted theory was everything had been picked up by souvenir hunters. and metal detectorists in the early days.

and that wasn't true. i kept telling them maybe the big stuff is gone, the little stuff is still there. i was totally wrong. even the big stuff was still there. this is another breast plate we found. this is right out of the ground -- it says b, g, and there's a little o. that's battalion guerrero. it's interesting because the guerrero battalion was actually split into two different units at san jacinto. they're preferential troops. they're good companies -- there were two good companies in each company. they were with santa ana and just the regular infantrymen, the fuseleros were with coss that morning. they were there that morning. there's lots of documentation on the mexican side that the guerrero battalion troops were the first ones that ran and ran right through the mexican camp. we think we found a guerrero battalion plate, that's really going to help us locate where the battle took place. well, yeah --

it does and it doesn't because they were split into two units. we don't know whether this is from the santa ana guerrero guys or the coss guchlterrero guys. there's still a lot of work to be done. i'd say 1% of the archaeology that needs to be done has been done at san jacinto. this is a french horn. this was one of the preferential units where the casadores, the casadores were light infantry. were and this was their emblem. very napoleonic. here is the coin that jim already showed you. i can't tell you what an excitement it was pulling that thing out of the ground. as i understand that $12,000 that jim talked about, by the time it was counted by the texans several times it was $8,000 when they finally turned it in and divvied it up. well, this is one -- maybe this is one of the $4,000 that never made it back. once again, it says zacatecas -- at the very bottom -- and that's where santa ana had been looting. this is a really fascinating

artifact. it may be one of the greatest artifacts we've found, and it's one of the ugliest. this is the end of the canister shot. you can see the dimples in it. right. here's the dimple. right there is the dimple. this was shot out of a canon, and the balls that were inside, they would have been iron because it was probably the texans that fired this shot. dimpled that steel plate that was at the end that holds it together. so this is a piece of the canister shot from one of the twin sisters. we're 95% sure it was one of the twin sisters. we don't think the mexicans had any canister of this style, but once again we don't know. there's a lot more answers than there are questions. this is a fascinating one. they recently had a story on the discovery channel that i got to be in about a musket ball with a piece of bone in it. at first they told us this was rock and i called the specialists back and said i have never seen any rocks at san jacinto.

i doubt that it's rock. look again. and sure enough, they said, maybe it is bone. and the discovery channel came down and we did electron microscopy on it and found out it certainly seemed to be bone. this is particularly fascinating and this is why the discovery channel was able -- was willing to come. because they were tubal weave the story. we know that this lead through isotopic studies, we know that lead is mexican armyey c tell b whether the lead is from missouri, which is interesting, moses austin was in the lead mining business in missouri, so that's where most of the texans' lead seems to come from, missouri. this was mexican lead. this bullet was probably, not absolutely, fired by a mexican soldier. well if you look at the battle report, there were 22 text nans wounans -- texans wounded and eight killed. there were 30 people shot. yes, it could have been a horse. there weren't many horses shot in the battle. but it is possible.

one in 30 cha piece of sam houston's bone. that's why they were able to put us on tv and make that story. they didn't act like it was true. they just said, a, there is a possibility. this was another site that we stumbled across, there was a guy named gary wiggins, whispered in our ear he knew where some artifacts had been found and the friends of the san jacinto battleground, we are starting to call ourselves, what its it, david? i forgot nethe new name, that's right we're going to be conservators. it is a wonderful organization. and this organization has done so much, but january duvalt, i don't know how she did, got a $50,000 grant from battlefield protection. we never dreamt we would get it. we ended up in the terrible woods on a hint that there might be artifacts. and we started finding artifacts like crazy, a mile and a half

south of the battleground. talk about lost texas history. talk about saving texas history. the reason i can, i know the date, this picture was picture is taken december 4th, 18 -- 19 -- 1997, because that's the day my granddaughter was born and i missed the c-section and i'm still in trouble for that. but i did find this bayonet, it's hard to see, and i gave that to my son and daughter-in-law to put that in their baby book for the baby. i thought it was a lot cooler that her grandpa, which by the way my nickname is digger. digger was out there finding a mexican army bayonet on the day of her birth rather than just have me there at the bedside. just an aside, as a grandpa, i love to tell this story. yesterday afternoon we got a tweet that that -- my granddaughter audrey, who will be 4 this december, was thanking god last night, every night they

try to decide what to thank god for, last night she thanked god for fingernail polish and big butts. this is some more artifacts that we found in that line. we ended up realizing finally what we had found. but we found lots of bayonets. we found cavalry, infantry, it was a whole mixture of stuff. this is a dragoon button which was cavalry at that time, the 8th dragoons. this is a drawing of what might have happened. and it's hard to see it but there's bayonets here, there's chacos, there's different artifacts. a mile and a half south of the battlegrounds so these guys have run for a mile and a half. they've dropped their muskets, there's dropped their sabers. it's well-documented that juan

almonte, this is him right there, got them to form up, put them in a line, which we found all the artifacts in a very distinct line, then he told them, disarm, and he marched them out to surrender. and so what we found is exactly where they disarmed. nobody had gone back there. we found hundreds of musket balls in packs like they'd been dropped as a pack of musket balls instead of dropped like they'd been shot or anything. each one of these by the way is an individual talk. i'm just trying to give you an idea about how much texas history there is yet to be saved. several years ago, a couple years ago, another board member of the friends of the san jacinto battleground, he was online googling san jacinto and he found that there was a collection of skulls at the university of pennsylvania. and this collection of skulls had been donated by a dr. morton. come to find out james audubon

visited the battle ground in 1837. in his diary he said, i wonder if my friend dr. morton would like any of these skulls. we didn't know if he sent any. then we found the record online that those skulls had been donated and it turned out there were six san jacinto skulls of mexican soldiers that were donated. four of them were by james audub audubon. we got a hold of dr. ausley at the smithsonian and they did a forensic study and they presented that two years ago at the san jacinto symposium, these skulls still exist and it was amazing to see the wear and tear on these guys. not only fresh wounds that they died of but also old wounds. we even got a forensic reconstructionist, amanda danning from columbus, she worked closely with dr. ausling,

she's been in the news doing reconstruction of these skulls. just to give you an idea of what they showed, it's amazing. this is an entry wound right here. you can see how nice and clean it is. this is the exit wound which is much bigger. try to imagine what the position this soldier was in that he got shot here. more than likely he was either already wounded and on the ground or possibly down on his knees begging for his life. but they weren't sparing many people that day. so that's a whole other episode. we're trying to raise money to do dna analysis. there's still a little bit of soft tissue and hair left on some of these skulls. another really wild episode that i've had the pleasure of being involved in, a friend of mine, rick range, is a big alamo expert, and he's chasing down alamo cannon, and he found a cannon in a barn in north texas, okay? and this cannon was supposedly

an alla mow cannon, and of course my response after i'd been shown all kinds of artifacts is, yeah, right. we started doing research and that's a whole other power point and a whole other lecture. i believe now that this probably is an alla mow cannon. dr. winders was kind enough to believe that it likely could be. we've got a really good history, we don't have an absolute 100% guarantee, but we've got some documents and pictures and everything that really give a fascinating story about how this easily could be one of the alamo cannons. and it came all the way through pennsylvania and back to texas. but anyway, now the alamo's been kind enough to put it on display. if you go into the chapel it's the first door on the left. you can see this alamo cannon with the friends group had it donated to it. we got it conserved and it's there now. that's another thing for you

all. on our website, the friends of the san jacinto battleground, you can win up to $500 if you can prove this is an alla mow cannon. there's hints on there for where you might want to start looking. another place you can find texas history is in the archives. now they have the mexican military archives online and i stumbled across this document by empudilla, and he was in the sea of mud so i knew the name right away, i also realized he was at the alamo. this is a document he wrote to santa ana the day after the alamo fell and it's all about how the mexican artillery got involved. one of the things he says in there, and we didn't know that he and several artillery officers went into the alamo during the assault, got one of the texans' cannons, rolled it down a ramp, and fired probably at the long barracks and silenced what he said was a deadly fire that was coming against their infantry.

well, one of the lighter cannons at the alamo was this one. if this is indeed an alla mow cannon. talk about tying things together. there's a decent chance if indeed this is an alamo cannon, this could be the one he rolled down that ramp and used against the long barracks. all kinds of fascinating information. in this letter he talks about how the texans used red hot canister shot they fired against the mexicans and he says that goes against all laws of warfare and humanity. so this document is a mexican officer talking about how immoral the texans were. i'm almost done here. one more thing i stumbled across recently, and doug cuba check's here today. he's an expert on the gonzales cannon. there's a small cannon that is labeled as the come and take it cannon. and i found several different documents that called the come and take it cannon an

eight-pound brass cannon. but i also found this document, and it's -- actually this date's wrong, ignore october 10th. but this is a little note that was scribbled by cass 10 nada, commander of the mexican troops at gonzales, that tried to take the cannon. he talks about they had a cannon, he also talked about a small piece of ordnance. it's on here somewhere, i don't need to try -- here you go. i think that's -- that's a small piece of ordnance. looking at the documents closely, doug doesn't totally agree with me but he realizes that he's got some explaining to do. the mexicans said the texans had a medium-sized cannon and a small piece of ordnance. i think the small one they

display was probably involved in the battle but was not the come and take it cannon. so basically what i'd like to point out to you is a couple of things very quickly. one is the mexican army was not obeying santa ana's orders and they were not retreating, they were withdrawing to wait for orders, then they got stuck in the mud. i like to say wharton county mud gets some of the credit for the mexican army -- it was a major blow. i'm not going to tell you it was the blow, it was the thing that defeated the mexican army, but it sure didn't hurt the texans' cause that they got stuck in that mud like they did. of course going along with the theme of the conference, there is so much more information out there. we never found the battle of medina. it's still there, just hasn't been found. we haven't found the crossing, i haven't found the mexican army camp from april 26th-27th from the westrn