The Little Cannon That Started a Revolution

A Cannon Nobody Wanted to Give Back

In January 1831, the empresario Green DeWitt wrote to Ramón Músquiz, the political chief in Béxar, asking for a weapon to defend his struggling colony at Gonzales against Comanche, Karankawa, and Tonkawa raids^2,8. Mexican officials agreed, on one condition: the gun could be reclaimed whenever they wanted it back. On March 10, 1831, colonist James Tumlinson Jr. signed for a small Spanish-made bronze six-pounder in Béxar and hauled it home^1,2.

For four years the cannon did nothing more dramatic than sit, probably mounted in a blockhouse as a deterrent². Then Mexican politics turned. Santa Anna's government was centralizing power, alarming both federalist Mexicans and the mostly Anglo-American colonists who had settled Texas under earlier, looser immigration rules^6,2. By September 1835, Colonel Domingo de Ugartechea, the senior Mexican military commander in Texas, decided it was unwise to leave an armed, restless colony sitting on artillery. He sent a corporal and five soldiers to fetch it back.

Gonzales said no. The town's alcalde, Andrew Ponton, had the Mexican soldiers escorted out empty-handed and sent riders to neighboring settlements asking for help^1,3. Rather than wait to see what Ugartechea would do next, the colonists dug a hole in George W. Davis's peach orchard and buried the cannon^1,3.

Ugartechea's answer was Lieutenant Francisco de Castañeda, sent with a larger detachment, somewhere between 100 and 150 dragoons depending on the source, to finish the job properly^3,9. By the time Castañeda reached the Guadalupe River near Gonzales in late September, the town had scraped together a defense out of eighteen men, later nicknamed the "Old Eighteen," who stalled him with excuses while couriers rode out for reinforcements^6,1.

Reinforcements came. Volunteers under John Henry Moore and J. W. E. Wallace swelled the Texian ranks to somewhere between 140 and 160 men within a few days^6,3. On September 28 or 29 they dug the cannon back out of its shallow grave, dragged it to John Sowell's blacksmith shop, and bolted it onto the fore-wheels of a cotton wagon belonging to Albert Martin, since there was no proper carriage and no proper ammunition either. They loaded it with chains and scrap iron^1,3.

Before dawn on October 2, the Texians crossed the Guadalupe near present-day Cost, a few miles upriver from Gonzales, and found Castañeda's camp. Scouts traded shots and pulled back, drawing the Mexican cavalry into pursuit. Then the makeshift cannon fired, twice according to the Texas State Historical Association, and the Mexican force broke off and retreated toward Béxar^1,4,3. Nobody on either side died in any numbers worth recording. It was, as the Texas Historical Commission's own marker puts it, a short, almost anticlimactic skirmish that nonetheless became known as the Lexington of Texas^6,3.

A Flag Nobody Can Quite Agree On

The phrase and the image people now associate with that morning, a white flag bearing a black cannon, a lone star, and the words COME AND TAKE IT, almost certainly did not exist yet when the shooting happened. The Texas Historical Commission's affiliated handbook entry states that a committee of five officers designed and hastily prepared the flag in the days before the battle, with materials donated by the women of Gonzales². The Texas Historical Commission's own blog, by contrast, says the flag was painted by the women of Gonzales after the battle, to commemorate it, and that Austin's volunteer army carried it toward Béxar afterward¹⁰.

Local and popular traditions complicate things further. A Gonzales visitors' account credits Sarah DeWitt and her daughter Evaline with making it; other sources name Caroline Zumwalt and Eveline DeWitt, or Sarah and Naomi DeWitt^11,1,5. A persistent story holds that the white fabric came from a wedding dress, Naomi DeWitt's silk gown by one version, which is a charming detail that shows up again and again but has no firm contemporary documentation behind it^1,12,5.

Whatever its exact origin, the flag did not last. It was carried with the cannon as Stephen F. Austin's volunteer army marched on San Antonio, and then, according to at least one member of that campaign, both the flag and the gun were simply abandoned along the way^2,10. No verified original has surfaced since, though versions of the design have been sold and auctioned as purported fragments over the years¹³.

Which Cannon, Exactly?

The battle produced two cannons, not one, and that gets flattened in most retellings. Alongside the bronze six-pounder was a much smaller iron esmeril, a one-pound-or-less swivel gun of a type common in Spanish colonial Texas^6,1. Historian Thomas Ricks Lindley's research, cited in secondary accounts, holds that both pieces were present at Gonzales⁶.

After the battle, the six-pounder went with the Texian army to the Siege of Béxar and was reportedly left at the Alamo, where it became one of twenty-one Mexican-captured artillery pieces when Santa Anna's army retook the fort in March 1836². One account traces a six-pounder from that haul being dug up in 1852, shipped to New York in 1874, and melted down into a church bell that still hangs in San Antonio⁶. A separate tradition says a different cannon, recovered from the Guadalupe River decades later, was identified as the original Gonzales gun and now sits in the Gonzales Memorial Museum⁷, a claim the city itself makes without qualification^4,14.

The sources gathered here do not supply an unbroken chain of custody for either claim. The Texas Legislature has treated the matter as settled enough to matter politically: a 2015 resolution formally designated the Gonzales cannon as the official state gun of Texas^15,16. Settled by statute is not the same as settled by evidence, and a storyteller retelling this is on solid ground saying plainly that nobody can prove which cannon, if any, now on display is the one that fired on October 2, 1835.

The Count

• 1831: year Mexican authorities loaned Gonzales the bronze six-pound cannon^1,2
• 100 to 150: size of the Mexican dragoon force sent to retrieve it, depending on the source^3,9
• 18: the "Old Eighteen" who initially stalled Castañeda's troops⁶
• 140 to 160: Texian volunteers gathered by the morning of the battle^6,3
• October 2, 1835: date of the battle, the first land engagement of the Texas Revolution^6,2,3
• 21: large Mexican-captured artillery pieces at the Alamo in March 1836, among them possibly the original Gonzales gun^6,2

Why a Loaned Gun Became a Cause

The dispute landed at a combustible moment. Mexico's 1824 constitution had opened Texas to American settlers, and DeWitt's colony around Gonzales grew out of that opening, but by the early 1830s the government in Mexico City was tightening its grip: ending slavery with carve-outs for existing colonists, closing the border to new immigration, and swinging toward centralist rule under Santa Anna^6,2. Earlier friction, including a soldier's assault on a Gonzales resident in September 1835, had already soured relations between the garrison and the town⁶.

Against that backdrop, a cannon that had sat quietly for four years stopped being a defense tool and became, as historian Stephen Hardin is quoted describing it, a point of honor and an unlikely rallying symbol⁶. The settlers' refusal to hand it over was not really about the gun's firepower, which Timothy Todish once dismissed as barely good for starting horse races⁶. It was about whether Mexico City or the colonists themselves would decide what happened next in Texas, a question the rest of the revolution, through the Alamo in early 1836 and the decisive Texian win at San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, would go on answering⁶.

Timeline

1. 1831-01Green DeWitt requests a cannon from Mexican authorities for Gonzales's defense.
2. 1831-03-10James Tumlinson Jr. receives the bronze six-pound cannon on behalf of Gonzales.
3. 1835-09Colonel Domingo de Ugartechea demands the cannon's return; Gonzales refuses.
4. 1835-09-29The cannon is buried in George W. Davis's peach orchard as Lieutenant Francisco de Castañeda's larger force approaches.
5. 1835-10-02Texian volunteers under John Henry Moore fire the recovered cannon, and Castañeda's dragoons withdraw toward Béxar.
6. 1835-12The cannon reportedly reaches San Antonio with the Texian army after the capture of Béxar.
7. 1836-03-06Mexican forces retake the Alamo and seize its artillery, possibly including the Gonzales cannon.

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