The biggest, bloodiest battle ever fought on Texas soil took place in a sandy valley in Atascosa County near the Medina River in 1813, twenty-three years before the battles of the Alamo, Goliad, and San Jacinto. Estimates of up to 1,000 American and Mexican republicans were killed or executed in the last major encounter of Spanish forces in Texas. Spaniards called it the battle of "El Encinal de Medina." In American history it is known as the Gutiérrez-Magee Expedition or as the "First Texas Revolution." The gruesome battle halted and destroyed the American filibustering expedition that had crossed into Texas from Louisiana a year earlier. Texas independence would wait for another generation. This book was edited and annotated by noted author and historian Robert Thonhoff from a manuscript written by Ted Schwarz just before his death in 1977. A prize-winning author for this and other books, Thonhoff is a Fellow of the Texas State Historical Association, the oldest learned society in Texas