After the battle of Coleto on March 19-20, 1836, a Texas Army under Col. James Walker Fannin was defeated by Mexicans in superior numbers, and the Texas soldiers were held in Presidio La Bahia as supposed war prisoners. By order of Mexican Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, approximately 400 of Fannin's men were marched out and massacred on Palm Sunday, March 27, 1836, while the wounded were shot one by one in the fort compound and Fannin was the last to die. Because of their profession, Drs. J. H. Barnard, J. E. Field and Jack Shackelford were spared; about 25 men were saved by a Mexican woman known as the Angel of Goliad, and approximately 30 escaped by feigning death or by swimming the San Antonio River. The Texans' corpses were stripped and partly burned but left unburied. This atrocity, three weeks after the fall of the Alamo, gave Texans part of the battle cry "Remember the Alamo! Remember La Bahia!" under which decisive victory was won at San Jacinto on April 21, 1836. Afterwards, Gen. Thomas J. Rusk and the Texan Army marched here, gathered the bones of Fannin's men from the terrain, carried the remains in procession from Presidio La Bahia to the grave, and gave them a military funeral and burial on June 3, 1836.