MASSACRE - The Goliad Witnesses

Not strange because of what's in it, but strange because it didn't exist until the second decade of the twenty-first century.

As incredible as it may sound, MASSACRE - The Goliad Witnesses is the first book to contain all of the Goliad survivor accounts.

You would think such a book would have been compiled by the first generation of Texas historians. But it didn't happen.

Or that someone would have done it during the Centennial fever. But it didn't happen then either.

So we decided it was high time the job was done and we did it.

Every survivor and eye-witness account of the Goliad Massacre, for the first time in a single volume:
 

• Joseph Barnard - survivor
• Andrew Boyle - survivor
• Samuel Brown - survivor
• Dillard Cooper - survivor
• John C. Duval - survivor
• Joseph Fields - survivor
• Isaac D. Hamilton - survivor
• Benjamin Holland - survivor
• William L. Hunter - survivor
• Milton Irish - survivor
• "Kentuck" - survivor
• Abel Morgan - survivor
• Jack Shackelford - survivor
• Charles B. Shain - survivor
• Joseph Spohn - survivor
• Lewis Washington - survivor
• Capt. Miller's Secretary (SHB) - witness

About the Cover

Designing the jackets for our books is an unpredictable process. Sometimes we settle on an idea right away, other times we produce dozens of different mock-ups and then vigorously debate which is best.
 
For Massacre - The Goliad Witnesses we threw around a lot of ideas, but nothing really worked.Then we started thinking - there is still one surviving witness of the massacre: the Chapel of Our Lady of Loreto. What if her walls could talk?
 
Well, that settled that. The cover of a book containing every eye-witness account of what happened on Palm Sunday in 1836, must feature that last witness.
 
I have this little oil painting of the chapel. It's from around 1920. A picker brought it to me a dozen years ago. Said he pulled it out of the trash in front of an old house in the Houston Heights that was being
remodeled.

 
This little painting by an anonymous artist would be the basis for the cover design.
 
But there had to be some way for those mute walls to bear witness to the treachery and bloodshed
they had seen.
 
And I think we found that way. I hope you will agree.
 
We rendered the image as if it were painted in dried blood. The blood of martyrs. When I looked at the mock-up it was like being hit in the chest.
 
The last witness was no longer mute. 

Physical Details