Although their losses were slight, the Texans’ situation was desperate. William Fisher was in agony after losing a thumb to a musket ball, and the entire force, hundreds of miles from home, was cut off from escape, low on ammunition, and had no hope of reinforcement. Fisher’s subordinates, Ewen Cameron and Thomas Jefferson Green, tried to rally the besieged troops, but their voices could hardly be heard amidst the chaos.

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By mid-afternoon of December 26, Fisher recognized their situation as hopeless. Although a number of his men ached to continue the fight, he saw surrender as “the only means of saving the lives of even a portion of the command.” His poorly organized force had suffered only 33 casualties, while the blood of the Mexican soldiers, as General Ampudia later wrote, “flowed in the gutters of Mier.” With the expectation that they would be treated “with all the honor and consideration of prisoners-of-war,” Fisher and his ragged soldiers reluctantly surrendered and stacked their arms in the square.

General Ampudia had earned a reputation for dealing harshly with enemies, and had he known that the Texans were operating without the blessing of their government, it is likely that he would have been less than magnanimous in his treatment of them. But as it was, he viewed Fisher’s troops as citizens of a nation with which Mexico was at war, and so treated them equitably.

Five days after the battle, the well-guarded remnants of Fisher’s tired army bade farewell to their wounded and headed southeast toward their captors’ headquarters at Matamoros. While there, the prisoners were well fed and “treated with marked humanity by all the better classes of the population . . . .” They passed their time in good spirits, confident that they would soon be repatriated.

On January 13, 1843, however, General Ampudia received orders from Mexico City to march the Texas captives southward immediately. President Santa Anna recognized the Texans not as prisoners of war, but as robbers and bandits. Several of Fisher’s men–veterans of the disastrous 1841 Santa Fe raid–had been warned that waging war upon Mexico again would bring about their execution.

The Texans were indignant and felt that the terms of their surrender at Mier had been violated. Nevertheless, after separating Fisher, Green, and three other officers from their troops to discourage escape attempts, five hundred Mexican defensores under the command of Colonel Antonio Canales began herding the Texans toward Mexico City.

In the absence of the other officers, the Texans elected Ewen Cameron as their leader. Like Fisher, Cameron had fought on the side of Mexican rebels in 1839. He had sparred with Antonio Canales before, and the two hated each other. Canales likewise had no love for the Texans, and his militia used their musket butts and sword points freely to prod their captives forward. On February 10, the 209 Texans arrived at the Hacienda del Salado, where they were reunited with Fisher’s party, which had arrived the previous day. The Texans quickly decided to attempt an escape the next morning.

As they gathered around their breakfast of boiled rice in the early morning light of the 11th, however, Cameron and a few other Texans observed Fisher and his officers ride out of the ranch under heavy guard. Their plan having been detected, the Texan leaders were being sent on toward Mexico City. Deprived once more of their senior officers, Cameron nonetheless concluded that the remaining Texans were easily a match for the guard and declared that, “The break will be made this morning if I have to make it all alone and single-handed.”

Most of Cameron’s weary comrades eagerly supported his decision and slowly congregated in the center of the courtyard, which was surrounded by ten-foot-high walls. They were now guarded by a force of about two hundred Mexican soldiers who had replaced Canales’ men before the prisoners’ arrival at Salado. “An unbroken silence reigned over the band,” Texan Joseph McCutchan later recalled, with “every eye fixed on Cameron, head erect, eyes steady.”

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