13/03/2024
On the day Houston arrived in Gonzales (March 11) he found the people in a panic. Two vaqueros had come from Béxar with news of the battle and that all of the men in the Alamo were dead. Houston had them arrested as spies and sent Deaf Smith and Henry Barnes toward Béxar to verify the information.
On March 13 (or late at night on March 12) Smith returned with Susanna Dickinson, her infant daughter, and Travis' slave, Joe, with the news that the Alamo had indeed fallen and the Mexican Army was on its way.
This was devastating news, especially to the new widows of the Immortal 32, whose shrieks and cries pierced the town air that had otherwise been stunned into silence.
Houston ordered the city to be burned and everyone to head east, thus beginning the mass evacuation of Texas known as "The Runaway Scrape." Juan Seguin and some men were assigned to guard the Texas rear.
Many of the army's men were outraged at the order to fall back. Fifteen year old Creed Taylor, already a veteran of the "Come And Take It" episode, the Battle of Concepcion, and Ben Milam's march into San Antonio, later expressed his disgust. "Let other historians rail and prate as they may, but be it known to all future generations of Texans forth that if anyone else had been in command [we would] do as we had done before --whip ten-to-one of the carrion-eating convicts under Santa Anna." This was, of course, adolescent, half-cocked bravado. Santa Anna's forces would have vaporized Houston's men.
The Runaway Scrape was a terrible ordeal characterized by cholera, measles, dysentery, near freezing temperatures, oceans of rain, and lack of food.
When we interviewed U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison for the Sam Houston documentary she told us her ancestor, Charles S. Taylor, buried his first four children who died due to the rigors of the Runaway Scrape. (Imagine watching your children die.)
Houston's movements became a long cat-and-mouse game where he was surfing the circumstances and trying to keep some distance between everyone and Santa Anna's regiments.
This painting by Lee Jamison depicts the beginning of the event. You can see the smoke from the fires in Gonzales burning in the background.
