Texas People, Texas Places: More Musings of the Rambling Boy

39. There Was Nothing for Us to Do But Run

✥ 39 ✥ There Was Nothing for Us to Do but Run Th e g r e e n , rolling, oakstudded country between the Colorado and Brazos Rivers below Austin and Waco is one of the most beautiful parts of Texas, but in the wet spring of 1836 it was the setting for some of the darkest days in Texas history. During the weeks between March 6 of that year, when the Alamo fell, and April 21, when Santa Anna was defeated at San Jacinto, the Mexican army moved eastward from San Antonio into the heart of Anglo-American Texas, destroying everything in its path, and Sam Houston’s army retreated before it. No one knew what the outcome would be. “There was nothing for us to do but run,” recalled Lucinda Gorham, recounting the events of forty years earlier. “We went to Cunninghams to join the Bastrop people, who were going by the Gotcher Trace. We camped in the field, and before daylight twenty -five Comanches stampeded and took our horses. We put it to a vote whether we should stop there and send to the army for relief, or get away from there as fast as we could. The women voted, too.” Lucinda Gorham was recalling the Runaway Scrape, the mass flight of Anglo-American settlers to the Sabine River, the boundary between Mexican Texas and American Louisiana, which took place during those weeks. She told her story to Julia Lee Sinks in 1876, when Sinks was interviewing old settlers for a history of Fayette County. Her brief narrative captures the fear, indecision, and misery that accompanied the panic that swept through the Anglo settlements of Texas that spring. Gorham went on to tell ✥ 153 Sinks that after the Comanches ran their horses off, her little group made a stand on the prairie, the men waving their rifles and the women waving sticks, hoping that the Comanches would mistake them for rifles. The Comanches emerged from the woods on horseback and circled the group several times but did not attack them, eventually riding off to loot a nearby cotton gin. Lucinda Gorham and her group got across the Colorado River in an abandoned boat and walked across Fayette and Washington counties to the Brazos in knee-deep mud. When they got to the crossing at Washington-on-the-Brazos, they found the west bank of the river jammed “with all manner of vehicles, good and worn-out carriages , ox and mule wagons, trucks, slides, anything that could carry women and children.” The panic started at Gonzales on March 11, the day the news of the fall of the Alamo reached Sam Houston and the Texas army that was camped there. The slaughter at the Alamo created twenty widows in that little town, many of them young women with small children. Houston ordered the army to withdraw eastward and the town to be burned, and the women and children followed the army. As Houston’s little army retreated toward the Colorado River, the panic spread across Texas as the word flew from settlement to settlement that Santa Anna’s army meant to purge the region of Anglo-Americans. In Nacogdoches, far from the Mexican threat, the rumor started that the Cherokees had allied themselves with the Mexicans and were planning to massacre the population. Most of the men were on their way to join the army, and colonist John A. Quitman reported that “the houses are all deserted and there are several thousands of women and children in the woods on both sides of the Sabine without supplies or money.” In fact the Runaway Scrape was almost entirely an exodus of women and children. As Houston’s army crossed first the Colorado and then the Brazos without making a stand, retreating further and 154 ✥ further eastward, more and more farms were abandoned and everincreasing numbers of women whose men were with the army took to the roads with their children. The rains that spring were the heaviest in many years. The roads turned into quagmires and the rivers and creeks swelled beyond their banks. Dilue Rose Harris, who was eleven years old when her family abandoned their home at Stafford’s Point, recalled that when they reached the San Jacinto River at Lynch’s Ferry there were five thousand people waiting to cross. They camped in the rain for three days before they could get to the other side...