RETREAT FROM GONZALES
Four days after the Declaration of Independence, news came to the convention on the Brazos of the desperate plight of Colonel William Barret Travis, under siege at the Alamo in San Antonio. Sam Houston, commander-in-chief of the Texas Army, left Washington post-haste for Gonzales, to take command of the troops there and go to the aid of Travis. He arrived there on the 11th, and at about dark learned from two Mexicans who had just arrived from San Antonio that the Alamo had fallen and its 183 brave defenders massacred. This was confirmed two days later by Mrs. Almeron Dickinson who had been released by the Mexicans after seeing her lieutenant husband killed in the old mission. She was trudging toward Gonzales with her babe in her arms when the Texas army scouts found her.
The reports of the Alamo slaughter terrified the people of Gonzales. They were panic-stricken by the general belief that Santa Anna next would sweep eastward with his well-trained army, in a drive to wipe the rebellious Texans from the face of the earth.
Then began the exodus of frantic colonists known to Texas history as the “Runaway Scrape.” Men, women and children packed what belongings they could take in wagons and carts, on horseback, or on their own backs, and fled their homes in terror across the rain soaked country ... all moving eastward toward the Louisiana border to escape the wrath of the bloodthirsty Santa Anna.
General Houston, realizing that his few hundred green troops were no match for the well-drilled hordes from Mexico, evacuated Gonzales and had the rear guard put the town to the torch. The Texans crossed the Colorado River on the 17th at Jesse Burnam’s, and camped there for two days. Then the army resumed its march down the east bank to Benjamin Beason’s crossing, some twenty miles below, near the present town of Columbus. Camp was pitched at Beason’s on the 20th.
Had the retreating column been fifty miles farther south, the troops might have heard the distant rumble and crackle of gunfire. On March 19, Colonel James Walker Fannin Jr., commanding about 450 volunteers withdrawing from Goliad toward Victoria, was defeated in battle on Coleto Creek by General Jose Urrea’s forces of 1200 infantry and 700 cavalry. Fannin surrendered. On Palm Sunday, March 27, he and 352 of his men were marched out on the roads near Goliad and brutally shot down, by order of Santa Anna.