Continuing the Runaway Scrape
Houston drove his army 55 miles in only two and a half days through continual rain and mud to push ahead of the Dictator. During The Runaway Scrape, the Texas Army sometimes encountered Texas Tories. Encamped on one such farm, the owner demanded that the soldiers not touch his fire wood. Houston courteously agreed, and then ordered his men to dismantle his fences and use them for fire wood.
At dawn on April 20, 1836 the Army crossed a bayou and discovered a flat boat loaded with wheat flour – a gift from the local Texas Tories to welcome the Mexican Army. For weeks the Texas Army had survived on the herbs of wild longhorns and boiled beef without bread or even salt. This morning the flour was patted into dough cakes for a hot breakfast. The meal was disturbed when Houston’s flankers reported they had skirmished with Mexican troops.
Houston quickly moved his men three quarters of a mile to Lynch’s Ferry before Santa Anna could take it.
Concealing his men in a thick grove of live oaks trees, Houston deliberately positioned his two cannons on the open grass just in front of the cover where the Mexicans couldn’t miss them.
The Mexican advance saw his cannons named The Twin Sisters at the edge of the growth and raised a bugle alarm. At Santa Anna’s order, his twelve pound field gun opened fire on them, wounding the artillery commander and killing Houston’s horse beneath him. The Twin Sisters answered back wounding several Mexican artillerists and killing some stock.
Confident that he had Houston trapped against the river, Santa Anna made camp about a mile to the south east across the San Jacinto plains. With the San Jacinto River on their right, and an impenetrable marsh called Peggy Lake at their rear, other Mexican officers warned the Dictator that it was a poor choice for the camp, but he dismissed them.
During the day some of the Texas volunteers led by Kentucky hot spur Colonel Sidney Sherman demanded a fight. To deny them now might cause a mutiny, so Houston agreed to let them wreak an order in force, but gave strict orders not to provoke a general engagement.
Being Texas volunteers however, Sherman and his sixty cavalry raced straight for the Mexican camp to try to capture it and were quickly surrounded. Sherman’s force managed to extricate themselves after losing one dead, two wounded, and several horses.
Houston be-rated Sherman so savagely that he created an enemy for life, whoever afterward never minding his own stupidity accused Houston of cowardice. Houston broke Sherman in rank, took his command away from him, and gave it to a Georgia newspaper editor named Mirabeau Bonaparte Lamar.