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When news of the Alamo’s fall reached Gonzales, it triggered panic among the Anglo
population of Texas.
Sam Houston ordered the town torched in advance
of the Mexican Army and the residents fled to the east. Along the way, virtually
every other settler joined the flight as Texas began to unravel that late winter
of 1836.
Andrew Kent and his wife Elizabeth left the Gonzales area on
foot with their nine children. Suffering in a climate that ranged from unseasonably
cold to unseasonably wet, ten-year-old Elizabeth and her 16-month-old sister,
Phinette, died of exposure. Andrew Jackson Kent, not yet 4, became separated from
his family during a stream crossing and was never seen again.
While not
an exodus of Biblical proportions, what came to be called the Runaway
Scrape has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. Thousands of
people hastily left their homes and most of their belongings hoping to outrun
Gen. Santa Anna and his troops.
“A few days before we arrived in Gonzales,”
Mexican Army Lt. Jose de la Pena wrote in his diary, “Generals Ramirez y Sesman
and Tolsa had passed by, and the troops under their command had consumed and taken
with them everything they could.”
By March 17, Washington-on-the-Brazos
had been deserted. By April 1, all of Texas between the Colorado and Brazos rivers
lay virtually depopulated. Left behind were many fresh graves, including two for
the Kent children.
The mass withdrawal continued until word spread of
Houston’s April 21 defeat of Santa Anna at San Jacinto. Slowly, those who still
wanted to give life in Texas a chance turned to the west and went back to what
was left of their homes. And that’s when a nameless hero gave his all for Texas.
“Our folks with their neighbors returned to their log houses on the south
bank of the Colorado River,” Smithville pioneer Rosa Berry Cole recalled in “Memories
of By-Gone Days.” “Some found their houses burned, their crops gone and desolation
everywhere, but they were free.”
Fences down and most of the rails burned,
settlers had to start from scratch. The Kents discovered that the Mexicans had
burned their cabin and slaughtered all their cattle, hogs and chickens. The blood
and chop marks on Andrew’s carpentry table showed it had been as a butcher block.
Now, on top of everything else, the returning refugees faced a severe
shortage of food and the means to produce it. Men saddled up to look for strayed
milk cows while the womenfolk looked for loose chickens.
Mrs. Cole managed
to find three hens that had escaped the skillets of the Mexican Army and others
living on or near the Colorado in Bastrop County found a few more.
Problem
was no one could find a rooster. No rooster, no chicks. No chicks, pretty soon
no more setting hens or Sunday fired chicken dinners.
Finally, someone
heard that a rooster was for sale upriver in Bastrop. Neighbors passed a hat to
raise enough money to buy the needed male of the species and a volunteer rode
to make the purchase.
The community rooster may not have fully appreciated
his importance in rebuilding Texas, but he enthusiastically embraced the task
at hand – and every hen along the river.
As Cole recalled, the busy bird
“was taken from house to house, each keeping him a week till he made all the rounds
and then back home and start over the same round.”
Before long, thanks
to the seemingly undaunted patriotism of that rooster, Bastrop County residents
never wanted for eggs or fried chicken.
Whether the rooster died of
old age or exhaustion isn’t known, but his legacy kept clucking for a long time
along the Colorado.
© Mike Cox
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