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 Texas : Features : Columns : "Texas Tales"
"Texas Tales"

Rooster

by Mike Cox
Mike Cox
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
August 12 , 2004
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