Girl, 11, met Runaway Scrape, flooding with bravery, resilience
Before 2017, our year of the flood, passes into history, I wanted to re-introduce an early-day Houstonian who endured her own flood-ravaged year. Dilue Rose Harris, an 11-year-old who experienced the Runaway Scrape in 1836, not only endured but prevailed. I see the feisty youngster as an inspiration to all of us as we look forward to a new — and drier — year. (The column originally appeared on March 20, 2015.)
COLUMBUS — It’s raining as I write, just as it probably was across much of eastern Texas on this day in 1836. In raw, little villages and isolated farms, a cold, wet winter and spring only added to the misery settlers were enduring as they faced nothing less than their own annihilation. In Columbus, in Gonzales, in La Grange, word had just been received that the Alamo had fallen, all its defenders slain. Soon settlers would learn, to their horror, that more than 300 of Col. James Walker Fannin’s men in Goliad had been marched out and shot on Palm Sunday.
The Mexican army under Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna was on the move, sweeping eastward across Texas, intending either to kill or drive out every American colonist in the newly declared independent republic.
Texians were terrified, their panic heightened by the fact that women and children had been left alone and defenseless, their men either slaughtered at the Alamo or at Goliad or off somewhere with Gen. Sam Houston’s ragtag army, an army — if you could call it that — on the run. Racing ahead of the Mexican force even more swiftly than Houston’s troops were horrifying rumors of Santa Anna’s ruthlessness — ruthlessness on a par, perhaps, with the so-called Islamic State today, or so the settlers feared.
Those in the general’s path, Anglo, Tejano or AfricanAmerican, did what you and I would have done, what any sensible person would have done. They packed up whatever pitiful belongings they could and fled.
Their mass exodus is called the Runaway Scrape. It doesn’t get as much attention as the iconic bookend battles of the
Alamo and San Jacinto, in part because it undercuts the myth of the ever-stalwart Texan, but the Runaway Scrape is a remarkable event. It’s reality.
The Runaway Scrape — “scrape” as in scrap or fight — actually began in January 1836, when settlers in South Texas heard that Santa Anna was approaching the Rio Grande. Many fled immediately, giving up their land grants and abandoning all they had built as colonists.
Santa Anna crossed the river in mid-February with his best generals and 4,000 men.
When the makeshift garrison at the Alamo was annihilated a few weeks later, full-fledged panic set in among the Texians. Thousands headed toward Louisiana and the protective arms of Uncle Sam, otherwise known as Andrew Jackson.
Fleeing after Alamo fell
Dilue Rose Harris, 11 at the time, lived with her parents, Dr. Pleasant W. Rose and his wife Margaret, at Stafford’s Point (now Stafford, the Houston suburb). The youngster made bullets for the Alamo defenders and fled with the family across the rain-swollen Trinity shortly after receiving word of the mission’s fall.
“We left home at sunset, hauld beding Clothing and provision on the sleigh with one yoak of oxin,” she recalled in a remarkable reminiscence first published in 1898. (Her spelling and syntax are eccentric, but her memory’s crystal clear.) “Mother and I walking she with an infant in her arms. brother drove the oxen. two little sisters rode in the sleigh. we were going two miles where we could get in acart. Father was helping with the cattle. he joined us after dark.”
The rain had set in weeks earlier, turning the roads into bogs of red or black mud. Rivers spilled out of their banks — the Trinity was more than a mile wide — and the lowlands became impassable swamps. Livestock drowned. Cold, sick and exhausted, women and children walked barefoot. Measles, whooping cough and fevers of various sorts set in. Babies, including the Roses’ newborn daughter, died in their mothers’ arms.
“They were tough people; they had to be. I just wonder how they made it at all,” said Laura Ann Rau earlier this week, as we sat in the parlor of the house in downtown Columbus where Dilue Rose Harris, her husband and their nine children lived for 40 years. Rau, her mother and grandmother restored the house back in the 1970s.
Kate Scurry Terrell wrote decades after the event of a group of exhausted refugees camping at a plantation on Buffalo Bayou on the evening of April 21 after a long march in a cold rain. “Towards sunset,” she recalled, “a woman on the outskirts of the camp began to clap her hands and shout ‘Hallelujah! Hallelujah!’ Those about her thought her mad, but, following her wild gestures, they saw one of the Hardins, of Liberty, riding for life towards the camp, his horse covered with foam, and he was waving his hat and shouting, ‘San Jacinto! San Jacinto! The Mexicans are whipped and Santa Anna a prisoner!’ “
‘Peace to tired hearts’
wind carried peace to tired hearts and grateful slumber.”
Until the end of April, the Rose family camped outside Liberty, where they buried their newborn daughter. Dilue Rose Harris described how, on their way home, a man named King got his family across a rain-swollen bayou and swam back to fetch his horses. He had gotten nearly across with them, when a large alligator surfaced. The man’s wife first saw it and screamed. The alligator struck her husband, and he went under. Several men fired their guns at the animal, but it did no good. Mr. King was gone.
Back home at Stafford’s Point, the Rose family discovered that their house had been broken into. They considered themselves lucky, since many other settlers lost everything, either to looters or the Mexican Army. Dr. Rose’s bookcase had been ripped apart and hogs lay sleeping on his books and medicines. Meanwhile, the corn field needed plowing, so he hitched up his oxen and went to work — on the Sabbath, no less — before cleaning out his office.
“Mother was very despondent, but Father is hopeful,” Harris wrote. “Says Texas wold gane her Independ-ence and become agreat nation.”
Afraid of spinsterhood
She also recalled considerable talk about a new town being started on Buffalo Bayou about 10 miles above Harrisburg, a town named in honor of the hero of San Jacinto.
Two years later, young Miss Rose concocted a plan of her own that was almost as audacious as the Allen Brothers’. Not quite 13 and fearful she would be an old maid, she resolved to dance with President Houston at the second annual San Jacinto Ball in downtown Houston. She was nearly within reach of the great man that evening when, alas, a “pretty young widow” politely bumped her aside. She settled for a Texas Ranger and future Colorado County sheriff. She was 14 when they married.