Democratic Texas Rep. Gene Wu is silhouetted by the setting sun as he boards a bus following a press conference with other Texas House Democrats and Democratic members of Congress at the Democratic Party in Warrenville, Ill., Monday, Aug. 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

Texas State Rep. Gene Wu, D-Houston, center, talks to Democrat politicians from Indiana, in Chicago, Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2025, before other Texas politicians arrive for a press conference as the Texas Democrats continue to try to prevent a redistricting effort by Republicans in their state. (Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune via AP)

GONZALES, 1836 – It was near midnight in this small town 75 miles east of San Antonio. A late-winter rain chilled and a cold wind whistled, the sound punctuated by women wailing, children crying. Residents had just received word that the Alamo had been annihilated. Among the martyred were 32 of their husbands, fathers, sons and brothers.

“I shall never forget the scene which followed the confirmation of the dreadful news,” colonist John Swisher later wrote in his memoir. “The mad agony of the widows and the shrieks of the childless and fatherless beggars all description.”

Volunteers from miles around made their way to the stricken town. Rumors were rampant that Santa Anna’s army would overrun Gonzales within hours. Settlers were panicked, enraged, desperate to wreak revenge.

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Gen. Sam Houston had an alternative plan. Instead of readying his men to fight — all 378 of them — he ordered townspeople to evacuate, leaving behind almost everything they owned, everything they’d built over the years. He has his men burn Gonzales to the ground. With monstrous red flames illuminating the night, he and his troops retreated. Along with thousands of panicked settlers, they slogged eastward across muddied fields and windswept prairie, through swamped meadow and trackless forest, in the ragtag mass migration that come to be called the Runaway Scrape.

We’ve long thought of Houston’s tactic not merely as a retreat but a strategic........

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