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was just biding his time, looking for an opening to turn around and strike. The deeper Santa Anna marched into Texas, the more worn out his troops and equipment got. Camped near the meeting of the San Jacinto River and the Buffalo Bayou, Santa Anna decided it was time for a siesta on the afternoon of April 21, 1836. He forgot to post sentries. His men lay snoozing as a burly, mangy-looking Sam Houston and his more than eight hundred Texans and their allies snuck up through the cover of a forested hill, led by a contingent of uniformed Kentucky riflemen. “Now hold your fire, men,” Houston cautioned, “until you get the order!”
    It was time for payback, Texas-style.
    Screaming “Remember the Alamo!” and “Remember Goliad!” the Texans overwhelmed the Mexicans in a mere eighteen minutes, enough time for Sam Houston to lose two horses—both shot out from under him—and sustain a bad gunshot wound to the ankle.
    The Texans were in no mood for mercy and unleashed a full-scale slaughter. No one was spared, not even the wounded or soldiers trying to surrender. “Take prisoners like the Meskins do!” shouted one Texan, and scores of Mexicans were shot to pieces after surrendering, or hunted down in the river and clubbed to death while pleading “Me no Alamo!” or “Me no Goliad!” A horrified Sam Houston tried to stop the massacre, shouting “Parade! Parade!” in a vain attempt to call his men back to form a dress formation and leave off killing. By the time the butchery stopped, a total of 630 Mexicans died that day, versus nine Texans.
    The people of Texas were jubilant, grasping that independence was theirs. A messenger raced into one refugee camp on the Sabine River waving his hat and shouting, “San Jacinto! San Jacinto! The Mexicans are whipped and Santa Anna a prisoner!” A lady named Kate Scurry Terrell witnessed the reaction and wrote: “The scene that followed beggars description. People embraced, laughed and wept and prayed, all in one breath. As the moon rose over the vast flower-decked prairie, the soft southern wind carried peace to tired hearts and grateful slumber.”

Sam Houston—and his long rifle—accept Santa Anna’s surrender.
Library of Congress
    When Santa Anna was captured, he asked Sam Houston to “be generous to the vanquished.”
    Houston told the prisoner curtly, “You should have remembered that, sir, at the Alamo.” Santa Anna would eventually be shipped off to Washington; he later returned to Mexico and in fact would go to war twice more, against France and finally against the U.S.
    The epic revenge-victory at the Battle of San Jacinto marked the birth of a free American Texas, and it altered the fate of three republics: Mexico, Texas, and the United States, then a country barely fifty years old. Mexico was forced to sign a withdrawal and peace treaty three weeks later that conferred legitimacy on the new Republic of Texas. Mexico never ruled Texas again, despite periodic raids in the 1840s. The United States absorbed the Republic of Texas in 1845, plus more Mexican land after the Mexican War in 1848.
    If you drive about twenty-five miles southeast of downtown Houston today, you’ll come across the 570-foot-tall San Jacinto Monument, the world’s tallest memorial column. (Everything’s bigger in Texas, right?) The inscription reads, in part: “Measured by its results, San Jacinto was one of the decisive battles of the world. The freedom of Texas from Mexico won here led to annexation and to the Mexican-American War, resulting in the acquisition by the United States of the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Utah and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas and Oklahoma. Almost one-third of the present area of the American Nation, nearly a million square miles of territory, changed sovereignty.”
    Not a bad day’s work for Sam Houston and his riflemen.
    The battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto were crossroads battles, fought on the edges of several