On the heavily wooded grounds of a Texas power plant, archaeologists have found the spot where Mexican troops under the command of Col. Juan Almonte surrendered to Sam Houston's force of Texas irregulars along the San Jacinto River, ending Texas' war of secession.
The 1836 surrender "resulted in the loss of all Mexican territory west to California," said archaeologist Roger Moore of Moore Archaeological Consulting in Houston, who led the team that found the site.
"The whole continental expansion of the U.S. to the West Coast hinged on this battle," he said. The discovery was announced Thursday.
In the early 1800s, Texas was a Mexican territory, but many Americans had moved into it and they grew tired of the oppressive Mexican rule, eventually fomenting rebellion.
The Battle of San Jacinto occurred six weeks after the battle of the Alamo, in which Mexican forces led by Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna besieged the fortress and eventually killed all 350 secessionists inside, including Davy Crockett and James Bowie. Santa Anna then went after Houston's troops with an overwhelming force, but, confident in his chances, he made the fatal mistake of splitting his troops.
The force led by Almonte that encountered Houston was only 1,100 to 1,200 men strong, about the same size as Houston's group. But the Texans had been enraged by the slaughter at the Alamo. Houston, moreover, was able to take advantage of deep swales in the landscape to march his soldiers close to Almonte's force and, in effect, ambush them.
In a battle that lasted only 18 minutes, Houston's forces routed the Mexicans, who threw down their guns and ran. Almonte was able to slow them down in another gully and organize them into a cohesive mass that surrendered without further casualties. "It probably saved their lives," Moore said, because the enraged Texans would probably have slaughtered the Mexicans if they had been running away individually.
Santa Anna was later captured nearby and was persuaded to order all his troops out of Texas.
Most of the locations of the battle are well known, but not the site of the surrender, which had been mismarked by veterans of the battle in 1890.
Some historians suspected that the actual location was in the middle of a 50-acre triangular plot of land on the grounds of a natural gas plant owned by NRG Energy Inc.
