Texan Army Crossing of Buffalo Bayou (San Jacinto)
Harrisburg, Harris County, Texas
Marker Inscription
3000 ft. north at this site the Texas army under command of General Sam Houston crossed Buffalo Bayou on April 19, 1836 on a raft built from Isaac Batterson's house and began the march which terminated with the victory at San Jacinto April 21, 1836.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
On April 19, 1836, the Texas army under General Sam Houston crossed Buffalo Bayou near this spot on a raft built from the dismantled house of settler Isaac Batterson. From this crossing the troops began the final march that ended two days later in the decisive victory at San Jacinto, winning Texas independence.
Why it matters
This quiet bayou crossing was the last leg of the campaign that secured Texan independence at San Jacinto, one of the most consequential battles in the story of the American Southwest.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the spring of 1836, the Texas Revolution had reached its most desperate hour. Weeks earlier the Alamo had fallen at San Antonio de Béxar, and the defenders at Goliad had been captured and executed. General Antonio López de Santa Anna, president of Mexico, was driving his columns eastward across the young rebel territory, and the settlers of Anglo and Tejano Texas were fleeing before him in a panicked exodus that history remembers as the Runaway Scrape.
The land around Buffalo Bayou was then a raw frontier of timber, mud, and slow brown water — the very edge of settlement. Harrisburg, the little town near this crossing, had recently been put to the torch by the advancing Mexican army. The revolution seemed to be collapsing, and General Sam Houston's small, retreating army was the last thing standing between Santa Anna and the total defeat of the Texan cause.
Against that backdrop, a river crossing was not a minor logistical footnote. It was a decision about where and whether to fight. Every mile of bayou and every hour of daylight mattered, because Houston knew that the campaign — and perhaps the survival of the whole enterprise — would be decided within days.
People & events
The marker fixes a single, vivid moment: on April 19, 1836, Sam Houston's army reached this stretch of Buffalo Bayou and had to get across. There was no bridge and no time. So the soldiers built a raft — and they built it, remarkably, from the dismantled house of a settler named Isaac Batterson.
There is something deeply human in that detail. A family's home, its walls and timbers, was pulled apart and floated on the water to carry an army toward a battle. It is the kind of sacrifice, offered by an ordinary person whose name would otherwise have been lost, that quietly makes history possible. We know little more of Batterson than this, and that silence is itself a reminder of how many unsung people shaped the events we celebrate.
From this crossing the army marched on, and two days later, on April 21, they met Santa Anna's forces at San Jacinto. The battle was famously brief — a sudden, ferocious afternoon assault — and it ended in a decisive Texan victory and the capture of Santa Anna himself. The march that won Texas its independence began here, on a raft made of a man's house.
Its place in the American story
San Jacinto belongs to the larger drama of how the United States came to stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The independent Republic of Texas that this campaign created would, within a decade, be annexed by the United States — a step that helped ignite the war with Mexico and ultimately reshaped the map of the entire American Southwest.
What happened along Buffalo Bayou is a lesson in how enormous consequences can hinge on small, local acts. A crossing improvised in a hurry, on borrowed timber, set in motion the final movement of a campaign whose outcome still echoes in the borders, cultures, and identities of a huge swath of the modern United States.
It also captures a truth about frontier warfare: armies did not glide across the land on prepared roads. They forded, rafted, and slogged through wilderness, depending on the goods and goodwill of the scattered settlers they passed. This spot marks exactly that intersection of grand strategy and muddy, hands-on necessity.
If you visit
Stand near this marker and let the setting do its work. The battle you've read about happened elsewhere, two days later — what you are looking at is the quiet beginning, the crossing itself. The marker notes the actual spot lies about 3,000 feet to the north, so orient yourself and imagine the water there.
Picture the scene without the modern surroundings: a retreating army, exhausted and uncertain, prying apart a settler's house and lashing the boards into a raft. There is no monument-scale grandeur here, and that is precisely the point. This is the humble, working end of a story whose triumphant end is commemorated on a much larger scale nearby.
It makes a natural first stop on a San Jacinto–themed drive through the Houston area. Come here first, read the marker slowly, and then carry the image of that improvised crossing with you to the battlefield. Knowing where the march began makes the victory at its end feel earned rather than inevitable.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Sam Houston
- · Isaac Batterson
Related events
- · Battle of San Jacinto
- · Texas Revolution
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Near Site of Isaac Batterson Home
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On April 19, 1836, as Sam Houston's army raced toward destiny, soldiers tore up the flooring of Isaac Batterson's house to build rafts and ferry the troops across rain-swollen Buffalo Bayou. Some 248 men, many of them ill, were left behind at the Batterson place while the rest marched on to triumph at San Jacinto two days later. Batterson, a New York transplant, had bought the land in 1835 and named his settlement "Clinton" for his old home — the community that would one day become Galena Park.
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Founded in 1826 by John R. Harris on land he had settled three years earlier, Harrisburg became a busy port and site of Texas's first steam saw and grist mills. For three tense weeks in 1836 it served as capital of the fledgling Republic of Texas under President David G. Burnet—until Santa Anna's troops burned the town in pursuit of the fleeing government. Rebuilt after San Jacinto, it launched Texas's first railroad in 1852, grew into a Confederate rail center, and was absorbed by Houston in 1926.