The Time Travel Series attempts to recreate past events as realistically as possible - Daily Episode Guide.
April 21, 1836 — 4:00 AM
Texian encampment, live oak grove along Buffalo Bayou, San Jacinto, Republic of Texas
A single drum tap cuts the darkness. You open your eyes beneath a wool blanket spread on damp ground between the roots of a live oak. The air is thick, salt-tinged, heavy with Gulf humidity and the smell of cold ash, horse dung, and unwashed men. Your left ankle throbs — the old Horseshoe Bend wound never sleeps. Around you, nine hundred men stir in the blue-black predawn, coughing, spitting, rolling from under oilcloths and saddle blankets. No fires are permitted. You rise stiffly, buckle your sword belt, check the pair of pistols in their saddle holsters, and listen. A quarter-mile south across the dark prairie, the Mexican camp is silent. You can smell their cookfires from yesterday. Somewhere in the marsh, a heron calls.
April 21, 1836 — 6:30 AM
Edge of the live oak tree line, overlooking the coastal prairie, San Jacinto
You stand at the timber’s edge with Secretary of War Thomas Rusk, passing a brass spyglass between you. The sun is low and orange over the marshes to the east, casting long shadows across the flat prairie. The Mexican camp is visible three-quarters of a mile south — a low barricade of trunks, baggage, and packsaddles, maybe five feet high, with the dark shapes of tents and stacked arms behind it. Peggy’s Lake glimmers beyond, ringed by cattails and salt marsh. You count the column of smoke from their cookfires. The men behind you are eating cold beef and hardtack. You can hear them sharpening knives on whetstones. The Twin Sisters — the two six-pound iron cannons from Cincinnati, shipped as “hollow ware” to dodge American neutrality laws — sit on their carriages at the edge of the grove, their brass fittings catching the early light. You lower the glass. “They have not posted sentinels,” you say to Rusk. He nods.
April 21, 1836 — 9:00 AM
Texian forward observation point, edge of the prairie, San Jacinto
