My Street's Special Day

I live on San Jacinto Street in Lockhart, Texas, a little place southeast of Austin. Today is San Jacinto Day, and not's about our street.  This is from the Texas Day By Day website:

"On this day in 1836, Texas forces won the battle of San Jacinto, the concluding military event of the Texas Revolution. Facing General Santa Anna's Mexican army of some 1,200 men encamped in what is now southeastern Harris County, General Sam Houston disposed his forces in battle order about 3:30 p.m., during siesta time. The Texans' movements were screened by trees and the rising ground, and evidently Santa Anna had no lookouts posted. The Texan line sprang forward on the run with the cries "Remember the Alamo!" and "Remember Goliad!" The battle lasted but eighteen minutes. According to Houston's official report, the casualties were 630 Mexicans killed and 730 taken prisoner. Against this, only nine of the 910 Texans were killed or mortally wounded and thirty were wounded less seriously."

And here's the connection to my new novel-in-progress: One main character, James Callahan, was a soldier in the Texan army, a sergeant in one of Colonel Fannin's companies. He fought in the losing battle at Coleto Creek a few weeks before the battle at San Jacinto and was taken prisoner along with Fannin's entire force. With great luck, he was one of the 15 or 20 men taken out of the Goliad church being used to imprison the 400 or so captured Texians, and sent to build a bridge several miles away. So, he missed the mass execution of the Goliad prisoners ordered by Santa Anna.
Callahan escaped his Mexican army captors and was still in hiding when the epic battle at San Jacinto took place.

Another minor character in my book, Nathaniel Benton, was in Sam Houston's army, but missed the battle at San Jacinto because he somehow seriously shot himself in the foot in the days before the battle. He was part of the "left-behind" camp guard during the battle.
Both these fellows historically became captains of mounted volunteer "ranging" companies in the thirty years following the Texas Revolution, chasing Apaches, Comanche's, and Mexican bandits.
I'm just finding it odd and a little amusing that two of the Texas soldiers who missed the final act of the revolution, surfaced later to lead a Texas Ranger military expedition into Mexico,  which is the focus of my book.
The action in my new novel, A Different Country Entirely, takes place 19 years after San Jacinto, but the legacy of the afternoon fight near Buffalo Bayou--the Battle of San Jacinto, shaped nearly everything about Texas in those decades between 1836 and 1865, when the end of the Civil War changed things again.
One does wonder, if Santa Anna had been on his game on April 21st, and beaten Sam Houston's ragtag army at San Jacinto, which by all logic, he should have, and asserted his iron-hand control over all of Texas, after executing several hundred more Texian "soldier-traitors", would Texas today be a Mexican state?