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I dunno if anyone’s still following this but it’s now Tuesday August 11th, 1840.

Close to 1,000 Comanches are three days and maybe 75 miles out heading NNW away from the coast, intending to make a wide left turn northeast of Gonzales and that high hill and then head directly northwest to escape towards the Texas Hill Country which at that time was still in Comanche hands.

Meanwhile, it seems to independently occur the everyone in a number of widely scattered locations that the best place to intercept them was at the “Plum Creek bottom”.

Why that would be so is not readily apparent today, native prairie was already going under by the 1870’s and in the absence of fire, overgrown pastures and wooded areas are the norm where it ain’t actively farmed.

Used to be scarcely a tree other than along the watercourses between Austin and San Antonio though.

One Robert Hall, twenty six at the time, on of the founders of Seguin a tough sumbich who would ranch the lawless Nueces Strip of far South Texas, riding in from the southwest with Caldwell’s men from Seguin towards Plum Creek reports the following...

The 11th was intensely hot, and our ride was chiefly over a burnt Prairie, the flying ashes being blinding to the eyes. Waiting some hours at noon, watching for the approach of the enemy after night, we arrived at goods cabin, on the Gonzales and Austin Road, a little east of Plum Creek.

We know that the country was open enough that one could see for miles from the Big Hill fifteen miles east of Gonzales, we also know that west of Plum Creek lay open prairie all the way west to El Paso and Chihuahuan desert country.

Yet around Plum Creek...

From the big hill near Gonzales on to Plum Creek, this area of Texas was heavily wooded. Beyond Plum Creek, there was an open prairie which led towards the Hill Country area of Austin.

That describes a band of woodland about thirty miles long stretching NW-SE in otherwise open country. Much of it laying along Plum Creek.