About 15 miles from Franklin, two men stopped the trio at gunpoint, demanding to know who they were. “I didn’t blame them much for the question,” Lane recalled, “for I was in my shirt and drawers, with a handkerchief tied around my head, having lost my hat in the fight, and they thought we were Indians.”

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The two men turned out to be Love and Jackson, the members of the surveying party who had returned to Franklin for a replacement compass. News of the Kickapoo attack stunned the two, who relinquished their horses to Lane, Henderson and Burton for the remaining miles to town. Arriving in Franklin, Lane was put in the care of sympathetic local women, and Henderson and Burton returned home.

Meanwhile, Love and Jackson raised a 50-man burial detail and started for the scene of battle the next morning. They were on the lookout for the injured John Violet, who had been left at the muddy pool. Incredibly, the men found Violet—rather, he found them—at Tehuacana Springs. When the wounded surveyor popped out of his hiding place, yelling his head off, the riders thought they were under Indian attack. “Boys, I’m mighty glad you’ve come!” said Violet. He explained that he had grown tired of waiting. After splinting and bandaging his own thigh, he had struck out from Richland Creek toward Tehuacana Springs, “subsisting on green haws and plums.” When he reached the springs, he was so famished that he tried to capture a large bullfrog. Failing at that, he loaded a pistol with a dozen buckshot (each the size of a small English pea) and a proportional amount of powder to blast the frog. Violet hit his target, but the recoil propelled him over an embankment, breaking the ligature that bound his thigh, and he briefly lost consciousness. On regaining his senses, he crawled up to the spring in search of the dead frog. “He found one hindquarter floating around, the balance having been shot to flinders,” Lane said. “Being very hungry, he made short work of that.”

After recovering Violet in better shape than they expected, the men from Franklin continued on to the ravine. “They found the bones of all our killed, the flesh having been stripped off by the wolves,” Lane said. The detail buried the remains of 18 surveyors in the shade of the trees. In the lower part of the ravine they examined 80 piles of green brush from which the Indians had done most of their firing. Lane said that beneath each was “a copious quantity of blood, which proved that we had not been fooling away our time during that day.”

The Kickapoos may have lost twice as many men as the surveyors in the fight at Battle Creek, but there are no exact figures. The burial detail returned to Franklin with Violet, who recovered from his wound. Some sources claim there were three other survivors besides Violet, Lane, Henderson and Burton.

On October 16, Kickapoos attacked Maj. Gen. Rusk’s militia, which was en route to a Kickapoo village on the Trinity River in search of Córdova. Rusk repelled the ambush, but each side lost 11 men.

In the end, the attacks on the surveyors and Rusk’s militia did little to change the situation in Texas. By 1840 most of the Indians had left the republic. The Alabamas and Coushattas were given title to a small parcel of land in east Texas. The only other Indians who remained in the region were the Tiguas near El Paso and the Mexican Kickapoos near Eagle Pass. Texans finally completed effectual surveys and established permanent settlements in Navarro County around 1845.

Today, a Texas Historical Commission marker commemorates the site of the “Battle Creek Burial Ground,” about a mile west of Dawson on state Highway 31. It bears the following inscription:

A surveying party of 25 Texans ran into about 300 Kickapoo Indians on a buffalo hunt; failing to heed warning to leave, the Texans were ambushed on Oct. 8, 1838. Only seven survived, and four of these were wounded. After the escape, they came back to bury their comrades in a common grave.

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