security, is becoming daily more and more imperative. While they remain where they are, no one knows the hour when they may be utterly destroyed." The men were encouraged to raise a small troop on the premise of conducting an excursion against the native tribes and then to secure the archives quickly and to transport them. Smith led over 20 men and 3 wagons into Austin the morning of December 30, 1842. The men were almost finished loading the wagons with papers when they were noticed by Angelina Eberly, the owner of a nearby boarding house. Eberly ran to Congress Avenue, where a six-pound howitzer was situated. She turned the small cannon toward the General Land Office and fired it. Although some shot hit the General Land Office, there was no real damage, and no one was injured. Smith and his men left quickly and headed northeast to avoid the men patrolling the road through Bastrop. They were accompanied by two clerks from the General Land Office, who were tasked with ensuring the General Land Office records were not harmed or modified. Their progress was slow since a downpour made roads almost impassable for the already slowly-moving oxen. The group managed to travel before it stopped for the night at Kinney's Fort, along Brushy Creek. In Walnut Creek, north of Austin, some of Houston's agents were surpassed by angry citizens who then recovered some of the stolen documents and returned them to Austin. In Austin, Captain Mark Lewis gathered a group of men to retrieve the archives. Some of the pursuers had no horses, and some had little or no weaponry. Lewis's men reached Smith's encampment in the middle of the night. They were undetected since Smith had neglected to post guards. On the morning of December 31, the records were returned to Austin. It is uncertain as to whether Smith's men took them back, or the Austin group took custody of the records and transported them. Aftermath The Texas House of Representatives formed a committee to investigate the attempted transferral of the archives. The committee admonished President Houston for his actions in trying to move the capital from Austin without the approval of Congress. A Senate committee reported that they did not agree that Austin should be the capital, but without an immediate threat to the city, Houston had no legal reason to move the records. In 1843, the