William Lockhart Hunter was born 1809 in Virginia. He traveled to Texas in October 1835 to fight in the Texas Revolution as a member of Robert C. Morris’s New Orleans Greys. He reached Texas with his unit in time to participate in the Siege of Béxar. When the battalion was transformed into the San Antonio Greys, commanded by Samuel Overton Pettus, Hunter was second sergeant. Under Col. James W. Fannin, Jr., at Goliad in early 1836, his duties entailed the supply of commissaries at Fort Defiance. After the battle of Coleto Hunter was imprisoned at Nuestra Señora de Loreto Presidio at Goliad with the rest of Fannin’s command until March 27, 1836, when the men were taken out and shot in the Goliad Massacre. Hunter, by one account, was not killed by the Mexican volleys, so he feigned death, only to be bayoneted in the shoulder and “haggled at his throat with a dull knife,” clubbed about the head with the breech of a musket, then stripped of his clothing. Later he revived and crept to a nearby ranch, where he was nursed to health. Another version has Nicholas Fagan, Fannin’s blacksmith spared by the Mexicans at Goliad, escaping, finding Hunter badly wounded, and carrying him to a nearby Mexican family on Manahuilla Creek. They hid and nursed him until he could proceed to Mrs. Margaret Wright’s nearby ranchhouse on the Guadalupe River above Victoria, where he recovered from his wounds. He died on October 25, 1886, and was buried in Austin with military honors.

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Joseph Lindley was born 1793 in North Carolina. Lindley fought in the War of 1812 as a United States Ranger. He was involved in the Fredonian Rebellion at Nacogdoches and the Siege of Béxar in 1835 and fought at the battle of San Jacinto. Mirabeau B. Lamar, president of the Republic of Texas, appointed Lindley an Indian agent with a charge to keep the peace. He died January 20, 1874 and was buried in Limestone County and later reinterred at the State Cemetery.

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John Files Tom was born 1818 in Tennessee. He joined the volunteer army under command of Stephen F. Austin and participated in the battle of Concepción and the Grass Fight. He was gunner boy with Col. James C. Neill’s artillery in the Siege of Béxar. He left San Antonio on February 11, 1836, and joined Sam Houston’s army in the retreat across Texas. In the battle of San Jacinto his knee was shattered by a musket ball; he was removed from the battlefield, taken to the home of Lorenzo de Zavala, and officially listed as killed in battle. Since Tom was a minor and was incapacitated by his wound, his headright and bounty certificates for his military service were redeemed by his father. During the Civil War he was commissioned to organize a ranger company for frontier protection. Tom died in 1906 and was buried in the cemetery at Leakey.

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Sion Record Bostick (Bostwick) was born 1819 in Alabama. Sion Bostick was present for the battle of Gonzales in the company of Capt. P. R. Splane and took part in the Siege of Béxar. When Antonio López de Santa Anna marched into Texas, Bostick reenlisted, on March 21, 1836, as a private in Capt. Moseley Baker’s company of Col. Edward Burleson’s First Regiment, Texas Volunteers; he fought in the battle of San Jacinto. A Sion Bostick is also listed as a member of Capt. William H. Patton’s Columbia Company at the time of the battle. With two other scouts, Joel Robison and James A. Sylvester, Bostick captured and brought in Santa Anna on April 22. After San Jacinto he reenlisted as a private in the army, first for the term from March 11 through May 25 and then from July 1 to October 1, in the company of Capt. B. F. Ravill. He took part in the battle of Plum Creek that year and later claimed to have served during the Mexican War in Capt. Claiborne C. Herbert’s Company E of Col. John Coffee Hays’s First Texas Mounted Rifles. This company was recruited in Columbus, but Bostick’s name does not appear on its muster roll. On March 21, 1862 he enlisted in Capt. John C. Upton’s Company B of Col. James J. Archer’s Fifth Texas Infantry regiment of the famed Hood’s Texas Brigade. He served for a time in Virginia but was discharged by the order of the Confederate secretary of war on September 22 as over age. “During the war with Spain I was very much troubled because I was too old to go,” he later wrote.

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