Thomas Osborn was born 1812 in Tennessee. His participation in the battles of the Texas revolution began on June 26, 1832, with the battle of Velasco where he served in Capt. Henry Stevenson Brown’s company of eighty men. In October 1835 Osborn was one of 300 volunteers in the Siege of Béxar, and on October 28, 1835, he was with a volunteer detachment of ninety men from Capt. T. F. L. Parrott’s company at the battle of Concepción, where he was badly wounded. In the Goliad campaign of 1836 Osborn and his brother John Lyle Osborn were members of Capt. Albert Clinton Horton’s company in an advance group that was cut off from Col. James W. Fannin’s besieged army. Osborn was not in the battle of San Jacinto, having been detailed to guard Texas families during the Runaway Scrape. Osborn died on May 16, 1883, in Red Rock, Bastrop County, and was buried there.

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Valentine Bennet was born 1780 in Massachusetts. He fought in the War of 1812. In 1832 he took a leading part in the battle of Velasco, where he was severely wounded in the face and hip. He moved to Gonzales in 1834 and in 1835 was one of the eighteen men who defied Domingo de Ugartechea’s order in the battle of Gonzales. Bennet was elected lieutenant when the Gonzales militia was organized, and from that time on he was in the thick of the Texas Revolution. He participated in the battle of Concepción in October 1835 and the Siege of Béxar in December. He held the rank of assistant quartermaster and received honorable mention from Gen. Edward Burleson for efficiency in keeping the army well supplied. Later, as quartermaster of the revolutionary army, he was kept busy supplying beef for Sam Houston’s growing forces as the general retreated from Gonzales to the battleground of San Jacinto. After the battle of San Jacinto Bennet remained with the army. In 1841 he was commissioned a major in the quartermaster’s department of the Army of the Republic of Texas and was sent on the Texan Santa Fe expedition. Among the other Santa Fe prisoners he suffered many indignities and cruelties at the hands of his Mexican guards; in August 1842 the prisoners were released, and Bennet returned to Texas. He reentered the Texas army when Gen. Adrián Woll invaded Texas; subsequently, he took part in the Somervell expedition. He died July 24, 1843, and was buried in the old cemetery at Gonzales.

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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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