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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Thomas Alley served as a captain in the army of Texan volunteers at the siege of Bexar in 1835.

Antonio Cruz y Arocha, Alamo defender and courier, was one of a number of native Texans who joined Capt. Juan N. Seguín’s company for six months’ service during the Texas Revolution. He took part in the Siege of Béxar and later served in the Alamo garrison as a member of Seguín’s cavalry company. Cruz left the Alamo on February 25, 1836, along with Seguín, to rally reinforcements for the Alamo. He later served with Seguín in the battle of San Jacinto.

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