Hunter, William Lockhart

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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