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Updated: May 18, 2025
Opened and spread before us on the rude slab table, the letter proved to be the briefest of military commands: a peremptory order to Ferguson to rejoin the main body at once, proceeding by forced marches if needful, and on no account to risk engagement with the over-mountain men.
Supplied with ammunition, the Cherokees, led by this Captain Stuart or some other, were first to fall upon the over-mountain settlements. These laid waste, the Indians were to form a junction with the army of invasion, and so to add the torch and tomahawk and scalping knife to British swords and muskets.
Those colonies were now settled close to the base of the mountains, and there was heard a popular clamor for pastures new. French ownership of the over-mountain region was denied, and in 1728 Pennsylvania "viewed with alarm the encroachments of the French." The issue was now joined; both sides claimed the field, but, as usual, the contest was at first among the rival forest traders.
A fortnight earlier Major Ferguson had captured two of the over-mountain men of Clark's party and had sent them to the settlement on the Watauga with a challenge in due form or rather with the threat to come and lay the over-mountain region waste in default of an instant return of the pioneers to their allegiance to the king. This challenge, so our scouts told us, had been immediately accepted.
They then marched to join the over-mountain boys, under Sevier, Shelby and other officers. Upon the junction of their forces, a council of war was immediately held, at which Kerr was present. They learned that Ferguson was about twenty miles from them, at Peter Quinn's old place, six miles from King's Mountain.
I made a mental note of this and wondered if my Lord Cornwallis had met with some new change of heart. He was not over-squeamish as I had known him. Then I heard the baronet say: "But yet the thing is done?" "As good as done. The Indians are to have powder and lead of us, after which they make a sudden onfall on the over-mountain settlements.
Those means were the four hundred and forty-five raw militia under Moultrie, who, behind a pile of palmetto logs, on the 28th of June, 1776, repulsed Sir Peter Parker in his attack on Sullivan's Island in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, and the two hundred and ten "over-mountain men," under Sevier, Robertson, and Isaac Shelby, who beat back, on the 20th and 21st of July, the Cherokee invasion of the western frontier.
This last interview was to be an orderly settlement of the whole affair, and assurance that self-accusation should not accompany me to the wilderness. Then with the war over there would be no over-mountain ties to hold me back from the Kentucky country, or the Natchez lands. I reached Richfield just as Colonel Lewis was setting forth to settle some wrangling between two of his captains.
The over-mountain settlers had increased in numbers so rapidly that four counties had been erected for them; one, Davidson, taking in the Cumberland district, and the other three, Washington, Sullivan, and Greene, including what is now eastern Tennessee.
Whereupon, Charlie McDowell and the over-mountain men, seeing all was lost, broke their camp on the Broad and took to their heels, every man jack of them for himself. So ye see, Dickie Jennifer, there's never a cursed corporal's guard left in either Carolina to stand in the king's way."
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