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Updated: May 16, 2025
There were good honest men among the loyalists and there were also rough and vicious men out for spoils which was true as well of the Whigs or Patriots from the same counties. Among the rough element were Tory banditti from the overmountain region.
The day is our own!" Thus he was heard to shout above the triumphant war whoops of the circling foe, surging higher and higher about the hill. But there were others in his band who knew the fight was lost. The overmountain men saw two white handkerchiefs, axed to bayonets, raised above the rocks; and then they saw Ferguson dash by and slash them down with his sword.
Before Shelby left the Holston in 1782 and moved to Kentucky, of which State he was to become the first Governor, the Assembly of North Carolina passed a resolution of gratitude to the overmountain men in general, and to Sevier and Shelby in particular, for their "very generous and patriotic services" with which the "General Assembly of this State are feelingly impressed."
The first sound of the overmountain migration of which I spoke above was of the stealthy step of the hunter, yet back of that for a century was the scarcely audible plash of the paddle and the answering swirl of the water. But as in overmountain migration the noisy wheel soon followed the foot, so in the other the noiseless sail followed the swishing paddle.
This overmountain procession came chiefly up the watercourses of the south and middle States. Prior to 1830 the mass of pioneer colonists in most of the Mississippi Valley had been contributed by the up-country of the south.
At the original place of rendezvous, the Sycamore Shoals of the Watauga, the overmountain men gathered on September 25th. There an eloquent sermon was preached to them by that fiery man of God, the Reverend Samuel Doak, who concluded his discourse with a stirring invocation to the sword of the Lord and of Gideon a sentiment greeted with the loud applause of the militant frontiersmen.
The importance of the overmountain men's victory lay in what it achieved for the cause of Independence. King's Mountain was the prelude to Cornwallis's defeat. It heartened the Southern Patriots, until then cast down by Gates's disaster. To the British the death of Ferguson was an irreparable loss because of its depressing effect on the Back Country Tories.
It proceeded to get rid of what it deemed western rapacity by ceding the whole overmountain territory to the United States, with the proviso that Congress must accept the gift within twelve months. And after passing the Cession Act, North Carolina closed the land office in the undesired domain and nullified all entries made after May 25, 1784.
"Werewolf" would have been a fit name for him for, though he was a wolf at night, in the daylight he was a man and, as we have seen, a chivalrous one. In the guerrilla fighting that went on for a brief time between the overmountain men and various detachments of Ferguson's forces, sometimes one side, sometimes the other, won the heat. But the field remained open.
The overmountain men no longer needed to complain bitterly of the lack of legal machinery to keep them "the best members of society." They now had courts to spare. Frankland had its courts, its judges, its legislative body, its land office in fact, a full governmental equipment. North Carolina also performed all the natural functions of political organism, within the western territory.
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