King's Mountain

by Sharyn McCrumb

  I thought it likely that he would, too. I had talked to him about it a day or so before, and told him what the plans were.

  “I’ll come with you,” my brother Robert had said.

  I hesitated. “We need to leave some men here to guard the settlement, you know. Some of your wife’s people are staying. James Robertson would be glad of your company, if you wanted to stay.”

  My younger brother shrugged. “I’m going. You’re going. I reckon Valentine is going. What about Joseph?”

  I nodded. “Yes. Both of them—our brother Joseph, and his namesake, my son. The boy is eighteen now. I said he could come.”

  “Well, I may be your youngest brother, but try to remember that I am an old man of thirty. If you’re letting your eighteen-year-old boy ride with you, don’t even think of telling me to stay home with the women and the babies. I’m going.”

  We were sitting outside Robert’s house on a bench under a big shade tree with the mountains rising up before us like a blue curtain, so misty that it was hard to tell where the hills stopped and the clouds began. I had wanted a word with him in private. After I said my greetings to Robert’s wife, Keziah, and to little Charlie, and duly admired their red-faced newborn, named Valentine after our father, I had beckoned my brother outside with a solemn expression that told him my visit was more than a social call.

  I sighed. “I knew you’d be hell-bent to come, but that new son of yours is just on two months old, isn’t he? And little Charlie is not but two. Shouldn’t you think about staying with Keziah?”

  He laughed. “Aren’t you one to talk, Jack? With a brood of ten of your own, and a new-made bride who joined the family less than a month ago. If anybody in this family is tied down with apron strings and wrapped in baby bunting, I reckon it’s you.”

  “Well, I’m a colonel, Bob. Nobody can make me stay home. And you’re a Sevier, so I don’t suppose anybody can tell you anything.”

  Then we laughed and clapped one another on the shoulder, and began to talk about the plans for the march.

  * * *

  Now here was my second son, James, sporting the same obstinate expression Bob had worn, still standing there defiantly next to Catherine’s sewing table, looking up at me awaiting an answer. I sighed. Perhaps if his mother were still alive, she’d have had objected to my letting him go to war so young, but we had buried her early in the year, and perhaps the boy’s childhood had died with her. Catherine, only a few years his senior and his stepmother only a scant few weeks, would have no such qualms about letting him go. He must have seemed quite grown-up enough to her. Or perhaps she simply trusted me to make the decision regarding my own son.

  Looking at young James’s anxious smile, I was struck again by how much he reminded me of my own youngest brother. Neither of them was going to be left behind when the older ones were allowed to go. Robert would see James’s feelings as a mirror of his own. James would get his horse.

  * * *

  While I was arranging for the purchase of black powder from the Pattons’ mill, ordering ground corn from the mill of Baptist McNabb, and meeting with William Cobb over at Rocky Mount to obtain other supplies from his store, Colonel Shelby was attending to the diplomatic side of the enterprise, for he had to enlist the support of William Campbell and his Virginia militia to join us.

  He was a well-connected man, Col. William Campbell, as well as a man of substance. A man of my own age, but with more formal education and the airs and graces of eastern Virginia’s aristocracy, Campbell had married a sister of Virginia’s former governor Patrick Henry, and the Campbells lived on a fine plantation called Aspenvale, near the Holston. Although he had aspirations to the gentry, Campbell was as seasoned in war as the rest of us. He had done his military service in the first Virginia Regiment under the command of Patrick Henry, and then under the able Col. William Christian. Since Campbell’s return to his home on western Virginia’s frontier, he had been hunting down Tory bandits and conspirators in the area. He had hanged a few of them, and so enraged the rest that they nailed signs to the gates of Aspenvale, marking him for death. There had been at least one attempt on his life by his enemies, but it did not succeed, and he carried on, unfazed by the threats of retribution.

  Rather than ride another forty miles to call on Colonel Campbell, Shelby wrote Campbell a hasty letter explaining the situation and the plan for the march south, and he dispatched his brother Moses Shelby to deliver it and await an answer.

  But the answer was no.

  “There is more urgent business than chasing after Ferguson,” Campbell told Moses Shelby, as he penned a reply. “I am lately come back from fighting down in the Yadkin Valley, and I have heard all the talk about Lord Cornwallis’s intention to invade Virginia. What’s more, I believe it. I think Cornwallis will avail himself of the Great Wagon road, and push north with his forces, crossing into Virginia a hundred miles east of here. I cannot leave the Commonwealth undefended to go looking for trouble in South Carolina. I plan to march my men eastward to wait for the invasion forces in a mountain pass on the Virginia border with Carolina.”

  He said as much in the message he sent back to Isaac Shelby, but that could not be the end of the matter, for so great was our need for support from Campbell’s militia that Shelby could not take no for an answer. Shelby and I had reckoned on being able to round up two hundred and fifty men apiece, give or take, and we calculated that the Virginia militia would double that number. Without them we would be hard pressed to hold our own against the enemy’s troops. We hoped to have other forces join us as we pushed on toward Gilbert Town, but we could not be sure of their number. Campbell had to be persuaded to join forces with us.

  Colonel Shelby wrote again. He read Campbell’s refusal carefully, taking note of his objections to the plan, and then he penned a second missive, and this time he wrote at greater length, taking pains to explain the plan more thoroughly and to address Campbell’s objections.

  Suppose it were true, as Campbell contended, that Cornwallis intended to invade Virginia, just as Ferguson had threatened to attack the backcountry settlements? Would it not be better to prevent such an invasion at the outset, rather than to stand by idly waiting for it to happen?

  We thought so, Shelby wrote, and that is why we were prepared to seek out Ferguson before he could make good on his threat. In this new letter Shelby argued that if Campbell joined his forces to ours, and if we succeeded in defeating Cornwallis’s men, then such a victory would surely delay any planned invasion of Virginia. Perhaps it would eliminate it altogether.

  Campbell thought about it. It must have occurred to him that if he stuck to his original plan, he would face the enemy with only half the forces he’d have if he united his troops with ours. And the prospect of fighting the battles on some territory other than your own was always pleasing.

  In short order, Shelby had a new reply. This time William Campbell agreed to join forces with us, and he outlined his plans in some detail. He would, he said, gather his men together on the twenty-second of September in the village we knew as Wolf Hills, though it had taken the name of Abingdon two years earlier. There was a meadow there, just west of Black’s Fort, alongside Wolf Creek, a clear stream for drinking water, and enough space for an encampment of two hundred men or more. They would gather there.

  The following day, the twenty-third, William Campbell himself would proceed to Shelby’s house, Sapling Grove. On the twenty-fourth, his men, taking a more direct route westward on the old Watauga Road, would catch up with the two commanders en route to the mustering grounds at Sycamore Shoals.

  Shelby sent this information and other details of his own preparations to me in a long message, saying that he would see me at the mustering grounds in a week’s time. I was glad that my own tasks—arranging for supplies of food and for lead from the local mines to be made into bullets, and making sure that the two hundred and two score men under my command had the clothing and weapons they needed—had kept me so occupied that I
had little time for worrying about what might go wrong with the expedition or whether we would prevail once we found Ferguson. I tried to spend as much time as I could manage with Catherine and the children, all the while attempting to banish the thought that I might never see them again. Catherine did her best to maintain her smiling good humor, but at times, when she thought I was not looking, a faraway look would come into her eyes, and she would dab a tear away from her cheek with the corner of her apron.

  The smallest children were too young to understand the gravity of the situation, and my two oldest boys, Joseph and James, were aflame with anticipation for the great adventure to come. John, the third of my sons, was in a bate because he was forbidden to go along with his older brothers, so that he scarcely spoke a civil word to anyone in those weeks. It was only the middle children—Valentine, Richard, Betsey, and Dolly—who grieved to think of my leaving, for they were still mourning the loss of their mother earlier in the year. I was glad that I could entrust my brood to someone as tenderhearted and brave as Catherine; it was a blessing to know that I could be single-minded in the mission at hand, without having to worry about how my family fared at home.

  * * *

  The great day came at last, both too quickly for all the needed preparations and farewells, and too slowly to allay the lingering doubts that plague a man in the darkest hours of the night, but as the men began to gather there in the great field near the river, I forgot everything in the rising tide of excitement that at last the waiting was over.

  We had arisen well before first light to make our way to the muster grounds. Catherine and John rode along with us, on the old plow horses that would stay behind on the farm, as would they, but we had said our farewells to all the younger children the night before, and they were left at home in the care of a servant. The boys and I had packed all we could the night before, and we set out that morning in the darkness on the road to Fort Watauga. Joseph and James were in high spirits, laughing and teasing each other, and boasting to their sullen brother John about all the brave deeds they intended to accomplish on the campaign while he was mired at home with the babies. Catherine and I rode side by side mostly in silence, but from time to time hazarding some chance remark on any subject at all except the fact that we were parting.

  By the time the rising sun began to tint the clouds with pink and turn the wooded hills to gray, we were nearing the muster ground, and the trace was no longer a lonely road through the forest, but a bustling pike, crowded with militiamen and their families, all headed to the same place. They called out to one another, and some of the women joined their voices together in a hymn, and the quavering notes I heard in the tune made me think that they were singing in order to keep from weeping.

  I left my boys to tend to the horses, while Catherine and I walked across the field, stopping here and there to greet our neighbors and to wish them well. Valentine and Robert had come with their wives, and Catherine left my side long enough to visit for a few minutes with them. I heard Catherine ask after Keziah’s new baby, and then in one breath the three Sevier wives were promising to help one another while we menfolk were away. I was watching for the Pattons’ wagon to arrive bearing the black powder we had ordered, and keeping a mental tally of which of my men were accounted for.

  There was little distinction between officers and men, and unless you were acquainted with them, you might have difficulty telling which was which, for all the militiamen wore our customary long hunting shirts over leather breeches. Their belts bristled with long knives and short-handled axes, and each man had his rifle close to hand. Presently I caught sight of Colonel Shelby across the field, and I hurried forward to pay my respects.

  Isaac Shelby, when he saw me, clasped my hand, and said with a wry smile, “Why, Sevier, I could almost believe I am back at the same celebration that I interrupted when I first came to bring you the news.”

  I looked out across the sunlit field where hundreds of people were gathered, and I saw what he meant, for this looked more like a festival than the beginning of a military campaign. Young children with their dogs were laughing and shouting as they chased one another across the grass. The mothers, and wives, and sweethearts had all come to say good-bye to their men, and many of them had brought food, so that the family could share one last meal together before they were parted.

  “Yes, Colonel Shelby, it is very like my barbecue a few weeks back. And, just as last time, we will be obliged to leave the celebration prematurely. Did Colonel Campbell accompany you?”

  “He did. I think he is seeing to his own troops, if they have arrived yet. Campbell’s men came by the old Watauga Road, you know. He reckons there will be about two hundred of them. And my brothers Evan and Moses have come as well. Shall we go and find them?”

  I glanced at Catherine, but she seemed happily in conversation with my brothers’ wives, so I followed Shelby toward the far end of the field, where William Campbell stood in the company of the Shelby brothers. Colonel Campbell was a tall, robust man of my own age. His ginger hair and blue eyes were a testimony to his Scots blood, and the dour disposition of his forebears was reflected in his own stern and unyielding countenance.

  “Campbell will be a great asset to our mission. He is the scourge of the Loyalists along the Holston,” said Shelby. “Have you heard about his encounter with Francis Hopkins?”

  “No, though that name strikes a chord. Was there not a robber of that name in these parts? A Tory sympathizer?”

  “That is the man. He was a constant troublemaker in the area, a thief and a ne’er-do-well, and finally when he was caught counterfeiting money, the authorities clapped him in the local jail, but one night his villainous friends broke in and helped him to escape. What must the blackguard do next but present himself at a British fort, with the intention of doing further mischief to his Virginia neighbors. The fort’s commander, happy to help cause trouble among the Whigs, gave Hopkins credentials and a letter to take to the Cherokee, offering support for a murderous attack on the settlements.”

  “I would have put him down like a dog,” I said, for I had seen too many of my neighbors and comrades tortured and killed in Indian attacks to feel any spark of mercy for a man who would bring about such an infamous deed.

  Shelby nodded. “We are of one mind about that. The wonder is that after all his treachery, Francis Hopkins should dare to venture again into the Holston settlement, but one Sunday afternoon, that is exactly what he did. Campbell and his good lady were heading home after Sabbath services at the church at Ebbing Springs in the company of some of their neighbors, when suddenly a rider crossed their path, and, upon seeing them, immediately turned and spurred his horse away into the nearby woods. When Campbell registered astonishment at the stranger’s peculiar behavior, his companions told him the identity of the fleeing rider.”

  “Francis Hopkins?”

  Shelby nodded. “The very same.”

  “Campbell and the other men immediately rode off in pursuit of the fugitive, leaving Mrs. Campbell and the other ladies in the party to await their return. They chased Hopkins, who tried to elude them by fording the river. Campbell—you know what a burly fellow he is—plunged into the water after the villain, and they fought hand to hand there in midstream, until Campbell wrested the knife away from Hopkins and hauled him back to shore to the waiting justice of Campbell and his men. A quarter of an hour or so passed, and presently Squire Campbell returned to his wife, who wanted to know what had transpired. He said, ‘Why, Betty, we hanged him,’ and without further comment on the incident, he proceeded to escort his good lady home.”

  I smiled politely. “The sister of former governor Henry must find things a bit more rowdy here on the frontier than she was accustomed to in genteel Williamsburg.”

  “She comes of bold stock, though, despite their gentility. I’ll warrant she is equal to the challenge. And the incident pales beside what your lady wife has lived through these past years.”

  “Ah, you’ve heard o
f that incident on this very ground, during Old Abram’s attack, when poor Catherine ran for her life, and had to be hauled over the wall of the fort with the Indians in pursuit.”

  “Why, that story will outlive all of us, Colonel Sevier.” Shelby patted my shoulder. “Are your men in readiness for our departure?”

  “I think they are saying their good-byes.”

  We joined Shelby’s brother and Colonel Campbell, and shook hands all around.

  “We have among the three of us about seven hundred men,” said Campbell, “and another hundred or more of McDowell’s have already arrived here to join us, but I hope to see that number doubled once we get across the mountains and into the Yadkin territory. Ben Cleveland will join us, come hell or high water.”

  “They know we are coming,” said Shelby. “Let us just get safely and quickly over the mountains, and then we shall all join together, and as far as Ferguson is concerned it will be ‘come hell,’ indeed.”

  * * *

  One of my men came up just then. “Sirs, the Reverend Mr. Doak is about ready to commence the preaching, if you’d care to lead the way. He’s yonder under the sycamores.”

  Campbell looked surprised. “A clergyman? Come to wish us well? We are fortunate then. Back in east Virginia, the usual breed of minister uses his office to urge his flock to stay loyal to the king. They declare that rebelling against the king and his appointed officials here is not only treason, but a sin against Almighty God, by whose divine right the sovereign rules. They have frightened a good many pious men into submission through fear of the Hereafter.”

  “Reverend Doak is not that sort of parson,” I told him. “He seems to believe that rendering unto Caesar and rendering unto God are not one and the same.”

  “Or else he is persuaded that the Whig cause is a just one,” said Shelby. “At any rate, he is a learned young man, and the Watauga settlement is blessed to have him. He has studied at the College of New Jersey and also at another institution in Virginia. I hope that God spares him for many years to be a spiritual leader.”