King's Mountain

by Sharyn McCrumb

  The drums began to rumble.

  We had lost the element of surprise.

  VIRGINIA SAL

  The attack had come. My heart was beating in time with the drums, and in the distance I could hear the whoops and yells of the rebel soldiers coming ever nearer.

  The major had been mightily pleased the day he spotted this table of a hill. When they told him that it was called “the King’s Mountain,” he thought God himself was smiling down upon his mission and would deliver him and his regiment safely from the Backwater Men. In his certainty he was jubilant.

  I hoped he was right. I’ll allow that the major knows more about waging war than the likes of me, and, being the son of a lord, likely he is closer to Our Lord and Father as well. But I felt no joy in what he took as a sign from Providence. That feeling of summer’s ending had never left me, and now I shivered even when the sun was blazing overhead.

  Virginia Paul took no notice of anybody’s sentiments, sharing neither the major’s confidence nor my own misgivings. She glided about the new encampment, smiling her cat-in-the-cream-jug smile, and doing the officers’ bidding, as if we were safely tucked in Charlotte Town, instead of camped on some godforsaken hill, with a ragtag army coming at us. Sometimes I heard her voice wafting up the hill from the little stream below, singing a queer tuneless air with words I could not make sense of.

  “What do you reckon?” I’d asked her last evening, as we stared into the firelight. We knew that the rebels were coming. The major was alone in his tent, writing yet another dispatch to Lord Cornwallis, asking again for reinforcements, so we had the night and his campfire to ourselves.

  Beside me, Virginia Paul kept humming her strange little tune for so long that I thought she had not heard me, but at last she said, “Well, girl, I told you what I thought a long time ago, did I not? I gave you the good and the bad, depending on how you take it.”

  I harked back to the talks we’d had over the summer, mostly while we were washing the major’s linen in a forest stream. You’ll never pass a day of winter cold or hungry … You and the major will be together forever … I looked up at her then, and she was no longer smiling.

  “I won’t see another winter, will I?” I whispered.

  “You made your choice a good while back. You chose him.…”

  I opened my mouth to say that I repented of it, but the words stuck in my throat. He would never have stayed with me, but I had chosen him, and what was there for me if I left him now? A life of toil on a clay dirt farm, with a brute of a husband, and never quite enough to eat? Old at thirty, dead at forty, forgotten a week after my burying. Worth living for? I fingered the green glass beads around my neck, and shook my head.

  She answered me as if I had spoken my thoughts aloud. “So you know,” she said. “Yes. I told you once: there are worse things than dying.”

  * * *

  Now, in what had been a peaceful afternoon, the drums were rumbling and the rebels were upon us. I caught sight of the major, but he had no time for me. Elias Powell held the white horse while the major, clad in his checkered hunting shirt, hoisted himself in the saddle, always a painful thing to watch on account of his useless arm. He put the silver whistle to his lips, and rode off toward the red-coated regulars.

  I looked around me, trying to block out the noises, so that I could think on what to do next. The piddling hill had become an ants’ nest of activity, with the regulars and the local Tories scurrying first one way and then another, trying to hear the officers’ commands over the din of the drums and the echoing yells from below.

  Suddenly Virginia Paul was beside me, wrapped in her black shawl, but as serene and unruffled as ever. I wondered if she were deaf or mad to ignore the chaos about us, but her eerie calm made me turn to her for help. Grabbing her arm, I said, “What must I do? Tell me!”

  She made to answer me, but then she shook her head.

  “What will you do, then?”

  Virginia Paul shrugged. “Oh, I’m away down the hill in a moment. There’ll be no more work for us here, Sal. It is done, and you are free.”

  “But should I hide, or take up a musket, or run with you?”

  She made no answer, but she embraced me quickly, humming in my ear her strange sad song. She hurried away toward the southeastern slope of the King’s Mountain. I watched her disappear over the brow of the hill, and then I heard the roar of the guns and the answering volleys from below, and the soldiers were enveloped in the smoke from the guns, and I stood alone.

  My courage failed me then, and when I saw the first of the rebels scrambling up to gain the hill, I turned to run. I felt a sharp pain in my breast—no worse than the sting of a wasp, and then—nothing.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  3:00 P.M. October 7, 1780

  As we advanced toward the slopes of the mountain, we heard the roll of drums continuing to echo from the heights, and then the shrill sound of a whistle, blown in long blasts and then short ones, as if signals were being given. We had no time to consider any of this, though. With the enemy alerted to our presence, we had no time to spare.

  Somewhere off to my left, I heard Shelby shout out, “Let every man be his own officer! Do not wait for orders, but…”

  Then I raised my rifle and aimed it in the direction of the summit.

  The attack began.

  On the edge of the ridge above us, a line of troops with scarlet coats banded in green appeared. I was right about Ferguson’s defense: knowing that this was the lowest and most vulnerable side of the encampment, he had positioned his best men nearby in readiness. From the look of their uniforms, these men were regular army, and likely better trained than the local recruits. We could see them at the summit, standing out clear and bright from the surrounding greenery and silhouetted against the blue sky. Near them rode a boyish-looking Redcoat officer, waving a sword. It was not Ferguson, though, for this man wore no hunting shirt, only his green-trimmed scarlet uniform. The soldiers he commanded would be carrying regulation Brown Bess muskets, fitted with bayonets. Perhaps these soldiers had come south with Ferguson himself. Certainly, these were the troops that he would value most highly, for they were entrusted with the initial defense of his position.

  We were not expected to get past them.

  These defenders began to fire downward, mostly at Shelby’s approaching men who were more directly in their line of sight, but their volley was not returned by Shelby’s men. Because the men were not yet in their assigned place, Shelby would have ordered them to hold their fire a while longer. Many a leader would have lost his head at the first sign of enemy fire and cast the prearranged strategy to the winds, but Isaac Shelby was a brave man and a seasoned fighter, and he would not let the enemy dictate his moves or rush him into recklessness.

  Our men kept climbing up the ridge, tree to rock to tree, and the firing from above went on, unanswered. From what I could see, though, the Tories’ volleys were availing them nothing, for none of Shelby’s men fell, and all seemed well around me. Ferguson’s men were aiming too high. If those regular army soldiers were flatlanders, he had made an error in judgment by choosing to defend a hill. It takes skill and experience to fire downhill with any accuracy. If you are accustomed to shooting in a straight line on level ground, your aim will be off on hilly ground. I reckon my men and Shelby’s could have managed it, if the situation were reversed, for we were used to high country fighting, but those redcoats firing down at us were not.

  As I guided my horse up the slope, I looked upward, expecting to see a barrier of breastworks protecting the enemy’s position. There were certainly trees enough hereabouts for them to have constructed breastworks for defense, and with a thousand men who had been encamped there at least a day, they had certainly had the time and troops to do so, but for whatever reason none had been built. On the opposite side of the plateau, the part that Winston and Chronicle were headed for, Ferguson had set his baggage and supply wagons in a half circle, but that would afford him little protection
from a massed attack coming at him from every direction. Did he not anticipate a battle taking place here, or was he simply counting on Tarleton’s dragoons to come riding to his rescue? Now we knew that they would arrive too late, if they came at all.

  The first of our troops to return fire were William Campbell’s Virginians, for having less distance to travel to reach their assigned position, they were in place and ready to attack a little before the rest of us on the western slope. As they shot upward at the enemy, the Holston boys accompanied their volleys with piercing war whoops that echoed along the ridge and nearly drowned out the sound of the gunfire. The noise drowned out fear, too, for soon the men felt as fierce as they sounded. Moments later Shelby’s men had taken up the cry, then my Watauga boys, and soon the whole of our force was yowling like wild men. Perhaps the aristocratic Scot up on the plateau found this behavior barbaric—we had heard that the flatland Tories sometimes called us “the yelling boys”—but so be it. War is not a game for gentlemen.

  Soon we heard, in counterpoint to our war cries, the shrill piping of a whistle coming from somewhere above us. In all the smoke and confusion of the battle, the one thing that stands out clear in my memory is that piercing sound. I might have mistaken it for a bird at first, trilling its warning of interlopers in the forest, but this sound was rhythmic, a series of sharp blasts in a patterned sequence, as if someone were using that noise to give orders. I had no time to think about what it was, though, because a battle is a storm, and it sweeps you along in its own noise and current until nothing else can get through. But the noise can also shut you inside yourself so that sometimes you may have odd disconnected thoughts as if you had all the time in the world.

  * * *

  As I took the pellets of shot out of my pouch, and rolled one between my fingers, I thought, There’s your proof that the world is round, for if you know how round pellets of ammunition are made, the question is settled. On the bank of a river, you build a tower, maybe a hundred feet high, and from the top of that tower, you pour out molten lead. A white hot stream of liquid lead falls through the air and into a kettle of cold water to cool and harden the lead. The fall from a great height turns the molten lead into little round spheres of hardened metal. If at the beginning of creation, a molten earth had tumbled through the heavens, the fall would have made it round. But that thought flashed through my head in less time than it took to load the pellet and fire my weapon, and then the tide of the battle swept me away again.

  On the plateau above us, something had changed.

  The red line of defending soldiers had stopped firing their weapons. Now they were rushing down the slope to the right of us, straight toward Campbell’s men, with their weapons straight out in front of them, for there was a bayonet affixed to the barrel of each musket. The British officers were partial to fighting with bayonets. They liked close combat and charging at the enemy rather than long-distance sharpshooting, maybe because those old Brown Besses weren’t any great shakes at accuracy, but also I think because the sight of a sharp and deadly bayonet terrifies the opposing force. If you stand your ground, they’ll spit you like a pig, and if you run, you lose the battle. It had worked at Camden and the Waxhaws.

  My men weren’t accustomed to it, though. We fought with tomahawks, sometimes, same as the Indians did, but it wasn’t the same. And we didn’t have any similar apparatus tacked onto our Deckard rifles brought from home. We could outshoot them, but if we had to dodge a bayonet charge while trying to fire, I wouldn’t give you a fig for our chances.

  On our right, Campbell’s men seemed frozen for a moment before they had the good sense to cut and run back down the hill. One of the Virginians waited too long to retreat, and before he could gain his footing, he was cut down by the sword of one of the mounted Redcoat officers.

  They might have kept on running, rather than face those deadly blades in an uphill limb, but by the time the Virginians were back down on level ground, the shrill whistle blasted again from somewhere up on the plateau, and, hearing it, the Redcoats stopped their pursuit of Campbell’s militia, and scrambled back up the hill. We managed to pick off a few of them as they climbed. They made good targets framed against the open sky above them.

  As the Redcoats continued to make their way back to the plateau, the Holston boys stopped retreating and regrouped at the base of the hill. They, too, began to fire at the retreating enemy, sending a few more of them sprawling and tumbling down the slope. If he knew about it, this should have been Ferguson’s first intimation that things were going wrong, for at the battle of Camden, when the bayonet charge scattered the Whig troops and sent them running, they did not stop. But here, while our men had the good sense to avoid impalement on those bayonets, they did not quit the field in panic. They simply withdrew to a safe distance, and waited for the chance to attack again, and that chance was not long in coming.

  On the other side of us, Shelby’s men had worked their way upward, over the wet leaves and fallen logs, and now they were nearing the summit.

  This was the reason that the regular army Redcoats had been recalled from their pursuit of Campbell’s militia: they were needed to defend the encampment from this new wave of attackers. As before, they fired down on Shelby’s ascending soldiers, with little effect, and then, as they had done on Campbell’s side, they assumed the same attack stance for a bayonet charge and set off down the hill again. Shelby’s men had no choice but to pull back, slipping and scurrying back down the slope to safety, but, like Campbell’s militia, they regrouped on level ground and fired up at their pursuers. More of the Redcoats fell.

  Bullets from the summit buzzed over our heads like hornets, but few of them found a target. They were still aiming high. We weren’t.

  The air was filling with smoke from the discharge of the weapons, and the roar of so many guns all firing at once sounded like thunder, echoing over the hill.

  While the Redcoats were driving Shelby’s men down the slope again, Campbell’s militia took advantage of the distraction, and started up the hill again, tree to tree, pausing to fire upward as they went.

  The ridge was narrow, but it was a good quarter mile long, so we could not see what was happening at the other end of the plateau, where Ferguson’s encampment stood. If all was going according to plan, the rest of our troops would be in position now, and beginning their own ascent. Ferguson’s pet troop of trained Redcoats could not hold back all of us at once; sooner or later the homegrown Tories would have to join the battle, and they would be no match for us. If Tarleton’s dragoons had been up on that hill, things might have gone differently, but Ferguson was on his own here, with an ill-trained local force, and an encircled hill that could not be defended against an army the size of ours.

  I was not afraid. Whether I lived or died, we would carry the day, and that’s what mattered.

  I couldn’t see much beyond my own patch of the hill, and it was only later, after the battle was over, that we were all able to piece together all our separate squares and fashion a quilt of the battle in our minds.

  I caught a glimpse of Ben Cleveland early on, astride that great beast of a horse of his, with its broad back and hoofs like dinner plates, a fitting mount for its three-hundred-pound rider. The next time I saw Cleveland, when we had gained the plateau and a cloud of smoke parted for a moment, the big man was on foot, still at the head of his Wilkes militiamen, and mowing down enemy soldiers in his path.

  When we reached the plateau, we saw that the other militias from all sides had also attained the ridge, and they were in the process of surrounding Ferguson’s embattled soldiers, driving them back toward their encampment, until they had nowhere left to go.

  The bayonet charge availed them nothing, for from all sides our rifle fire was cutting a swath through their ranks. As I stepped over the body of one of the fallen, a farmer dressed in hunting clothes, same as we were, I saw a sprig of pine bough in his hat—to show the other Tories which side he was on—and I noticed that the poor fellow
had some kind of makeshift bayonet tied to the barrel of his weapon. Unlike the regular army soldiers, with their Brown Bess rifles, fitted with army-issue bayonets, these local recruits brought their hunting pieces from home, as we had, and apparently they had been ordered to whittle down their hunting knives to fashion homemade bayonets out of them. But I doubted that anyone had bothered to train them in the skill of fighting with bayonets, and judging by the piles of bodies dotting the clearing, those makeshift weapons had done them little good. Before they could get close enough to stab anybody, our backwater marksmen had brought them down with bullets. I doubt that they could even see what hit them. But I had only a moment to contemplate all that, for I was heading for the thick of the fighting.

  There would be a thousand stories spun out of the confusion of this battle, for every man here would have his own narrow escape, his own sorrowful memory, or his little personal triumph to remember. To piece the battle together, like the women fashion the separate squares of a quilt, you would need to gather together all those stories. I had been in enough battles by now to know that someday I would know at least some of the stories that made up this one, but no one makes sense of a battle while it is happening. The best you can do is to try to live through it.

  A Redcoat officer was heading up a troop of local Tories, dressed in homespun hunting shirts and hard to distinguish from our own men. They made a run at us and at Shelby’s men with their homemade bayonets, but before they had accomplished anything, that piercing whistle sounded again, and the officer called out to them to stop, but they didn’t seem to understand what they were being asked to do, or why. Perhaps they had never been told the code of the whistle sounds at all. They stopped, confused, glancing back up the hill as if for further orders, and when none came, they seemed to fall into a panic, ignoring the shouted orders of their Redcoat commander. Each man was trying to do what seemed best to him, which is exactly what we told our soldiers to do, but in the British army, they believe that an officer must always keep control over his men or all is lost. In order to restore order, the poor Redcoat officer was forced to cut down a couple of his own men with his sword in order to gain the attention of the rest. The ones in panic, those who would try to run away, must be stopped, before their frenzy infected the rest of the troops. The officer had to kill them to stop the stampede that would surely have followed if he had not.