ornwallis invaded North Carolina he sent Ferguson into the western
part of the State to crush out any of the patriot forces that might
still be lingering among the foot-hills. Ferguson was a very gallant and
able officer, and a man of much influence with the people wherever
he went, so that he was peculiarly fitted for this scrambling border
warfare. He had under him a battalion of regular troops and several
other battalions of Tory militia, in all eleven or twelve hundred men.
He shattered and drove the small bands of Whigs that were yet in arms,
and finally pushed to the foot of the mountain wall, till he could see
in his front the high ranges of the Great Smokies. Here he learned for
the first time that beyond the mountains there lay a few hamlets of
frontiersmen, whose homes were on what were then called the Western
Waters, that is, the waters which flowed into the Mississippi. To these
he sent word that if they did not prove loyal to the king, he would
cross their mountains, hang their leaders, and burn their villages.

Beyond the, mountains, in the valleys of the Holston and Watauga, dwelt
men who were stout of heart and mighty in battle, and when they heard
the threats of Ferguson they burned with a sullen flame of anger.
Hitherto the foes against whom they had warred had been not the British,
but the Indian allies of the British, Creek, and Cherokee, and Shawnee.
Now that the army of the king had come to their thresholds, they turned
to meet it as fiercely as they had met his Indian allies. Among the
backwoodsmen of this region there were at that time three men of special
note: Sevier, who afterward became governor of Tennessee; Shelby, who
afterward became governor of Kentucky; and Campbell, the Virginian, who
died in the Revolutionary War. Sevier had given a great barbecue, where
oxen and deer were roasted whole, while horseraces were run, and the
backwoodsmen tried their skill as marksmen and wrestlers. In the midst
of the feasting Shelby appeared, hot with hard riding, to tell of the
approach of Ferguson and the British. Immediately the feasting was
stopped, and the feasters made ready for war. Sevier and Shelby sent
word to Campbell to rouse the men of his own district and come without
delay, and they sent messengers to and fro in their own neighborhood to
summon the settlers from their log huts on the stump-dotted clearings
and the hunters from their smoky cabins in the deep woods.

The meeting-place was a