ished drove on in the dark, close to the great flank
of hills. From where King's Mountain, strewn with dead and dying, reared
its black shape like some rudely hewn tomb of a primordial age when
titans strove together, perhaps to the ears of the marching men came
faintly through the night's stillness the howl of a wolf and the
answering chorus of the pack. For the wolves came down to King's
Mountain from all the surrounding hills, following the scent of blood,
and made their lair where the Werewolf had fallen. The scene of the
mountaineers' victory, which marked the turn of the tide for the
Revolution, became for years the chief resort of wolf hunters from both
the Carolinas.

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. Ding's Mountain, indeed, broke the Tory spirit. Seven days after
the battle General Nathanael Greene succeeded to the command of the
Southern Patriot army which Gates had led to defeat. Greene's genius
met the rising tide of the Patriots' courage and hope and took it at
the flood. His strategy, in dividing his army and thereby compelling the
division of Cornwallis's force, led to Daniel Morgan's victory at
the Cowpens, in the Back Country of South Carolina, on January 17,
1781--another frontiersmen's triumph. Though the British won the next
engagement between Greene and Cornwallis--the battle of Guilford Court
House in the North Carolina Back Country, on the 15th of March--Greene
made them pay so dearly for their victory that Tarleton called it "the
pledge of ultimate defeat"; and, three days later, Cornwallis was
retreating towards Wilmington. In a sense, then, King's Mountain was the
pivot of the war's revolving stage, which swung the British from their
succession of victories towards the surrender at Yorktown.

Shelby, Campbell, and Cleveland escorted the prisoners to Virginia.
Sevier, with his men, rode home to Watauga. When the prisoners had been
delivered to the authorities in Virginia, the Holston men also turned
homeward through the hills. Their route lay down through the Clinch and
Holston valleys to the settlement at the base of the mountains. Sevier
and his Wataugans had gone by Gill