parties. These hill towns lay in the high gorges of the Great
Smoky Mountains, 150 miles distant. No one in Watauga had ever been in
them except Thomas, the trader, who, however, had reached them from the
eastern side of the mountains. With no knowledge of the Indians' path
and without a guide, yet nothing daunted, Sevier, late in the summer
of 1781 headed his force into the mountains. So steep were some of the
slopes they scaled that the men were obliged to dismount and help
their horses up. Unexpectedly to themselves perhaps, as well as to the
Indians, they descended one morning on a group of villages and destroyed
them. Before the fleeing savages could rally, the mountaineers had
plunged up the steeps again. Sevier then turned southward into Georgia
and inflicted a severe castigation on the tribes along the Coosa River.

When, after thirty days of warfare and mad riding, Sevier arrived at his
Bonnie Kate's door on the Nolichucky, he found a messenger from General
Greene calling on him for immediate assistance to cut off Cornwallis
from his expected retreat through North Carolina. Again he set out,
and with two hundred men crossed the mountains and made all speed to
Charlotte, in Mecklenburg County, where he learned that Cornwallis had
surrendered at Yorktown on October 19, 1781. Under Greene's orders he
turned south to the Santee to assist a fellow scion of the Huguenots,
General Francis Marion, in the pursuit of Stuart's Britishers. Having
driven Stuart into Charleston, Sevier and his active Wataugans returned
home, now perhaps looking forward to a rest, which they had surely
earned. Once more, however, they were hailed with alarming news.
Dragging Canoe had come to life again and was emerging from the caves of
the Tennessee with a substantial force of Chickamaugan warriors. Again
the Wataugans, augmented by a detachment from Sullivan County, galloped
forth, met the red warriors, chastised them heavily, put them to rout,
burned their dwellings and provender, and drove them back into their
hiding places. For some time after this, the Indians dipped not into
the black paint pots of war but were content to streak their humbled
countenances with the vermilion of beauty and innocence.

It should be chronicled that Sevier, assisted possibly by other
Wataugans, eventually returned to the State of North Carolina the
money which he had forcibly borrowed to finance the King's Mountain
expedition; and that neither he nor She