red neighbors--but to the
short-sighted treachery and ferocity of the savages themselves, and
especially to the machinations of the tories and British agents. The
latter unceasingly incited the Indians to ravage the frontier with torch
and scalping knife. They deliberately made the deeds of the torturers
and women-killers their own, and this they did with the approbation of
the British Government, and to its merited and lasting shame.

Yet by the end of 1779 the inrush of settlers to the Holston regions had
been so great that, as with Kentucky, there was never any real danger
after this year that the whites would be driven from the land by the red
tribes whose hunting-ground it once had been.

CHAPTER IX.

KING'S MOUNTAIN, 1780.

The British in the Southern States.

During the Revolutionary war the men of the west for the most part took
no share in the actual campaigning against the British and Hessians.
Their duty was to conquer and hold the wooded wilderness that stretched
westward to the Mississippi; and to lay therein the foundations of many
future commonwealths. Yet at a crisis in the great struggle for liberty,
at one of the darkest hours for the patriot cause, it was given to a
band of western men to come to the relief of their brethren of the
seaboard and to strike a telling and decisive blow for all America. When
the three southern provinces lay crushed and helpless at the feet of
Cornwallis, the Holston backwoodsmen suddenly gathered to assail the
triumphant conqueror. Crossing the mountains that divided them from the
beaten and despairing people of the tidewater region, they killed the
ablest lieutenant of the British commander, and at a single stroke undid
all that he had done.

By the end of 1779 the British had reconquered Georgia. In May, 1780,
they captured Charleston, speedily reduced all South Carolina to
submission, and then marched into the old North State. Cornwallis, much
the ablest of the British generals, was in command over a mixed force of
British, Hessian, and loyal American regulars, aided by Irish volunteers
and bodies of refugees from Florida. In addition, the friends to the
king's cause, who were very numerous in the southernmost States, rose at
once on the news of the British successes, and thronged to the royal
standards; so that a number of regiments of tory militia were soon
embodied. McGillivray, the Creek chief, sent bands of his warriors to
assist the British and to