our heads. Cornwallis with at least 1500
British and Tories waited at Charlotte for the reinforcement of
1000 from Broad River, which reinforcement has been entirely cut
off, 130 killed and the remainder captured. Cornwallis
immediately retreated, and is now on his way toward Charleston,
with part of our army in his rear....--Elizabeth Maxwell
Steel: Salisbury, October 25, 1780.

So thoroughly had the Cherokees been subdued by the devastations
of the campaign of 1776 that for several years thereafter they
were unable to organize for a new campaign against the
backwoodsmen along the frontiers of North Carolina and Tennessee.
During these years the Holston settlers principally busied
themselves in making their position secure, as well as in setting
their house in order by severely punishing the lawless Tory
element among them. In 1779 the Chickamaugas, with whom The
Dragging Canoe and his irreconcilable followers among the
Cherokees had joined hands after the campaign of 1776, grew so
bold in their bloody forays upon small exposed settlements that
North Carolina and Virginia in conjunction despatched a strong
expedition against them. Embarking on April 10th at the mouth of
Big Creek near the present Rogersville, Tennessee, three hundred
and fifty men led by Colonel Evan Shelby descended the Tennessee
to the fastnesses of the Chickamaugas. Meeting with no resistance
from the astonished Indians, who fled to the shelter of the
densely wooded hills, they laid waste the Indian towns and
destroyed the immense stores of goods collected by the British
agents for distribution among the red men. The Chickamaugas were
completely quelled; and during the period of great stress through
which the Tennessee frontiersmen were soon to pass, the Cherokees
were restrained through the wise diplomacy of Joseph Martin,
Superintendent of Indian affairs for Virginia.

The great British offensive against the Southern colonies, which
were regarded as the vulnerable point in the American
Confederacy, was fully launched upon the fall of Charleston in
May, 1780. Cornwallis established his headquarters at Camden; and
one of his lieutenants, the persuasive and brilliant Ferguson,
soon rallied thousands of Loyalists in South Carolina to the
British standard. When Cornwallis inaugurated his campaign for
cutting Washington wholly off from the Southern colonies by
invading North Carolina, the men upon the western waters realized
that the time had com