Tree to tree, up the mountain

The story, from several sources

This account blends Rothbard’s chapter with the other sources listed below and has not yet been separated into Rothbard’s own account and the fuller story. Read Rothbard’s chapter 57 for his account.

By late September 1780 the British thought the Carolina back country was theirs. Cornwallis sat at Charlotte, and Major Patrick Ferguson, the one regular officer among a thousand Loyalist militia, was ranging through the hills to punish rebels. He sent word across the mountains to the Watauga settlers: stop opposing the king or he would hang their leaders and lay waste their country. They took it badly. Isaac Shelby, John Sevier and William Campbell brought their neighbors, and by 15 September more than 1,400 riflemen stood at the Watauga. Ferguson turned east and took up a position on King’s Mountain, a low rocky ridge on the Carolina line. On 7 October nine hundred of the best mounted riflemen caught him there. They tied their horses and climbed from every side, and Shelby told his men to be their own officers and fight from behind the trees. Ferguson’s bayonet charges drove one party back down the slope, only for another to close in on a different flank. Ferguson said he would never surrender to such banditti, and he was killed. Rothbard calls the victory a people’s victory, won without any semblance of a Continental force or even of an overall commander. It showed that the United States could lose an army at Camden and still beat the British. Of Ferguson’s 1,000 men, not one escaped being killed or captured; the Americans lost about 90.