King's Mountain (6 page)

I had heard this already from my brother Valentine, who agreed with Colonel Shelby. Their troops were only thirty miles from Ninety Six, mounted and ready to advance, but before they could get under way, they were stopped by a courier from Charles McDowell. He was delivering a dispatch that McDowell had received hours earlier from General Caswell. The letter advised them that Gen. Horatio Gates had been soundly defeated at Camden. South Carolina was now controlled by the Loyalist forces under Lord Cornwallis. This was deemed to be such a blow to the Revolution that our commander could not risk the loss of any more troops.

“I heard of it from my brother,” I said. “That letter from Caswell, informing you of Gates's defeat. Infernally bad timing, wasn't it?”

“We had to pass Ferguson's encampment on our way north, and they gave chase. We hastened with such speed that we dispensed with encampments altogether. We drank from streams as we crossed them, and ate what he found in the fields we traversed. Finally, we reached McDowell at Gilbert Town, not long after our pursuers called a halt to their chase and faded back to the south. And so we came home.”

“But this threat from Ferguson is your pretext for another chance.”

“Well, it's only the gravy, Sevier, not the meat. Before we even got back from the Musgrove Mill expedition, Robertson and I talked about it, and we decided that it would be a good idea to raise as large a force as we could muster, and send them all back to engage the enemy in one fell swoop. And this time I don't mean to let any timid commanders hold us back.”

“But you are proposing to head back there and join forces with McDowell again?”

He scowled. “That cannot be helped. We need his support, but not his leadership. He is an old sheep and I mean to lose him in a mighty flock.

“Look here, Sevier, just think. You with the Fort Lee contingent, and Robertson with his Watauga boys. William Campbell can bring Virginia troops, and I have my command. Benjamin Cleveland down on the Yadkin. If we put all the militias together, more will join us—some South Carolinians perhaps, and some units from even farther east than the Yadkin. Why, we could put together a force of more than a thousand men.”

“I suppose we could. And how many have agreed to join you thus far?”

Shelby hesitated for a moment and in the silence, the shouts and laughter from the lawn filled the little parlor. I looked out at the golden afternoon. There under the trees, the younger children were chasing one of the puppies, and from a bench in the shade of a towering poplar, the older ladies were keeping an eye on the courting couples. It was odd to think of my bride Catherine as one of the settlement's matrons now, though she was all of twenty-six by now, and the new stepmother of a sixteen-year-old lad, my Joseph, as well as the nine younger Seviers.

I knew that Shelby was asking me to leave all this—leave my bride of three weeks—to march off to war a hundred miles and more from home. The war had been going on for four years now. Why must it come after me now?

“Who else has agreed to this, Colonel Shelby?”

He stared out the window for a few more moments, and then he met my gaze without a qualm. His purpose, after all, was to see that all of us on the frontier were safe, and so my wife and children were the very reason to go. “I came to ask you first,” he said. “But I don't think we have much of a choice. We can't sit back and let the government in the north fight this war against the Tories when it's all happening on our lands—and they don't know how to fight the battles. It's not just McDowell anymore. Now it's the likes of Gates, too. We're the frontiersmen, Sevier. We're the ones who know how to fight; and I'd prefer to do so before the battles creep into our own backyards.”

“Tell me about Gates, then.”

“You know that Congress appointed him the commander for the southern department of the war, as they call it.”

“Yes, Horatio Gates. English by birth. They say he is the son of a duke.”

“And also the son of that duke's housekeeper. He is a mule of a man, trying mightily to be a thoroughbred, and thoroughly irritating everyone who crosses his path with his airs and graces. Leaving aside all the tittle-tattle about his behavior in the northern colonies, he comes south, and decides to attack Camden, despite objections from the local commanders that their troops are not ready to do battle. Then he, knowing nothing of the terrain himself since he just arrived, insists on marching the army by the ‘direct route' to Camden, through swamp and pine barrens, instead of taking the road that would have taken them through farmlands, where friendly Whigs would have fed the troops along the way. So he arrived with tired and ailing soldiers, and ordered a night march on the town. Cornwallis, who was headquartered there in the home of some poor Whig, ordered a march that same night, knowing full well that Gates's army was coming. The Tory spies are quite efficient, I fear.”

“My brother Valentine has said that the battle was a rout, but he gave me little of the particulars.”

Shelby waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, they were outnumbered, sick from trying to eat green corn, and footsore from the long march. It is not the battle that I wished to speak of. It is the aftermath. They say that Gates left the battlefield at a gallop. Major Davie was on his way to the battle with a small group of reinforcements, when—ten miles from Camden—he encountered a rider in full flight, heading north. Davie says that Gates ordered him to turn back, to which the major replied that his men were ready to fight against Tarleton, despite his reputation as a butcher. General Gates looked back as if he expected to see all the devils of hell in pursuit of him, and then he spurred his horse and sped on northward.”

“Gates abandoned the army?”

Shelby shrugged. “What was left of it. We had nearly four thousand men on the field at Camden, and General Cornwallis claimed that his men had killed a quarter of that number and wounded another quarter. Meanwhile, as these men lay maimed or dying at Camden, their illustrious commander rode more than a hundred and eighty miles in just three days, and fetched up in Hillsborough.”

There were so many thoughts crowding my brain that I seized upon one at random and said it aloud. “General Gates … He is not a young man, is he?”

“He is past fifty. You may consider that ride an admirable feat for a man of his age, but as behavior for a general it is monstrous.”

“And is he still in Hillsborough?”

“The last word that I had said he was there with the few hundred survivors of his folly at Camden, trying to reassemble an army. If you are thinking of appealing to Gates for help—”

“Not after what you've said,” I assured him. “It sounds as if we are on our own. But we cannot do it alone, you know, Shelby. Not just with your militia and mine. We haven't enough men.”

“No, but people look up to you, Colonel Sevier. If I can tell people that you are with us, then the rest will come. You can raise at least a hundred men or so, can't you?”

“Yes, but you know it will take more than numbers. If you propose to march a few hundred men down to Ninety Six, or wherever the fight will be, then you'll need powder and shot, rations, supplies … It takes a deal of money to grease the wheels of a war wagon.”

“Yes, it does indeed, but no one will give us the money until we have the army. We'll cross that bridge farther along. What I need to know right now is—will you come?”

I considered it. “So Ferguson threatens to bring the war to us.”

“Yes. That's the nub of it. I do not think any of us has a choice of whether or not to fight. You can only decide whether you want to do it in the low country or”—he pointed to the sunlit lawn beyond the window—“there.”

“Where are the armies now? Do you know?”

“Lord Cornwallis and Banastre Tarleton are thought to be in Charlotte, but Major Ferguson was headed for Gilbert Town, and we deem it likely that he is still there in the foothills burning and thieving his way to converting the people to his side. I don't want him here.”

“No. It was good of him to warn us, though. I wonder why he did.”

“It's peculiar, isn't it? I can only assume that he meant to frighten us into submission.”

We looked at each other and laughed. “He doesn't know us very well, does he?”

VIRGINIA SAL

I joined up with him that summer, a week or so after Ramsour's Mill. Some of the folk hereabouts would take umbrage at my doing that, for they were saying that the British were only trying to keep us from being free, but I never had any time for wrangling about politics. I reckon I will still have to chop wood and boil water no matter who is in charge of the country. I listened to all the arguing, though—you could hardly help it unless you was to sit off by yourself the livelong day, which I had neither the means nor the leisure to do. I kept my opinions to myself, but hearing both sides of the wrangle day in and day out, I saw the most sense in those that held with keeping our ties with England. Maybe it's all right for those folk in the big cities by the ocean to harp on being independent, but here we are in the hill country, a few far-flung farms and patchwork fields hewed out of a tangle of forest that goes on forever. Who is to save us if the Indians make another war? Or if the Spanish should decide to come north? If that was to happen, I reckon most folk around here would go down on their knees and beg the British to stay.

Anyhow, I did like the look of that fellow I saw commanding the Loyalist troops in these parts.

I caught a glimpse of him from afar as his regiment went marching down the road one day. Some of the men had on the scarlet coats of the regular army, and they made a fine show on their horses, with their swords and their brass fittings glinting in the sunshine. Most of the soldiers, though, were just South Carolina farm boys, not real soldiers at all, and they just looked dusty and hot, and ordinary, trudging down the road in the wake of the gentry. The commander caught my eye at once. I took him for a general, with his fine white horse and his faraway look, as if he was so important and noble that it was beneath him to notice anything so common as a muddy trace cutting through the hills of Carolina, and a bunch of gawking rustics, peering at him from over their fences.

Folk who had seen him up close were full of tales about the commander's fancy way of talking, and the prissy way he had of insisting on proper meals and clean clothes, even when he was soldiering and camped out in the back of beyond. He was quality. You could tell. But when I went along to the army camp that summer morning, I hadn't any notion of meeting up with him at all. He was just a sight to behold, riding by on a white horse, and I had no more thought of getting closer to him that you'd have about keeping company with a waterfall or a snow white deer—he was just a marvel to say you had seen one time, that's all.

His manservant, Powell, found me in the camp, a few days after that set-to they had at Cowpens. Their side had won that battle, and so I came along out of curiosity, but mainly to see if there were pickings to be had, for I have to make my own way in the world. There are some I know who would have run away from an army, and if I had been a man, I reckon I might have done that, but, on my own like I was and sick to death of being the hired girl on an upland farm, I thought I would go and see what the war was like, afore things around here went back to being dull again. I was young and pretty enough to be sure of my welcome among soldiers. And I reckoned I was safer with an army than I would have been as a lone, lorn woman on some farmstead when they came through, a-foraging. You fare better if they can count you as one of their own, and if you are not afraid of them, for one on one they are mostly just farm boys, same as all the ones you've seen a-plowing and hoeing corn. Besides, from what I had seen these past months of Loyalists and Rebels raiding farms, stealing livestock provisions, and hanging them that disagreed with them, I judged that it might well be safer to be with an army than staying at home and trying to ignore one.

So I set out that morning before sunup, looking for the war.

It didn't take much to find them, neither. The Indians may slip in and out of the woods without ever you knowing they were there until too late, but the king's army rampages around like so many rutting bulls, making all the noise and commotion they please and proud of the display of it. So I had to ask the way a time or two, along with a dipper full of water, for it was a day of breathless heat, but finally I found them along about mid-morning, and I strolled into the camp, smiling and nodding how-do as if I had been sent an invitation.

I attracted attention enough. Some of the Loyalists were older men, and mindful of families left back at home, and bone weary besides from all the marching, but there were enough young bucks in the ranks to create quite a stir at the sight of me. I smiled broader and edged away from a grasping few, looking for somebody worth my time.

A likely-looking bunch of the younger soldiers had gathered around me, and they were making free with their flasks and their rations, when a fussy little terrier of a man—name of Elias Powell, I was to find out—spied me talking amongst them, and he swooped in like a duck after a june bug, cut me out of the pack, and hustled me away, with his hand gripped tight around my elbow so's I couldn't run.

“What did you want to do that for?” I asked, trying to shake him off. “I wasn't doing nothing, but only just passing the time of day with those boys back there.”

He tightened his grip on my arm and shook it a little to show he meant it. “How do we know you aren't a spy for the Whigs then?”

I blinked at that, for it wasn't what I was expecting to hear. This Elias Powell wasn't much older than me, maybe twenty-five, I judged, though not at all as handsome as them he had dragged me away from. He looked like a chinless rabbit, and he sounded like a local farmer, but even so I thought that he had taken me away from the militia men either because he disapproved of stray women in camp, or else because he had designs upon me his own self, though now I could see that his thoughts lay elsewhere entirely.