King's Mountain

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “Two men are missing, sir.” The young officer looked as if he could not believe it himself.

  “Are you sure? Oh, yes, of course you are, or you wouldn’t be telling me, would you? Well, then, which two, Major Tipton?” It crossed my mind that they might have become separated from the group, or met with an accident somewhere along the trace. I even hoped that that might be the case, because the alternative would be somber news indeed.

  “Well, young Sam Chambers is nowhere to be found.”

  I relaxed a little. Sam Chambers wasn’t much more than a boy, and not an overly bright one at that. “Perhaps his nerve failed him,” I said. “Or else he got homesick for his family and hightailed it back there before we got any farther from home.”

  Tipton did not return my smile. He stood there watching me, and his expression told me there was worse to come.

  “Who else, Major?”

  “James Crawford.”

  There it was. Now that was a serious matter indeed. I knew the man Crawford of old, and he was no wavering youth. I had served with him in the Indian wars, and I knew him to be a wily fellow and an able soldier. He had neither lost his way nor his nerve. If he had deserted our forces, it must be because his conscience had put him on the side of the king, or else his soldier’s instincts told him that our ragtag army was likely to be on the losing side when the final reckoning came. He was looking out for himself, which is counted as a virtue on the frontier, and is only an inconvenience when there is a higher cause to be served. Perhaps Crawford had not been outspoken in his support of our cause, but he is an able fellow, and we were sorely in need of soldiers, so when he joined our ranks, we did not question his loyalty.

  “He might have gone home,” said Jonathan Tipton, and I knew he meant that remark more as consolation than as a serious suggestion. The major did not believe it, and, though I wished I could, neither did I. I liked Crawford. He had served well in earlier battles against the Cherokee, and I wished that he had been able to see his way clear to support us in this campaign.

  “We will have to tell the others, Tipton. I am afraid that the man means mischief. He might sell our plans to the Tories for who-knows-what reward.”

  Tipton grunted. “I hope the blackguard gets more than a jug of whiskey for selling us to the enemy.”

  “Thirty pieces of silver, then?” My smile faded even as I uttered the impious jest, for it was a grave matter. “Even if he has simply gone in search of a Tory militia to join up with them, I think he will certainly cost us the element of surprise.”

  “Will you send some trackers after him?”

  I shook my head. “There’s no telling when he left, or which way he plans to travel, and we cannot afford to waste any men on a fruitless effort to overtake him. Though I’ll wager he is headed for Gilbert Town, since Major Ferguson is reputed to be there. I’d better tell the others.”

  While the men practiced their military maneuvers, I again took counsel with my fellow commanders, telling them of the defection of two of my men, and confessing my fear that they would betray us to Ferguson.

  Red-faced with anger, Campbell said, “Well, that’s torn it! Now we know that we would be marching straight into a trap. I suppose we will have to turn back.”

  Shelby was silent for a moment. He thinks things through before he makes a decision, but once he does, he will stay the course. “We have slaughtered the settlement’s cows, and spent their tax money on supplies and black powder. If we abandon the mission now, all that will be for naught.”

  I had hoped one of the others would take that line, for I did not want to quit. I said, “Shelby is talking sense here. The enemy will know we’re coming sooner or later, anyhow. And that’s all Crawford knows, really, isn’t it? That we’re taking a raft of troops into their territory, intending to fight. But Crawford doesn’t know which way we’re going, or what our tactics might be, so I doubt that his information will be any great help to Ferguson.”

  Campbell considered it. He was by no means pacified, but he was a seasoned soldier, and he saw the sense in our arguments.

  “We may never get another chance with a force of this size,” said McDowell. “We need to put an end to Ferguson’s raids, sooner rather than later. My people want to go home.”

  Campbell sighed. “Well, if the three of you are set on it, I suppose I must see it through as well. All right, then, let’s do what we can to limit the damage. We can divide our forces, alter the route a bit, and make as much haste as we can. That way at least we may avoid an ambush somewhere upon the trail.”

  I clapped him on the shoulder. “Good man! We will do all those things. When we make camp tonight, let’s go over the routes, and decide how to divide up our forces before we proceed.”

  Campbell nodded. “And when we catch that traitorous man of yours, let’s hang him.”

  * * *

  At the end of the drilling that afternoon, we ordered the men to fire a volley with their rifles, as if to inform heaven itself of our resolve. But even the thunder of a thousand weapons fired in unison was swallowed up by that great wall of mountains that enveloped us. My first thought was how insignificant we were, dwarfed by that vast wilderness, but I consoled myself with the thought that if we were so small, it would be all the harder for the enemy to find us until we were ready to meet them in battle. The sword of the Lord and of Gideon. His army was a small one, too, as I recall.

  “We must divide our forces now,” said Campbell, when we met again later that afternoon. “If we do that, the Tories cannot ensnare all of us at once.”

  “Agreed,” said Shelby. “And by splitting up, we will occasion different rumors about our passage, if anyone along the way is inclined to betray us to the enemy.”

  “Perhaps we should first send a scouting party ahead, to tell us if we are walking into a trap.”

  Charles McDowell gestured with the hand that held his flask. “I’ll go. My men have just lately come over the mountain, and we know the way back. Let me take some of my men and go on ahead.”

  We looked at one another, but no one voiced any objection to McDowell’s offer. He did know the trails, and he had resources where we were going. It made sense to let him go on ahead. “It would help to know where Ferguson is,” I said.

  “So it would,” Shelby agreed. “It would shorten our journey and make our provisions last longer if we knew exactly where to find him.”

  Campbell nodded. “But you’ll meet up with us soon and tell us what you find, will you not, Colonel McDowell?”

  “I will,” said McDowell. “The rest of you can stay together a day or so longer. No one will find you in these mountains. Keep heading southeast. We’ll find you in a few days once you’ve come down into the valley of the Catawba.” He stood up, brushing wet leaves from his breeches, and squinted at the westering sun. “There’s still a good hour of daylight left. No time like the present, I suppose. I’ll collect a few of my best men and be off. Safe travels, gentlemen.”

  A bit later we watched him mount up and ride off at the head of his small band of Burke County soldiers. He followed a straight path along the creek that would lead him down into the valley of the Roan, and then onward to the foothills of the mountains.

  Soon the trees and the slope of the trail obscured them from view, and the three of us turned away. “We won’t get much farther today,” I said, for the sun was low in the sky and we would not be moving at the pace of McDowell with his smaller force. “Still, I’ve no wish to make camp here, so let’s get as far as we can toward lower ground, else we get caught in a fresh snowfall up here in the clouds.”

  Shelby and Campbell nodded in agreement, and we gave the word to our officers to make the men ready to move on. We would follow a more arduous path across the mountain than the one McDowell had taken, proceeding in the shadow of the high mountains so that a false twilight seemed to overtake us even before the sun had set. We pressed on, following an east-leading path, and we managed to travel perhaps two miles far
ther along before the dark came in earnest, leaving us still high in the Yellow Mountains, shivering from the bitter chill of the autumn night. We camped beside a spring, wrapped in blankets that afforded us little relief from the cold winds that whistled through the hollow. Those who had brought extra clothing put it on now, and some of the others complained about the wintry air, perhaps regretting that they had exchanged their homes in the Watauga Valley, still wreathed in the warmth of summer, for a cold dark mountain pass in the wildwood.

  It was an easier trek than we’d had in the morning, though, for we had crested the mountain and were now making our way downhill. We’d never have made two miles that evening if we hadn’t been on the downward slope.

  That night I sat at the campfire with my boys Joseph and James, sharing our rations of cracked corn and fresh-killed beef, and talking over the day’s events. We were wrapped up in our coarse woolen blankets, but the cold mountain air still found its way into our bones, and we huddled close to the fire to ward off the chill.

  “Well, James,” I said to the younger boy, “you were adamant to come with us. What do you think of soldiering now?”

  He grinned up at me in the firelight, and wiped his mouth against his sleeve. “It’s fine, Daddy. I reckon I can march as well as any of the other fellows now, with all the drilling practice we had today. But I’ll be glad when we can quit walking and go to fighting.”

  “You’ll walk three miles for every minute of a battle, boy,” I told him. “Soldiering is as much walking and waiting and sleeping rough as it is adventure and excitement. Best make up your mind to accept that now.”

  “It’s worth it, though,” said Joseph. “If we whip those Tories, we’ll have a tale to tell for the whole rest of our lives. We can say we were there. We fought in the glorious Revolution. Maybe adventures sound better when you’re telling them than they feel when you’re a-living them.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that’s the truth,” I said. “For when you tell this tale to your children in years to come, you’ll leave out all the tedium of the marching and you’ll forget the times that the bad food put knots in your belly or the blisters pained on your heels. You’ll only talk about the glory of the battle. They say that women forget the pain of childbirth and remember only the joy of the babe that comes of it. Maybe men are like that about war.”

  * * *

  The morning dawned clear and bright, and we made ready to continue our journey in good spirits, for we knew that the hardest part of the march was behind us. From here on, we would be heading down the mountains, covering more miles every day as we made our way into the broad river valleys to the east. The nights would be warmer, and the food more plentiful, as we came into farming country at harvest time. Now we had only to find Ferguson before he could get reinforcements from General Lord Cornwallis, and all would be well.

  We followed a bold stream that tumbled down the mountain, and by mid-morning we had descended from the heights of the Roan to summer country once again, where the sun burned away the last of the chill from our night on the mountain. When the slope of the mountain gave way to a valley, the creek flowed into the Toe River, which was our guide for the remainder of the day’s travel. The banks cut by the river were often steep and warranted the utmost caution as we traversed them, but the path was a royal road compared to the hard climbing of the previous days, and by pushing forward to the limits of the men’s endurance, we were able to put twenty miles behind us before the coming of night.

  We halted for the evening at the mouth of Grassy Creek at Cathee’s Plantation, not many miles from the gap that would take us on the final descent into the rolling valleys. If nothing went wrong, we should reach the McDowell plantation at Quaker Meadows in two days.

  “We must divide our forces soon,” Shelby said.

  While the men were making camp, and building the evening’s campfires, Campbell, Shelby, and I walked around the encampment, making sure that all was going smoothly, and taking the opportunity to confer once more on the situation at hand. It had been a peaceful journey so far. We had seen no hostile Indians, experienced no ambushes, and lost no men to the rigors of the march. I hoped that our luck would hold, but I knew that we could not count on it. We must do all we could to protect ourselves from misfortune, and, now that we had reached the eastern edge of the mountains, we could no longer consider ourselves safe from ambush. Ferguson could be a day’s ride away—and we didn’t know where.

  “I think we must do it first thing tomorrow,” said Campbell, “before we get too far into the valley. I hope that McDowell will send word to warn us if the enemy is in our path.”

  We all nodded in agreement. “At the gap, then,” said Shelby.

  After tonight’s encampment, we would push forward to the Gillespie Gap, and then, perhaps by midday, go separate ways.

  I think Campbell was haunted by the thought that his militia would be annihilated, and leave Virginia at the mercy of the advancing army of Cornwallis. I did not share his sense of dread, partly because I did not think we would be roundly defeated, but also perhaps because with the war going on northeast of here, I did not think the Tories would go so far out of their way to attack the Watauga settlements in force, and if they finally sent over a splinter of an army, I reckoned we could take ’em.

  I expect Shelby felt the same about the safety of his territory, or else, like me, he liked our chances of surviving the battle and getting home in one piece. But, worried or not, we saw the sense in the suggestion to split up. It was only for a day or two at most, and then our combined forces would be bigger than ever. By now the Yadkin militia of Ben Cleveland and Winston’s forces from the Moravian settlements would have mustered somewhere northeast of here and they, too, would be heading for Quaker Meadows. I wondered if James Crawford had managed to find Ferguson yet, and whether Ferguson had any thoughts of coming after us before we reached McDowell’s plantation.

  James wolfed down his rations, and wandered off to find some of the young men his age, but my eldest boy stared into the campfire with a scowl that said more than he could have shouted. I wondered if the cracked corn was making knots in his belly, or if he was sore from the climb, but since he was half my age, and I was hale and hearty, I thought something else was amiss.

  “Something bothering you, boy?” I said.

  Joseph shrugged. “Just I didn’t sign on to be no nursemaid, is all.”

  “Looking out for James, you mean?”

  “He’s like a new-weaned pup, running all over the place, getting in everybody’s way, and never shutting up. I feel like I’m running cattle all by myself, riding herd on him. Why didn’t you leave him home with the rest of the young’uns?”

  Now it was my turn to stare into the firelight. “He needs to grow up, Joe. Your mother is gone, and Mrs. Sevier has all she can do to look after the little ones. It’s time for James to start becoming a man, and the only way he can do that is if we let him act like one. Sure, he will put a foot wrong at the outset, maybe more times than we’d care to count, but he’s got the chance to watch the rest of us, and see how men behave. I don’t know of any other way for him to learn.”

  “All right,” said Joseph, still not happy about it.

  “And you need to learn something, too, son. I see you becoming a leader, and that means being able to control all manner of men that come under your command—the weak, the lazy, the timid, and the reckless. And you need to be able to look after a man who needs help, even if it means putting your life at risk. There’s a lot of trust in soldiering. Your life depends on them and theirs on you. Do you understand?”

  He nodded unhappily.

  “Good. Then the sooner you can settle your brother down and make a useful soldier out of him, the closer you are to having troops of your own to oversee. And someday the skills you learn from looking after James may be worth something to you.” I handed Joseph my flask of spirits, and nodded for him to take a swig. “This journey is a test for both you boys. You see that, don’t
you?”

  The boy nodded, and looked away. “Reckon so,” he said in a voice gruff from the raw spirits, or perhaps from tears. “But I swear, Daddy, James would try the patience of St. Peter.”

  I laughed. “If I remember my Bible, son, St. Peter wasn’t known for patience any more than you are. Didn’t he cut off the ear of a Roman soldier in Gethsemane? Well, do your best, anyhow. We have a long way to go, and it’s too late for any of us to turn back now.”

  * * *

  The night was so chilly and the cold ground so uncomfortable that I scarcely minded when the dark blanket of stars above my head gave way to the first gray streaks of dawn. I had no wish to linger there in an effort to sleep. The sooner we got down the mountain, the sooner we could settle our score with the enemy and go home. Then, in a warm feather bed with my dearest Kate, I would sleep.

  We made a hasty breakfast of some of our rations, packed up our gear, and, still together as an army, we headed up the valley of Grassy Creek to the Gillespie Gap. The trek up the valley to the gap was a good ten miles, mostly uphill, and I threaded my way carefully along the trail, for I knew my horse was tired after the past few days’ arduous journey across the Yellow Mountains, and I did not want his strength to give out when we were half a day’s ride from the gentle grasslands of the broad Catawba Valley.

  When we reached the gap, we paused there in the September sunshine looking at the ripple of mountains stretching away into a blue haze of clouds on the horizon, so that at times it was hard to tell where the ridges stopped and the mist began. I was looking at the mountain as I had looked at clouds when I was a boy, turning their shapes into familiar images in my mind—the face of an old man, or the round hump of a buffalo’s back—when the procession of riders parted, and William Campbell guided his horse up beside mine. He did not spare a glance for the sprawl of hills around us, and, though he looked a bit worn down from the hard ride, I could see that he only had thoughts for the mission at hand.