The Battle of Kings Mountain

In the fall of 1780 the British seemed to have the South in hand. Charleston had fallen in May and Cornwallis was moving into North Carolina. On his western flank, Major Patrick Ferguson was raising Loyalist militia, and he reportedly sent word over the mountains that if the settlers kept resisting he would lay their country waste with fire and sword.

On September 25, 1780, about 1,100 men gathered at Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga River, in what is now Elizabethton, Tennessee: farmers and hunters from the Watauga, Nolichucky and Holston valleys under Isaac Shelby and John Sevier, and Virginians under William Campbell. They crossed the Blue Ridge at Yellow Mountain Gap in hunting shirts, not uniforms, carrying long rifles, and picked up more men in the Carolinas.

On October 7 they caught Ferguson on Kings Mountain, a wooded ridge just south of the North Carolina line, and about 900 of them climbed it from all sides.

The painting stays down among them, in the dim light under the trees. Riflemen in fringed hunting shirts crouch behind rocks and trunks, aiming upslope, while a rider in a slouch hat raises his arm to push them on. At the crest, red coats show through the powder smoke and the turning leaves.