Before They Were Heroes at King’s Mountain

In the fall of 1780 and responding to a threat by an invading army to destroy their homeland, a “ghost legion” of a thousand citizen soldiers banded together and marched over the Appalachian Mountains thus making the would-be hunter the hunted. For two weeks, these North Carolina and Virginia militiamen under the leadership of Isaac Shelby, John Sevier, William Campbell, Benjamin Cleveland, and many other men-of-note, rode through snow and rain tracked down Major Patrick Ferguson and his army of Loyalists. On October 7, the Patriot militia surrounded the regiment of British-trained American Loyalists atop the promontory known as Little King’s Mountain. The Patriot militiamen defeated them in one hour, killing or capturing all the Tories. Thomas Jefferson called that victory, which destroyed the left flank of Cornwallis’s army advancing under its Southern Strategy, the “turning of the tide” in America’s fight for independence.