from England, or else Scotch highlanders), in part also of cut-throats, horse-thieves, and desperadoes of all kinds who wished for revenge on the whigs and were eager to plunder them.  His own regular force was also mainly composed of Americans, although it contained many Englishmen.  His chief subordinates were Lieutenant-Colonels De Peyster [Footnote:  A relative of the Detroit commander.] and Cruger; the former usually serving under him, the latter commanding at Ninety-Six.  They were both New York loyalists, members of old Knickerbocker families; for in New York many of the gentry and merchants stood by the king.

    Ferguson Approaches the Mountains.

Ferguson moved rapidly from place to place, breaking up the bodies of armed whigs; and the latter now and then skirmished fiercely with similar bands of tories, sometimes one side winning sometimes the other.  Having reduced South Carolina to submission the British commander then threatened North Carolina; and Col.  McDowell, the commander of the whig militia in that district, sent across the mountains to the Holston men praying that they would come to his help.  Though suffering continually from Indian ravages, and momentarily expecting a formidable inroad, they responded nobly to the call.  Sevier remained to patrol the border and watch the Cherokees, while Isaac Shelby crossed the mountains with a couple of hundred mounted riflemen, early in July.  The mountain men were joined by McDowell, with whom they found also a handful of Georgians and some South Carolinians; who when their States were subdued had fled northward, resolute to fight their oppressors to the last.

The arrival of the mountain men put new life into the dispirited whigs.  On July 30th a mixed force, under Shelby and two or three local militia colonels, captured Thickett’s fort, with ninety tories, near the Pacolet.  They then camped at the Cherokee ford of Broad River, and sent out parties of mounted men to carry on a guerilla or partisan warfare against detachments, not choosing to face Ferguson’s main body.  After a while they moved south to Cedar Spring.  Here, on the 8th of August, they were set upon by Ferguson’s advanced guard, of dragoons and mounted riflemen.  These they repulsed, handling the British rather roughly; but, as Ferguson himself came up, they fled, and though he pursued them vigorously he could not overtake them. [Footnote:  Shelby’s MS. Autobiography, and the various accounts he wrote of these affairs in his old age (which Haywood and most of the other local American historians follow or amplify), certainly greatly exaggerate the British force and loss, as well as the part Shelby himself played, compared to the Georgia and Carolina leaders.  The Americans seemed to have outnumbered Ferguson’s advance guard, which was less than two hundred strong, about three to one.  Shelby’s account of the Musgrove affair is especially erroneous.  See p. 120 of L. C. Draper’s “King’s Mountain and Its Heroes” (Cincinnati, 1881).