As for Gates, he offered no welcome to this ragged squad.  The leader modestly offered him some advice about the military condition of the South, but the general in command was clothed in too dense an armor of conceit to be open to advice from any quarter, certainly not from the leader of such a Falstaffian company, and he was glad enough to get rid of him by sending him on a scouting expedition in advance of the army, to watch the enemy and report his movements.

This service precisely suited him to whom it was given, for this small, non-intrusive personage was no less a man than Francis Marion, then but little known, but destined to become the Robin Hood of partisan warriors, the celebrated “Swamp-Fox” of historical romance and romantic history.

Marion had appeared with the title of colonel.  He left the army with the rank of general.  Governor Rutledge, who was present, knew him and his worth, gave him a brigadier’s commission, and authorized him to enlist a brigade for guerilla work in the swamps and forests of the State.

Thus raised in rank, Marion marched away with his motley crew of followers, they doubtless greatly elevated in dignity to feel that they had a general at their head.  The army indulged in a broad laugh, after they had gone, at Marion’s miniature brigade of scarecrows.  They laughed at the wrong man, for after their proud array was broken and scattered to the winds, and the region they had marched to relieve had become the prey of the enemy, that modest partisan alone was to keep alive the fire of liberty in South Carolina, and so annoy the victors that in the end they hardly dared show their faces out of the forts.  The Swamp-Fox was to pave the way for the reconquest of the South by the brave General Greene.

No long time elapsed before Marion increased his disreputable score to a brigade of more respectable proportions, with which he struck such quick and telling blows from all sides on the British and Tories, that no nest of hornets could have more dismayed a marauding party of boys.  The swamps of the Pedee were his head-quarters.  In their interminable and thicket-hidden depths he found hiding-places in abundance, and from them he made rapid darts, north, south, east, and west, making his presence felt wherever he appeared, and flying back to shelter before his pursuers could overtake him.  His corps was constantly changing, now swelling, now shrinking, now little larger than his original ragged score, now grown to a company of a hundred or more in dimensions.  It was always small.  The swamps could not furnish shelter and food for any large body of men.

Marion’s head-quarters were at Snow’s Island, at the point where Lynch’s Creek joins the Pedee River.  This was a region of high river-swamp, thickly forested, and abundantly supplied with game.  The camp was on dry land, but around it spread broad reaches of wet thicket and canebrake, whose paths were known only to the partisans, and their secrets sedulously preserved.  As regards the mode of life here of Marion and his men, there is an anecdote which will picture it better than pages of description.