Existing comment:
From various signs (and the park had great signs!):
Liberty!
Gunshots and the shouts of hundreds of men battered the slope you see just ahead as one of the fiercest battles of the American Revolution broke out. Every man here that day knew that the Carolina back-country had burned and bled since May when the British landed on the coast. Unrelenting civil war had scourged the South with partisan plundering, bushwhacking, and brutal massacres -- neighbor against rancorous neighbor, and fathers against sons.
For the first time since Lexington and Concord, people living in the nearby piedmont and over-mountain settlements had to make a hard choice. The men who charged through these woods were determined to defend their homes. They had taken up arms against the King and his officers, and now they would spill blood -- for a new country.
Patriot fighters here wore their everyday frontier clothes, not military uniforms. Some Whigs puts scraps of white paper in their hats, the only way to distinguish a friend from a Tory foe.
Militiamen answered the call to duty armed with an assortment of weapons from their farms and hunting camps -- long rifles, hunting knives, muskets, and tomahawks.
Carolina Backwoodsmen
"This distinguished race of men are more savage than the Indians, and possess every one of their vices, but not one of their virtues. I have known... these fellows (to) travel 200 miles through the woods never keeping any road or path, guided by the sun by day, and the stars by night, to kill a particular person of the opposite party." -- George Hanger, British officer formerly attached to Ferguson's provincial corps
Many British leaders, like Major Hanger, had little hesitation in voicing low options of the pioneers who lived on the farthest edges of the Empire. As the first shots rang out, the woods to your left were filled with 160 such men, who had indeed traveled more than 200 miles of roadless wilderness to oppose the King.
Leaving their hard-ridden horses tied a mile from Kings Mountain, rough riflemen rushed along the slope to take up their assigned place here. Their job -- to block the Tories should they try to escape to rejoin Lord Cornwallis.
In late September, these western Carolina Whigs had ridden over the highest mountains in the East to answer the call for patriots to rally at Sycamore Shoals, Tennessee. As these over-mountain men crossed 4,700-foot-high Roan Mountain coming back east, they rode through snow that was already "shoe-tongue deep."
Fighting in a Forest Primeval
"Kings Mountain... would have enabled us to oppose a superior force with advantage had it not been covered with wood which sheltered the Americans and enabled them to fight in their favorite manner." -- Alexander Chesney, South Carolina Loyalist
The woods you see around you today may look ancient, but they are only a shadow of the mature forest that stood here October 1780. Hardwood trees like oaks, hickories, and chestnuts covered the slopes of Kings Mountain, their great trunks massive by today's standards. Each tree stood much farther apart than you see here. Nor was there as much underbrush. Both Whig and Tory accounts of the battle say they could see their enemies at long distances, and could move rapidly under the forest canopy. At the time of the battle, the top of the mountain was bare, open ground.
The last time timber was cut off Kings Mountain was less than a century ago. Forest has been reclaiming both the side slopes and the crest.
Local Boys & Spies
The patriots who formed battle lines at the foot of this steep hillside were local boys who knew Kings Mountain well. Some had used the larger clearing atop the ridge as a deerhunters' camp.
Local men from the South Fork settlements had helped the Whig colonels scout out where the King's men had taken their stand. As 25-year-old Major William Chronicle ordered his militia to "Face the hill," many a man knew he would have to face close relatives or neighbors among the Tories they would soon fight.
Near here Whig scouts questioned a Tory girl who had just been up to Ferguson's campsite to deliver some chickens. From her, and from John Ponder, a 14-year-old local lad just captured with the major's last letter in hand, they learned a key fact. The British commander was wearing an unusual "checkered hunting shirt" over his fine officer's redcoat. |