King's Mountain (15 page)

Pushing my way through the onlookers, I squatted down next to Uzal Johnson. “They say he fell under the wheel of a baggage wagon,” I said. “Did he break his leg?”

The doctor nodded. “That's not the worst of it.” He grabbed my hand and set it down on top of the fountain of blood spurting out from a tear in the soldier's britches. “Keep your hand there, Sal,” he said. “Push hard, while I think what can be done.”

“Won't you set the bone?” I asked. “I can find you a likely stick to make a splint with.”

Uzal Johnson sighed. “It won't come to that, Sal. Look closely where the wound is.”

I tried to peer down through the stream of blood, and then I saw what the doctor meant for me to see. A jagged piece of bone stuck out from beneath the skin near the wound.

“Keep pushing down, Sal.” When he saw that I had managed to staunch the flow, the doctor gestured to one of the officers. “Get all these men away, sir. I don't want them here.”

The officer nodded and began to herd the crowd away from the fallen soldier, shouting orders for them to gather firewood and such.

Malcolm Hardie had stopped wailing now. His eyes were open, and he kept taking in great gulps of air, while he tried to lie still.

“What has happened,” said the doctor, speaking to both of us, “is that the wagon wheel snapped that leg bone in two, and when it broke, the splintered bone poked its way up through the skin, tearing the femoral artery; hence all the bleeding.”

I nodded, fighting the urge to pull my hand away from the pooling blood. “How long do I have to hold the wound like this, Doctor?”

Uzal Johnson wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his coat. “Why, for the rest of his life, Sal.”

“But … but … can't you sew up the cut and stop the bleeding?”

He shook his head. “He would bleed to death before I could get in a single stitch. His life is draining away now, and all that is keeping him alive is the pressure of your hand upon the wound. When you take it away, this man will die.”

I pushed harder, and tried not to look into the face of the wounded man, but at last I did, and I saw that he was staring at me, calm now. “It don't hurt too awful much,” he said. “It'll be quick, won't it, sir?”

Dr. Johnson nodded. “Quicker than you can say the Lord's Prayer, soldier. But you have a little time yet to prepare yourself. Sal here can hold that wound shut yet a while, can't you, Sal?”

I nodded, feeling tears sting my eyes, and then I looked away so that he might not see me cry. Away at the edge of the field I saw Virginia Paul, looking above her into the branches of an oak tree, and paying us no mind at all. She was singing.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Late September 1780

The remainder of September went by in a storm of activity and preparation, as the men of the militia and our womenfolk made ready for our expedition. True to her word, my Catherine set out to sew clothing for me and my eldest boy, Joseph, who would accompany me.

Joseph and I were cleaning our weapons, and talking about the coming journey, when from her sewing table, Catherine called out to me, “Mr. Sevier, here is another of your sons who wants to go with you!”

I set down my rifle, and glanced at Joseph. “Wait here, boy.”

I found Catherine seated among her sewing things, and, beside her, red-faced and sullen, stood my second boy, James, sixteen years old, and chafing at the bit to be a man. Catherine tried not to smile. “He has been bending my ear half the morning with all the reasons that we should let him go. You'd better hear him out.”

James blushed at this, but he lifted his chin and met my gaze with a steady stare. “I want to come with you. I'm as good a shot as Joseph is, and I'm as old as you were when you married Mama and set off on your own, so don't tell me I'm too young to go, because I'm not.”

I sighed. “This will not be an easy journey, James, nor a safe one.”

“I know that. But if Joseph can do it, so can I.”

“The Tories would as soon hang prisoners as look at them. I hear tell that sometimes even the Whigs make a mistake and hang someone on their own side without taking the time to establish his bona fides.”

He grinned. “They'll have to catch me first.”

I wavered. He would have to learn to fight sooner or later. Life on the frontier was an endless war with nature or hostile tribes, so the boy might as well fight Tories as Indians. At least they didn't scalp their victims. Besides, it wasn't as if I would have my hands full with him. He was a steady lad, who gave little trouble. Besides, Joseph could look after him, and my own brothers Robert and Valentine would be with us. But there was one last objection to his going.

“We have but two horses, James. And it is a hundred miles or more over the mountain to where we must go.”

He beamed with joy when I said this, for like all children he recognized a parent's feeble objection over a minor matter as a sign that grudging permission was soon forthcoming. “Oh, a horse! Why, that's nothing, Daddy. Somebody will give me a horse. I'll ask Uncle Robert. His boys are way too young to go. He'll gimme his other saddle horse, for certain.”

I thought it likely that he would, too. I had talked to him about it a day or so before, and told him what the plans were.

“I'll come with you,” my brother Robert had said.

I hesitated. “We need to leave some men here to guard the settlement, you know. Some of your wife's people are staying. James Robertson would be glad of your company, if you wanted to stay.”

My younger brother shrugged. “I'm going. You're going. I reckon Valentine is going. What about Joseph?”

I nodded. “Yes. Both of them—our brother Joseph, and his namesake, my son. The boy is eighteen now. I said he could come.”

“Well, I may be your youngest brother, but try to remember that I am an old man of thirty. If you're letting your eighteen-year-old boy ride with you, don't even think of telling me to stay home with the women and the babies. I'm going.”

We were sitting outside Robert's house on a bench under a big shade tree with the mountains rising up before us like a blue curtain, so misty that it was hard to tell where the hills stopped and the clouds began. I had wanted a word with him in private. After I said my greetings to Robert's wife, Keziah, and to little Charlie, and duly admired their red-faced newborn, named Valentine after our father, I had beckoned my brother outside with a solemn expression that told him my visit was more than a social call.

I sighed. “I knew you'd be hell-bent to come, but that new son of yours is just on two months old, isn't he? And little Charlie is not but two. Shouldn't you think about staying with Keziah?”

He laughed. “Aren't you one to talk, Jack? With a brood of ten of your own, and a new-made bride who joined the family less than a month ago. If anybody in this family is tied down with apron strings and wrapped in baby bunting, I reckon it's you.”

“Well, I'm a colonel, Bob. Nobody can make me stay home. And you're a Sevier, so I don't suppose anybody can tell you
anything.
”

Then we laughed and clapped one another on the shoulder, and began to talk about the plans for the march.

*   *   *

Now here was my second son, James, sporting the same obstinate expression Bob had worn, still standing there defiantly next to Catherine's sewing table, looking up at me awaiting an answer. I sighed. Perhaps if his mother were still alive, she'd have had objected to my letting him go to war so young, but we had buried her early in the year, and perhaps the boy's childhood had died with her. Catherine, only a few years his senior and his stepmother only a scant few weeks, would have no such qualms about letting him go. He must have seemed quite grown-up enough to her. Or perhaps she simply trusted me to make the decision regarding my own son.

Looking at young James's anxious smile, I was struck again by how much he reminded me of my own youngest brother. Neither of them was going to be left behind when the older ones were allowed to go. Robert would see James's feelings as a mirror of his own. James would get his horse.

*   *   *

While I was arranging for the purchase of black powder from the Pattons' mill, ordering ground corn from the mill of Baptist McNabb, and meeting with William Cobb over at Rocky Mount to obtain other supplies from his store, Colonel Shelby was attending to the diplomatic side of the enterprise, for he had to enlist the support of William Campbell and his Virginia militia to join us.

He was a well-connected man, Col. William Campbell, as well as a man of substance. A man of my own age, but with more formal education and the airs and graces of eastern Virginia's aristocracy, Campbell had married a sister of Virginia's former governor Patrick Henry, and the Campbells lived on a fine plantation called Aspenvale, near the Holston. Although he had aspirations to the gentry, Campbell was as seasoned in war as the rest of us. He had done his military service in the first Virginia Regiment under the command of Patrick Henry, and then under the able Col. William Christian. Since Campbell's return to his home on western Virginia's frontier, he had been hunting down Tory bandits and conspirators in the area. He had hanged a few of them, and so enraged the rest that they nailed signs to the gates of Aspenvale, marking him for death. There had been at least one attempt on his life by his enemies, but it did not succeed, and he carried on, unfazed by the threats of retribution.

Rather than ride another forty miles to call on Colonel Campbell, Shelby wrote Campbell a hasty letter explaining the situation and the plan for the march south, and he dispatched his brother Moses Shelby to deliver it and await an answer.

But the answer was no.

“There is more urgent business than chasing after Ferguson,” Campbell told Moses Shelby, as he penned a reply. “I am lately come back from fighting down in the Yadkin Valley, and I have heard all the talk about Lord Cornwallis's intention to invade Virginia. What's more, I believe it. I think Cornwallis will avail himself of the Great Wagon road, and push north with his forces, crossing into Virginia a hundred miles east of here. I cannot leave the Commonwealth undefended to go looking for trouble in South Carolina. I plan to march my men eastward to wait for the invasion forces in a mountain pass on the Virginia border with Carolina.”

He said as much in the message he sent back to Isaac Shelby, but that could not be the end of the matter, for so great was our need for support from Campbell's militia that Shelby could not take no for an answer. Shelby and I had reckoned on being able to round up two hundred and fifty men apiece, give or take, and we calculated that the Virginia militia would double that number. Without them we would be hard pressed to hold our own against the enemy's troops. We hoped to have other forces join us as we pushed on toward Gilbert Town, but we could not be sure of their number. Campbell had to be persuaded to join forces with us.

Colonel Shelby wrote again. He read Campbell's refusal carefully, taking note of his objections to the plan, and then he penned a second missive, and this time he wrote at greater length, taking pains to explain the plan more thoroughly and to address Campbell's objections.

Suppose it were true, as Campbell contended, that Cornwallis intended to invade Virginia, just as Ferguson had threatened to attack the backcountry settlements? Would it not be better to prevent such an invasion at the outset, rather than to stand by idly waiting for it to happen?

We thought so, Shelby wrote, and that is why we were prepared to seek out Ferguson before he could make good on his threat. In this new letter Shelby argued that if Campbell joined his forces to ours, and if we succeeded in defeating Cornwallis's men, then such a victory would surely delay any planned invasion of Virginia. Perhaps it would eliminate it altogether.

Campbell thought about it. It must have occurred to him that if he stuck to his original plan, he would face the enemy with only half the forces he'd have if he united his troops with ours. And the prospect of fighting the battles on some territory other than your own was always pleasing.

In short order, Shelby had a new reply. This time William Campbell agreed to join forces with us, and he outlined his plans in some detail. He would, he said, gather his men together on the twenty-second of September in the village we knew as Wolf Hills, though it had taken the name of Abingdon two years earlier. There was a meadow there, just west of Black's Fort, alongside Wolf Creek, a clear stream for drinking water, and enough space for an encampment of two hundred men or more. They would gather there.

The following day, the twenty-third, William Campbell himself would proceed to Shelby's house, Sapling Grove. On the twenty-fourth, his men, taking a more direct route westward on the old Watauga Road, would catch up with the two commanders en route to the mustering grounds at Sycamore Shoals.

Shelby sent this information and other details of his own preparations to me in a long message, saying that he would see me at the mustering grounds in a week's time. I was glad that my own tasks—arranging for supplies of food and for lead from the local mines to be made into bullets, and making sure that the two hundred and two score men under my command had the clothing and weapons they needed—had kept me so occupied that I had little time for worrying about what might go wrong with the expedition or whether we would prevail once we found Ferguson. I tried to spend as much time as I could manage with Catherine and the children, all the while attempting to banish the thought that I might never see them again. Catherine did her best to maintain her smiling good humor, but at times, when she thought I was not looking, a faraway look would come into her eyes, and she would dab a tear away from her cheek with the corner of her apron.

The smallest children were too young to understand the gravity of the situation, and my two oldest boys, Joseph and James, were aflame with anticipation for the great adventure to come. John, the third of my sons, was in a bate because he was forbidden to go along with his older brothers, so that he scarcely spoke a civil word to anyone in those weeks. It was only the middle children—Valentine, Richard, Betsey, and Dolly—who grieved to think of my leaving, for they were still mourning the loss of their mother earlier in the year. I was glad that I could entrust my brood to someone as tenderhearted and brave as Catherine; it was a blessing to know that I could be single-minded in the mission at hand, without having to worry about how my family fared at home.