King's Mountain (41 page)

I sat up, and shook myself back to full wakefulness. In the glow of the firelight I recognized the prisoner as one of those men who had been sentenced to hang tonight, but whose life had been spared when we stopped the executions. He looked haggard and swollen-eyed, and I heartily wished I was downwind of him, for he stank like a cesspit, but I greeted him in a civil manner and asked what he had come about.

“I want to thank you for my life, Colonel,” he said. “And I feel like I owe you something in return.”

I wanted to tell him that he was not in my debt, but I understood the sentiment. The men in the backwater country cannot stand to be “beholden” to anyone. They will repay a debt of honor as quickly as they will repay the loan of goods or money. The kindest thing that I could do for him would be to allow him to discharge his obligation. It was obvious that he had come up with some way to square things with me, so I waited to hear him out.

After a moment's pause, the man went on, “I have some information, Colonel Sevier, and maybe by telling it to you, I can save your life.”

“I'd be much obliged to you then.”

He glanced up to make sure that no one was close enough to overhear our conversation. And then leaning in on a wave of sour breath, he said, “Word is going around among the prisoners that Tarleton and his dragoons have ridden out from Charlotte Town, and that they will overtake us soon.”

Well, they could overtake us if they'd a mind to. With eight hundred prisoners, give or take, to herd along, we couldn't make much more progress than a pregnant sow. Now, this fellow meant well, but the rumor he had heard might not be true. “Where did you hear this?”

“A woman come to camp this evening, and told some of the officers that Cornwallis's men would attack at dawn. Word got around.”

There was no way to prove or disprove his tale, but I didn't want to bet a thousand lives on the possibility that it was a lie. I thanked the fellow, and he slipped back into the darkness. Moments later, I was on my way to rouse Campbell and Shelby to tell them the news.

They listened gravely while I reported the rumor from the grateful prisoner. “I think we have to assume it is true,” I told them. “We can't let them catch us. We are too tired and weak for a second battle.”

“I doubt we have the powder and shot to effect it, even if we tried,” said Shelby. “We have to break camp, but it's so almighty dark I doubt we could see the trail to follow it.”

“The clouds moved in sometime after sunset,” said Campbell. “It is too dark to travel tonight. We will have to wait for first light to move out, but we can use the hours until then to break camp and be ready. Pass the word among your officers.”

“I'm taking my men back over the mountains,” I said.

“And mine,” said Shelby. “If we can make it to the Catawba River, I think we can get to safe territory before they overtake us.”

*   *   *

We never got a proper sunrise, but the sky did lighten up enough so that we could see the unbroken skein of low hanging clouds stretching as far as we could see. We had not gone far down the trail before the rain began, showering us with cold pellets, and adding to the general misery, but we could not wait it out in the sheltering woods or in some farmer's outbuildings. We had to reach the river before another day passed. The path became a stream, and the horses fought the mud with every step they took.

For a while I rode along next to Shelby, glad of his company to take my mind off the misery of the journey. We rode in silence for a bit, and then we heard a sloshing behind us, and turned to see the ranking officer among the prisoners overtaking us. Some of the Redcoat officers had been allowed to keep their mounts, though they were not noticeably grateful for the favor. DePeyster drew rein alongside Shelby, his weasel face slick with rain. “The men are too tired and ill-fed to be out in such punishing weather. Where are you heading in such undue haste?”

Shelby pointed northwest. “Back to our natural element,” he said. “The mountains.”

DePeyster thought about it. He stared at Shelby's impassive expression, waiting, but neither of us said anything more, and at last he ventured another remark, “So, Colonel Shelby, you smell a rat?”

Shelby permitted himself a tight-lipped smile. “We know all about it, yes.”

“Well, it will serve you right,” said the Tory, and turning his horse, he trotted back to rejoin his own men.

We had hanged only nine prisoners at Bickerstaff's Old Fields before Shelby and I called a halt to the proceedings. I hoped we had dispatched those most deserving of execution, but I suspect that it was a matter of chance. Considering how many of our supporters had been executed by the Tories in similar circumstances, I thought we showed a measure of restraint that bordered on celestial mercy, but DePeyster did not see it in that light. He had complained bitterly that we had no right to execute soldiers who were doing their duty, that we had no authority, that the trials were not properly conducted.

*   *   *

We had ignored his objections before the executions and since. Shelby was philosophical about it. “DePeyster is from one of the northern colonies,” he pointed out. “As are Allaire and the little Tory doctor, Uzal Johnson. They think the British are going to win the war, and that all their army's actions are justified on account of that.”

I shook my head. “I don't think they're going to win.”

He smiled. “Why not, Sevier? Has Providence vouchsafed you with a vision of the future?”

“No. I worked it out for myself, thinking about my farm.”

Shelby raised his eyebrows. “Your farm, Sevier? Pray tell.”

“It's this way: my farm is only a hundred miles or so away. Just a day's ride past the mountains yonder. I've been gone three weeks now, and even though it's harvest time, I think things will be all right when I finally do get home. But three weeks is about the limit that I can trust things to get along without me there to run them. And I'm only a couple of mountains away. Now, these American colonies are an ocean away from England. And they're being troublesome. The British may be able to keep their hold on us for a few years, if they really put their minds to it, and if they're willing to spend the fortune it will take to maintain an army so far away, but they can't run this country from the other side of the ocean, any more than I can run my farm from the other side of the mountains. Sooner or later, I have to go home—and so do they.”

Shelby smiled. “But, as you said, the British are winning up north against the Continental Army.”

“Well, they didn't win here. We proved that we can beat them. And sooner or later, they'll have other things to worry about. They have a whole continent full of enemies over the water. All we need is for one of them to start a war with the British, and that will distract them from our little revolution. I think that when they have to pick their battles, they'll leave us be and fight enemies closer to home.”

“So will you and I, Colonel Sevier,” said Shelby, no longer jesting. “It cannot be long before the Indians notice that we are gone, and lay plans to attack the backwater settlements.”

*   *   *

The rain continued steadily all day and into the night, and still we plodded northwest, heading for the river. Judging by the swollen creeks we passed along the way, the river would have risen many feet higher than its normal depth. We would need all the help that Providence would give us if we were to cross it safely. I pitied those who were making the journey on foot.

It was only two hours until midnight by the time we reached the Catawba, and as I feared it was rising steadily.

“Well, this is a heaven-sent blessing,” said Joseph McDowell, coming up beside me as we surveyed the rushing brown water.

“I'd hate to see one of its curses then,” I said, shivering in my sodden coat.

McDowell laughed. “No, Colonel, think about it. We have come in the nick of time. The river at this stage of the flood is just fordable. But if Cornwallis has troops riding in pursuit of us, they will be unable to follow us. By the time they get here, the river will be impossible to cross. We are safe. And Quaker Meadows lies just beyond the river. You can stop, and rest, and eat in safety, before you continue your journey home.”

“Thank God,” I said.

EPILOGUE

The Battle of King's Mountain ended, but the fighting did not. I got back over the mountain only to learn that Nancy Ward, the Cherokee Beloved Woman, had sent word that the Indians planned to attack. So instead of getting to rest on my laurels at Plum Grove, I had to haul myself right back into the saddle and ride out again to fight.

The dying hadn't ended, either. Before I had even set foot in the house, my boy James met me at the door with tears in his eyes. He had made it back safely, but my brother Robert had not. Nine days into their journey home from King's Mountain, just past the Gillespie Gap, on the road to Roan Mountain, Robert had suddenly taken ill and within minutes, he had died there in a little field beside the river. They buried him there.

The little Tory doctor had been right when he counseled him to rest and recover before he had tried to head for home. Robert had been afraid of getting caught by Cornwallis's men if he stayed, but the irony was that instead of coming after us, Cornwallis had left Charlotte Town, going the other way. He wrote off North Carolina as a lost cause, and was heading up to Virginia, hoping to join the fighting up north where things were going well for the British, I suppose. But I had been right about how hard it was to run a war from across an ocean. The British got tired of the trouble and the expense, just as I thought they would. The war sputtered on for almost exactly a year after King's Mountain, and then Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at Yorktown, and the United States was officially a new country.

William Campbell did not live to see it, though. He was on his way to Yorktown for the last gasp of the Revolution, when he was suddenly taken ill—I heard it was apoplexy—and he died at a farmhouse not far from his destination.

We stopped fighting the British then, but it seems there's always somebody who needs sorting out. The Indian wars went on.

Seven months after King's Mountain, old Ben Cleveland got kidnapped from one of his tenant properties by some Tory rascals, who wanted him to sign safe conduct passes for them, so that they could come and go through enemy territory. They stashed Ben in a cave some thirty miles up the mountain from Wilkesboro, and set him to copying out the passes. He wrote as slowly as he could, knowing that his brother and some of their militia would be on his trail. Sure enough, as he was writing the last one, his deliverers discovered the cave up on Howard's Knob, and they succeeded is rescuing Ben and taking his captors prisoner.

Ben Cleveland hanged them all, of course, back in Wilkesboro, on what they call “the Tory Oak.” I wonder if he misses the war.

Isaac Shelby is doing well. He has moved west into the Kentucky wilderness, and talks of gaining the territory's independence from Virginia. Once you learn that you can prevail against the powers-that-be, it's hard to stop challenging the authorities to get what you want. If he gets his territory to statehood, he'll be the first to govern it, I'll warrant.

The Seviers continue to prosper. In addition to the brood I had with Sarah, now well on their way to being adults, my bonny Kate and I have five children, beginning with George Washington Sevier, born a few months after the war's end. Robert's widow Keziah, left with two young boys to raise, married Maj. Jonathan Tipton a year after King's Mountain, and they have gone back to the Carolina side of the mountain. I wonder if the major moved out of this area in order to avoid being swept up in the conflict between his older brother and myself. I wish them well. I like Jonathan as much as I dislike his older brother, and that is a great deal indeed.

It was on account of John Tipton that, eight years after the battle of King's Mountain, I ended up back in Morganton—in jail.

The Overmountain Men had their own little war of independence, but it did not go as well as the first one. Four years after Yorktown, those of us in the three counties west of the mountains decided to declare our independence from North Carolina. The state had ceded its territory west of the mountains to the Continental Congress to pay off North Carolina's war debts.

It was not all my doing, this drive for separation from North Carolina, but those in favor of secession put me in charge of it, and after that my fate was bound up in the fledgling state, whether I wanted it to be or not. We had heard about the establishment of Kentucky, independent of Virginia, and it seemed to us that what we were doing was just the same as that, and ought to be no more difficult to accomplish. But politics is even more troublesome than war, because most of it is done while your back is turned, and the enemy isn't always easy to spot.

The upshot of it was that some of the people in the backwater counties wanted to get away from North Carolina's governance and some of them didn't. So that political distinction—of whether or not to stay with North Carolina—did what the British and the Indians before them could not effect: it made us turn against one another.

Suddenly instead of battling a faceless enemy, I was in contention with some of my neighbors, most notably with the brother of one of my most trusted officers. Major Jonathan Tipton had been my second in command at King's Mountain, placed even above my brothers in the ranks of the militia, and now his older brother John was my sworn enemy. His excuse was that he did not want the western counties to separate from North Carolina, but I suspect that he did not want to be a citizen in a state of which I was governor.

It came to battles between his supporters and mine. Finally he came up with a reason to call for my arrest. When North Carolina changed governors, the new one opposed the creation of Franklin, and my political enemies—Tipton chief among them—accused me of all sorts of crimes and finally arrested me for treason.