[Footnote: The authority for this expedition is Haywood (p.

106); Ramsey simply alters one or two unimportant details.

Haywood commits so many blunders concerning the early Indian wars that it is only safe to regard his accounts as true in outline; and even for this outline it is to be wished we had additional authority.

Mr.Kirke, in the "Rear-guard," p.
313, puts in an account of a battle on Lookout Mountain, wherein Sevier and his two hundred men defeat "five hundred tories and savages." He does not even hint at his authority for this, unless in a sentence of the preface where he says, "a large part of my material I have derived from what may be termed 'original sources'-- old settlers." Of course the statement of an old settler is worthless when it relates to an alleged important event which took place a hundred and five years before, and yet escaped the notice of all contemporary and subsequent historians.

In plain truth unless Mr.Kirke can produce something like contemporary--or approximately contemporary--documentary evidence for this mythical battle, it must be set down as pure invention.