CHAPTER IX.
KING'S MOUNTAIN, 1780.
The British in the Southern States.
During the Revolutionary war the men of the west for the most part took no share in the actual campaigning against the British and Hessians.
Their duty was to conquer and hold the wooded wilderness that stretched westward to the Mississippi; and to lay therein the foundations of many future commonwealths.

Yet at a crisis in the great struggle for liberty, at one of the darkest hours for the patriot cause, it was given to a band of western men to come to the relief of their brethren of the seaboard and to strike a telling and decisive blow for all America.

When the three southern provinces lay crushed and helpless at the feet of Cornwallis, the Holston backwoodsmen suddenly gathered to assail the triumphant conqueror.

Crossing the mountains that divided them from the beaten and despairing people of the tidewater region, they killed the ablest lieutenant of the British commander, and at a single stroke undid all that he had done.
By the end of 1779 the British had reconquered Georgia.

In May, 1780, they captured Charleston, speedily reduced all South Carolina to submission, and then marched into the old North State.