The alarm caused by the latter had prevented the militia from joining Davidson himself.] They were under Col.

Benjamin Cleavland, a mighty hunter and Indian fighter, and an adventurous wanderer in the wilderness.

He was an uneducated backwoodsman, famous for his great size, and his skill with the rifle, no less than for the curious mixture of courage, rough good humor, and brutality in his character.

He bore a ferocious hatred to the royalists, and in the course of the vindictive civil war carried on between the whigs and tories in North Carolina he suffered much.

In return he persecuted his public and private foes with ruthless ferocity, hanging and mutilating any tories against whom the neighboring whigs chose to bear evidence.