Assembling a force of some sixteen hundred Virginians, Colonel William Christian rendezvoused in August at the Long Island of Holston, where his force was strengthened by between three and four hundred North Carolinians under Colonels Joseph Williams and Love, and Major Winston.

The various expeditions met with little effective opposition on the whole, succeeding everywhere in their design of utterly laying waste the towns of the Cherokees.

One serious engagement occurred when the Indians resolutely challenged Rutherford's advance at the gap of the Nantahala Mountains.
Indian women--heroic Amazons disguised in war-paint and armed with the weapons of warriors and the courage of despair--fought side by side with the Indian braves in the effort to arrest Rutherford's progress and compass his defeat.

More than forty frontiersmen fell beneath the deadly shots of this truly Spartan band before the final repulse of the savages.
The most picturesque figures in this overwhelmingly successful campaign were the bluff old Indian-fighter, Griffith Rutherford, wearing "a tow hunting shirt, dyed black, and trimmed with white fringe" as a uniform; Captain Benjamin Cleveland, a rude paladin of gigantic size, strength, and courage; Lieutenant William Lenoir (Le Noir), the gallant and recklessly brave French Huguenot, later to win a general's rank in the Revolution; and that militant man of God, the Reverend James Hall, graduate of Nassau Hall, stalwart and manly, who carried a rifle on his shoulder and, in the intervals between the slaughter of the savages, preached the gospel to the vindictive and bloodthirsty backwoodsmen.

Such preaching was sorely needed on that campaign--when the whites, maddened beyond the bounds of self-control by the recent ghastly murders, gladly availed themselves of the South Carolina bounty offered for fresh Indian scalps.