Withdrawing now toward their breastwork, in anticipation of encountering there a larger force, the backwoodsmen suddenly found themselves attacked in their rear and in grave danger of being surrounded.

Extending their own line under the direction of Captain James Shelby, the frontiersmen steadily met the bold attack of the Indians, who, mistaking the rapid extension of the line for a movement to retreat, incautiously made a headlong onslaught upon the whites, giving the war-whoop and shouting: "The Unakas are running!" In the ensuing hot conflict at close quarters, in some places hand to hand, the Indians were utterly routed--The Dragging Canoe being shot down, many warriors wounded, and thirteen left dead upon the field.
On the day after Thompson, Cocke, Shelby, Campbell, Madison, and their men were thus winning the battle of the Long Island "flats," Robertson, Sevier, and their little band of forty-two men were engaged in repelling an attack, begun at sunrise, upon the Watauga fort near the Sycamore Shoals.

This attack, which was led by Old Abraham, proved abortive; but as the result of the loose investment of the log fortress, maintained by the Indians for several weeks, a few rash venturers from the fort were killed or captured, notably a young boy who was carried to one of the Indian towns and burned at the stake, and the wife of the pioneer settler, William Been, who was rescued from a like fate by the intercession of the humane and noble Nancy Ward.

It was during this siege, according to constant tradition, that a frontier lass, active and graceful as a young doe, was pursued to the very stockade by the fleet-footed savages.

Seeing her plight, an athletic young officer mounted the stockade at a single leap, shot down the foremost of the pursuers, and leaning over, seized the maiden by the hands and lifted her over the stockade.