Victors and vanquished drove on in the dark, close to the great flank of hills. From where King's Mountain, strewn with dead and dying, reared its black shape like some rudely hewn tomb of a primordial age when titans strove together, perhaps to the ears of the marching men came faintly through the night's stillness the howl of a wolf and the answering chorus of the pack. For the wolves came down to King's Mountain from all the surrounding hills, following the scent of blood, and made their lair where the Werewolf had fallen. The scene of the mountaineers' victory, which marked the turn of the tide for the Revolution, became for years the chief resort of wolf hunters from both the Carolinas.

The importance of the overmountain men's victory lay in what it achieved for the cause of Independence. King's Mountain was the prelude to Cornwallis's defeat. It heartened the Southern Patriots, until then cast down by Gates's disaster. To the British the death of Ferguson was an irreparable loss because of its depressing effect on the Back Country Tories. Ding's Mountain, indeed, broke the Tory spirit. Seven days after the battle General Nathanael Greene succeeded to the command of the Southern Patriot army which Gates had led to defeat. Greene's genius met the rising tide of the Patriots' courage and hope and took it at the flood. His strategy, in dividing his army and thereby compelling the division of Cornwallis's force, led to Daniel Morgan's victory at the Cowpens, in the Back Country of South Carolina, on January 17, 1781--another frontiersmen's triumph. Though the British won the next engagement between Greene and Cornwallis--the battle of Guilford Court House in the North Carolina Back Country, on the 15th of March--Greene madethem pay so dearly for their victory that Tarleton called it "the pledge of ultimate defeat"; and, three days later, Cornwallis was retreating towards Wilmington. In a sense, then, King's Mountain was the pivot of the war's revolving stage, which swung the British from their succession of victories towards the surrender at Yorktown.

Shelby, Campbell, and Cleveland escorted the prisoners to Virginia. Sevier, with his men, rode home to Watauga. When the prisoners had been delivered to the authorities in Virginia, the Holston men also turned homeward through the hills. Their route lay down through the Clinch and Holston valleys to the settlement at the base of the mountains. Sevier and his Wataugans had gone by Gillespie's Gap, over the pathway that hung like a narrow ribbon about the breast of Roan Mountain, lifting its crest in dignified isolation sixty-three hundred feet above the levels.

The "Unakas" was the name the Cherokees had given to those white men who first invaded their hills; and the Unakas is the name that white men at last gave to the mountain.

Great companies of men were to come over the mountain paths on their way to the Mississippi country and beyond; and with them, as we know, were to go many of these mountain men, to pass away with their customs in the transformations that come with progress. But there were others who clung to these hills. They were of several stocks--English, Scotch, Highlanders, Ulstermen, who mingled by marriage and sometimes took their mates from among the handsome maids of the Cherokees. They spread from the Unakas of Tennessee into the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky; and they have remained to this day what they were then, a primitive folk of strong and fiery men and brave women living as their forefathers of Watauga and Holston lived. In the log cabins in those mountains today are heard the same ballads, sung still to the dulcimer, that entertained the earliest settlers. The women still turn the old-fashioned spinning wheels. The code of the men is still the code learned perhaps from the Gaels--the code of the oath and the feud and the open door to the stranger. Or were these, the ethical tenets of almost all uncorrupted primitive tribes, transmitted from the Indian strain and association? Their young people marry at boy and girl ages, as the pioneers did, and their wedding festivities are the same as those which made rejoicing at the first marriage in Watauga. Their common speech today contains words that have been obsolete in England for a hundred years.

Thrice have the mountain men come down again from their fastnesses to war for America since the day of King's Mountain and thrice they have acquitted themselves so that their deeds are noted in history. A souvenir of their part in the War of 1812 at the Battle of the Thames is kept in one of the favorite names for mountain girls--"Lake Erie." In the Civil War many volunteers from the free, non-slaveholding mountain regions of Kentucky and Tennessee joined the Union Army, and it is said that they exceeded all others in stature and physical development. And in our own day their sons again came down from the mountains to carry the torch of Liberty overseas, and to show the white stars in their flag side by side with the ancient cross in the flag of England against which their forefathers fought.