When the attack on the northwestern slopes opened against Ferguson, however, he was forced to defend all sides of the crest at once. He could not do it, having neither the manpower nor clear fields of fire. Patriot fighters swarmed up the forested hillsides all around Ferguson’s suddenly vulnerable position, yelling like Indians, ducking from massive trees to huge boulders, pausing only to fire with deadly hunters’ marksmanship into the defenders’ ranks.

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With support from the northern end, Sevier’s, Campbell’s, and Shelby’s forces attacked the southwestern slopes again, finally gaining the summit. Cleveland and other attackers soon poured over the northeastern crest, too, taking the defenders in rear and flank. Though Ferguson’s position was now desperate and he was urged by subordinates to surrender and avoid further bloodshed, the undaunted Scotsman continued the battle–his vanity and his contempt for his backwoods opponents perhaps deluding him, even then, into believing that somehow he might still win the battle. As a result of his tenacity, some of the day’s hardest-fought and bloodiest action took place on the crest of King’s Mountain after it was overrun. Participants for years remembered pandemonium: the shrill blasts of Ferguson’s whistle mingled with backwoodsmen’s loud yells, the roar of hundreds of blazing guns, shouts of command, pain and fear, and a thick sulfuric fog from black powder that hung over the battle, blinding and smothering Patriot and Loyalist alike. Only the dead were oblivious.

Apparently, even Patrick Ferguson finally realized that the battle was irretrievably lost. Two horses were shot from under him, but he mounted another and with two companions attempted to cut his way through the encircling Patriots. He wore a checkered hunting shirt, clasped his famed whistle in his teeth, and wielded his sword with his left hand, a wound at the Battle of Brandywine having cost him the use of his right arm.

It may have been spectacular, but like his futile stand on the crest, Ferguson’s dash through the Patriot lines soon came to an ignominious end. Crack frontier riflemen quickly brought him and his two companions down–igniting a brisk debate in the over the mountain army and among later myth-makers as to which rifleman, from what unit, fired the shot that actually killed the Scotsman. That has never been settled, but as Ferguson fell from his horse, his foot caught in a stirrup, and he was dragged around a circle of victorious backwoodsmen.

‘It is very likely,’ wrote Pat Alderman in 1968 in a detailed account of the battle, ‘that many shots were fired into the body during this episode.’ Ferguson was a hated man, Tarleton’s massacre at Waxhaw was well remembered, the backwoods war was at its savage height, the victorious Patriots’ blood was up, and in the heat of a desperate battle that would not have been the only vengeful act committed by the King’s aroused opponents.

When, for instance, the defeated and demoralized Tory survivors finally were herded into an area only about sixty yards long, Ferguson’s second-in-command, Captain Abraham DePeyster, waved a white flag of surrender, and many of the frightened Loyalists called out for mercy. But the Patriot fire continued, and numerous Tories died with their hands in the air. One Patriot reported to have shot men who had already surrendered was John Sevier, who believed at the time that Tory raiders had killed his father. Lack of adequate communication between units, and between officers and men, aggravated the Patriots’ thirst for revenge. Finally, Colonels Shelby and Campbell managed to halt the shooting and restore a semblance of order.

Later, as the Patriot army began to separate into its regional units, thirty-six Tory prisoners were court-martialed for various acts of alleged lawlessness and, after a day-long trial, sentenced to death. On October 14, at Bickerstaff’s Farm in North Carolina (Captain Aaron Bickerstaff, a Tory, died at King’s Mountain), nine of the condemned men were strung up from a limb of an oak known for years afterwards as the ‘Gallows Tree.’ However, after one of the condemned men made a daring escape, Shelby, Sevier, and some of the other officers put a stop to the executions.

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