As is common in warfare, a night of horror followed the Patriot victory. There was no hospital, but makeshift litters were fashioned from tent cloth. Water from the spring and a captured keg of rum were available for the wounded, and one British surgeon had lived to treat survivors on both sides with the primitive medical skills of the time. The possibility of a counterattack by Tarleton’s Dragoons added fear to the Patriots’–and hope to the prisoners’–sleepless night.

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Casualty figures are unreliable at best, since the over the mountain army kept no formal rolls and British figures are disputed. A monument erected by the American government on the crest of King’s Mountain lists the names of 29 Patriots killed, four mortally wounded, 34 wounded, and 24 unknown.

Ferguson appears from British Army returns to have commanded 1,187 men, of whom more than 150 were killed, about the same wounded, and 810 captured. Various accounts use slightly different figures.

On the morning of October 8, still fearful of an attack by the dreaded Tarleton, the victorious army, leaving burial parties behind, was quickly on the march. Encumbered by a large body of walking prisoners, the army plodded westward for several days. Many of the wounded were left in Patriot houses along the way. Not until late on the night of October 15, on the west bank of the Catawba River, after a march of thirty-two miles, could the victors of King’s Mountain relax and rest. A rain-swollen stream was between them and what they still feared was Tarleton’s pursuit.

The next day, their mission accomplished, the various units began to depart for home. A mix of detachments escorted the dwindling band of Loyalist prisoners to the Yadkin River valley and down it toward the headquarters of General Gates. At Bethabara, a Moravian town near Salem, North Carolina, Campbell and Shelby departed for home. They left the three hundred remaining prisoners in charge of Colonel Cleveland.

Ultimately, about two hundred Tories taken prisoner at the battle were delivered to General Gates. The rest, perhaps six hundred–all Americans–had escaped, were dead of sundry natural causes, had disappeared, or in many cases had been murdered while in Patriot hands.

In strangely similar fashion, the over the mountain army all but vanished into legend. But it was no myth. It was formed to meet a specific threat. A fighting force that belied its lack of training and discipline, it vanquished Ferguson’s trained Loyalists as intended, then melted into the backwoods from which it had come.

Patrick Ferguson was buried near the spot where he was shot, under a cairn of stones (about five feet high) that befits his Scottish birth and recalls the prevalence of wolves in the American wilderness and on King’s Mountain in 1780. By the cairn, a monument to Ferguson as a lieutenant colonel in the Highland Light Infantry, 71st Regiment, was erected in 1930 by Americans ‘in token of their appreciation of the bonds of friendship and peace between them and the citizens of the British Empire.’

It’s a noble sentiment but an irony nonetheless; at King’s Mountain one of history’s most savage battles among neighbors came to a bloody and tragic resolution. Southern Tories never again rose in arms as significant supporters of King George’s cause in America, while Patriots everywhere were emboldened to continue fighting.

Here, too, at Patrick Ferguson’s stone-strewn grave, began the long British descent toward final defeat in 1781. A thunderstruck and fever-ridden Cornwallis, his left wing and his high hopes destroyed by the over the mountain army, retreated into South Carolina as a result of what Sir Henry Clinton called ‘the first link of a chain of evils’ that ended in ‘the total loss of America.’ Cornwallis’ retreat gave the Continental Congress time to organize a new southern army, with the capable Nathaniel Greene in command.

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