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. The maiden who sank breathless into the arms of the young officer, John Sevier, was "Bonnie Kate Sherrill"--who, after the fashion of true romance, afterward became the wife of her gallant rescuer. While the Tennessee settlements were undergoing the trials of siege and attack, the settlers on the frontiers of Rowan were falling beneath the tomahawk of the merciless savage. In the first and second weeks of July large forces of Indians penetrated to the outlying settlements; and in two days thirty-seven persons were killed along the Catawba River. On July 13th, the bluff old soldier of Rowan, General Griffith Rutherford, reported to the council of North Carolina that "three of our Captains are killed and one wounded"; and that he was setting out that day with what men he could muster to relieve Colonel McDowell, ten men, and one hundred and twenty women and children, who were "besieged in some kind of a fort." Aroused to extraordinary exertions by these daring and deadly blows, the governments of North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia instituted a joint campaign against the Cherokees. It was believed that, by delivering a series of crushing blows to the Indians and so conclusively demonstrating the overwhelming superiority of the whites, the state governments in the Old Southwest would convince the savages of the futility of any attempt ever again to oppose them seriously.