This cruel threat aroused the settlers adjacent to the mountains, on both sides, and north, into Virginia. More men were willing to go to the field than it was prudent to have leave the settlements. Their fame as “center shots,” with the rifle, was well known to the British regulars, who feared to meet them; but the chivalric Ferguson was stimulated by this fact to greater watchfulness and exertion. Ramsey draws this picture of the Revolutionary forces. “The sparse settlements of the frontier had never before seen assembled a concourse of people so immense, and so evidently agitated by great excitement. The large mass of the assembly were volunteer riflemen, clad in the homespun of their wives and sisters, and wearing the hunting shirt of the back-woods soldiery, and not a few of them the moccasins of their own manufacture. A few of the officers were better dressed, but all in citizen’s clothing. The mien of Campbell was stern, authoritative, and dignified. Shelby was stern, taciturn, and determined; Sevier, vivacious, ardent, impulsive, and energetic; McDowell, moving about with the ease and dignity of a colonial magistrate, inspiring veneration for his virtues, and an indignant sympathy for the wrongs of himself and co-exiles. All were completely wrapt in the absorbing subject of the Revolutionary struggle, then approaching its acme, and threatening the homes and families of the mountaineers themselves. Never did mountain recess contain within it a loftier or more enlarged patriotism--never a cooler or more determined courage.” Carrying their shot-pouches, powder-horns and blankets, they started from the Watauga, over Yellow mountain, to the head of the Catawba. Ferguson broke up his camp at Gilbert town (Rutherfordton), on the approach of the patriots. This was the most westward point he reached, in the execution of his threat to lay waste the country. The tories of his command quailed on the approach of so large a body of riflemen, and many of them deserted the royal standard. Ferguson dispatched for reinforcement, and took his position on King’s mountain, from which he declared “God Almighty could not drive him.” After being in the saddle thirty hours, in a dashing rain the patriots, on the afternoon of October 7, 1780, arrived at the foot of the mountain. This, one of the most historic spots in the South, is located on the North Carolina border in Cleveland county. The area of its summit is about 500 yards by seventy.