Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Brown despised Elijah Clarke, seeing in him a formidable foe and one of the last remaining threats to British dominance in the deep south. It was Clarke who was actively seducing released Whigs to violate their oaths of neutrality and take up arms against the crown. Brown had never been able to secure a reliable spy within the Georgia militia, but his Indian scouts were able to report their general movements. As soon as the Georgians crossed the Savannah River, Brown sent word to Lord Cornwallis that Clarke was traveling toward the western mountains of Carolina with a “motley crew,” and urged his destruction.

Now secure in Georgia and in most of the Carolinas and preparing to move into Virginia to attack George Washington’s army, Cornwallis had already dispatched Major Patrick Ferguson to protect his western flank. He forwarded Brown’s request to Ferguson with instructions to intercept Clarke’s small force and then to concentrate on the backwoodsmen of the Watauga Valley, who had come to be known as Over Mountain men.

While Elijah Clarke had been struggling to scrape up a few dozen men willing to support the revolution, Major Ferguson was overwhelmed with American volunteers who wanted to join the winning side, and selected two thousand of the best of them to serve with him. Ferguson was a brave and arrogant young man, already famous for having invented an improved breech-loading rifle that could be loaded and fired several times a minute. Twice wounded, he was a favorite of General Clinton but was not liked or trusted by Cornwallis, who preferred to depend upon Banastre Tarleton. Cornwallis assigned Ferguson to the thankless job of inspector of militia in May 1780, with instructions to concentrate his efforts on the frontier regions of the Carolinas, an area of little importance. Thereafter, Ferguson struggled to train and command the almost uncontrollable Tory militiamen, who expected that the purpose of each order would be explained to them by their commanding officers. They knew that the rebels chose their own officers, while the Tory commanders were always selected from within the army hierarchy. Ferguson was a strict disciplinarian and was often frustrated with the refusal of his troops to accept British military customs, but perhaps in one of his more sanguine moments he described his men accurately as “excellent woodsmen, unerring shots, careful to a degree to prevent waste or damage to their ammunition, patient of hunger and hardship, not obsessed with blankets, clothing, rum and other indulgences.” He cultivated a reputation of being willing to listen to his backcountry men, but he never really understood them and was not able to form them into a cohesive fighting force.