Nobody sent for them.

No general issued orders. No letter arrived from the Continental Congress. No drummer boy came over the mountain to rally the troops.

They just showed up.

On September 25, 1780, roughly 1,100 men gathered at Sycamore Shoals along the Watauga River in what is now Elizabethton, Tennessee. They came from the hollows and ridges of western North Carolina, southwest Virginia, and the backcountry settlements that would one day become Tennessee and Kentucky. They were farmers, hunters, long hunters mostly — men who spent more time talking to deer than to other people.

They called themselves the Overmountain Men.

Britain didn't even know they were out there.

That's the part that gets me every time.

By the fall of 1780, the Revolution was in serious trouble. Charleston had fallen in May. Camden had fallen in August. General Cornwallis was marching north through the Carolinas like he owned the place, which at that point he pretty much did. He sent a man named Major Patrick Ferguson west to lock down the backcountry, raise up Loyalist troops, and protect the left side of his advance.

Ferguson was good at his job. He was called "Bulldog" by his men. He'd been shot through the elbow at Brandywine and practiced so relentlessly that he learned to wield his sword with his left hand. He wasn't the kind of man who doubted himself.

Which is probably why he made the mistake he made.

He sent word to the mountain settlements that if resistance continued, he would march his army over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay their country to waste.

He called the Overmountain Men a set of mongrels.

He had no idea what he'd just done.

The 900 best marksmen climbed onto the 900 sturdiest horses and rode 35 miles through a cold, rainy night. No supply train. No artillery. Nothing but rifles and the kind of grudge that doesn't need a lot of sleep.

They found Ferguson dug in on a rocky hilltop just inside the South Carolina line. He apparently was taken by surprise by the boldness and rapidity of their advance.

At three o'clock in the afternoon on October 7, 1780, they hit him from every direction at once. For one hour and five minutes, they did not stop.

One hour and five minutes.

A Loyalist survivor remembered that the Overmountain Men looked "like devils from the infernal regions — tall, raw-boned, sinewy, with long matted hair."

One of the Patriot commanders told his men to shout like hell and fight like devils.

They obliged on both counts.

Ferguson was shot dead off his horse by at least eight musket balls as he tried to break out. He was the only actual British soldier on the field. Every man fighting for the Crown that day was an American. Which means what happened at Kings Mountain wasn't just a battle. It was a civil war fought on a hillside, and the mountain men won it before supper.

Thomas Jefferson called it "the turn of the tide of success."

British commander Henry Clinton said the American victory "proved the first link of a chain of evils that followed each other in regular succession until they at last ended in the total loss of America."

The total loss of America.

Written by the man who lost it, about a bunch of mountain people nobody in London had bothered to put on a map.

Cornwallis retreated. The southern campaign stalled. The chain of defeats that followed — Cowpens, Guilford Courthouse, Yorktown — began right there on that rocky little ridge in South Carolina, with men who had walked over the mountains because some British major told them not to.

There's a national historic trail now. The Overmountain Victory National Historic Trail. Runs 330 miles from Abingdon, Virginia, to Kings Mountain, South Carolina, tracing the route those men took in the fall of 1780.

Most people have never heard of it.

Most people have never heard of them.

That's the thing about Appalachia and American history. The contributions are enormous. The credit is somewhere else.

Two hundred and fifty years on, it seems worth fixing that.

Next week: Before Lewis and Clark, there were men who just walked west and came back with maps in their heads. The long hunters and the invention of the American frontier.