Just click on the places highlighted in red! KING'S MOUNTAIN, COWPENS, WAXHAWS, NINETY-SIX, and BRATTONSVILLE

I spent late Aug-early September 1999 in Georgia and the Carolinas, visiting King's Mountain, Cowpens, 96, Waxhaws, and Brattonsville, in the company of a great bunch of friends, including Holley, Peggy, Max and John - our very own International Brigade of RevWar enthusiasts - 'The (In)famous Five'. If you include Holley's adorable cats (whom we had to leave at her house in Georgia), we were also inter-species!

We travelled, feasted (I love the Megabar at Ryan's, in Gastonia and Shelby!), and had a marvellous time! It was my first visit to the US, and will not be my last!

The following account is not strictly chronological, as we made repeated visits to King's Mountain over the week we were in the area!

(To save picture-loading time, just click on links, then hit 'Back' to return to this Tour!)

My reason for being here in the first place was to give 2 papers, based on his original letters, on Pattie Ferguson at the 2nd Annual King's Mtn Seminar. These went well, and got some local media coverage, thanks to Peggy, Joe, and Alan (who turned up dressed for the wrong side in the wrong war, but never mind!).

King's Mtn was the main focus of our adventuring, and I spent a lot of time there talking to the extremely helpful and informative staff (Chris, Wilma and helpers in particular!), consulting archives, and sitting by the graveside of someone I have come to know and love as a very dear friend. In fact, Pattie was the unofficial and invisible sixth member of our group! We knew he was there, even though we couldn't see him.

(Or COULD we...???)

The path from the Visitors' Centre to his grave is a pretty and pleasant walk. The atmosphere in the little glade in which he lies is truly special, and seemingly enchanted. 'Mourning Cloak' butterflies (aka 'Camberwell Beauties') fluttered by a few times in a reassuring way, while I was there. If he has to be so far from home, then it's as well he is in so beautiful a place, and that he may have Sal, one of his doxies, beside him. The plain, grey mausoleum in Greyfriars, Edinburgh, would seem like a cage for so vital and sprightly a young man; the wooded glade is more fitting. But I know how heavily the blow fell upon his loving family that Christmas, when the news came: his widowed mother, whose favourite son he had been; 2 brothers and 3 sisters; his old aunt, who died soon after, brokenhearted; his many cousins...

I cannot swear to being dry-eyed all the time I was with him. Pattie himself is well-commemorated, with other markers at the site of his death. But then - he's a regular British officer. The Loyal American troops who fought and died under his command have hitherto received little attention. I believe that they are to receive more in forthcoming interpretive material; about time, too. I just wish even our regular servicemen (incl. Pattie) got even a fraction of that attention back at home, where they are pretty well ignored.

At the seminar, we met Richard Kellar and his replica Ferguson rifle (built by Ernest Cowan). It was interesting to actually see how smoothly the breechplug works, with just one rotation. She compares very well with 18C weapons, as well as being much smaller and lighter than a Bess. Max had a look at her, too. Dad's Cousin Allan, retired US Marine, also had the chance to play with the rifle, and said she was lighter than some of the stuff he'd had to cart around in Korea! Much prettier, too. Allan and Shirley had come down from New Jersey, en route to Florida.

We met Byron Logan, a twinkly and charming direct descendant of Pattie's orderly, Elias Powell. He thinks the famous silver whistle, retrieved by Elias, is now with a branch of the family who went out west. Elias had bathed Pattie's corpse in the stream near where he is buried. The stream bed was dried up when we were there, but we could see where it was!

We also heard some groovy rumours... OK, this was written down in 1874 in a letter to Lyman C. Draper, by a man who said he'd heard it from some old men who'd heard it from people who'd been in the battle, so it may be entirely apocryphal, but it's a good one and I'd like to believe it:

It's alleged that Pattie was in his tent with *2* female camp-followers, one of whom was braiding his long hair, and the other was reclining on his bosom, singing to him...

I sincerely hope so!!! I'd like to think his maimed little body got some action of a more pleasurable kind! Given that the following day he and one of his poor doxies were shot, one cannot begrudge them their fun the night before! It's also yet another nail in the coffin of what Max calls his 'Jiminy Cricket' reputation as a prim and proper, humourless type - which doesn't stand up if you know his private letters!
Pattie Ferguson: wit, raconteur and ... international sex-god?
(Hmm, considering his physique - the 'Bulldog' was actually built more like a Whippet - maybe not!!!)

I wonder if the 2 scantily draped - one is bare-breasted, rather heroically, given the risk of sunburn and 'skeeters! - Art Nouveau damsels on the 1909 monument are not purely allegorical, but are our Sal and Poll immortalised?! I'd like to think so!

So, glittery gold stars go to all our friends, living and 'differently alive'!

No stars, though, to:

1. A speaker who tried to do a 'spoiler' before I went on, with a sermon, not a lecture, in which he misquoted Pattie and also said he "just got what was coming to him". "Amen", said some goon in the audience. I can take being 'dissed' myself - I'm alive and can reply, and, goodness knows, I'm used to it - but Pattie...
   
2. Ms. 'Moral Minority' who asked me if Pattie was a "womaniser". To which I said, "No, just a normal, healthy, single young man!" (He was a flirt, not a Lovelace, and had other things to do; as Pete astutely pointed out back in the pub in St. Andrews: "The boy died of an overdose of LEAD, not of MERCURY!!!")
   But of course, everyone knows that Reb propaganda still likes to paint our officers as either limp-wristed camp stereotypes or "despoilers of American womanhood"... (See forthcoming movie The Patriot...)
   
3. A schoolteacher (!) who asked me re: Pattie: "Why was a Scotsman fighting for the British...?"!!!! I had to explain that Britain includes Scotland, and isn't just England... It's easy to see how this kind of misconception takes hold when so many publications refer to 'England' when they mean 'Britain'...

I was much impressed by one local road sign.... It has to be the best address in the whole town!

Cowpens:

A tour of Cowpens in the company of John Robertson is very special. Much of the published interpretive material (not to mention the inscription on the official monument!) has yet to catch up with Laurence Babits' findings in Devil of a Whipping, so a guide so well-versed in Babits as John is invaluable! He points out that Ban Tarleton's account has now been vindicated, and that the current interpretation panels and the older official monument are just plain wrong in terms of troop numbers, & c, since Morgan had deliberately reduced his figures in his official reports!

It was a warm morning, though, to be walking around a fairly open site, and I must confess I started to flag, not being used to the heat. However, indoors at the Visitors' Centre, it was comfortably air-conditioned! We all dressed up in the Legion helmet (one at a time, I hasten to add), and Holley and Max posed with the print of Ban's portrait!

It was strange to see places which had hitherto been only names in books (Broad River, Gilbert Town, Catawba, Saluda), and places where my Loyalist uncle had been, such as 96 and possibly King's Mtn itself. I was especially impressed by the preservation of the Star Fort at 96. Visiting it with Dr. Bobby Moss - a national treasure in his own right - was particularly memorable! I got the full works of guided tour. The earthworks were impressive. Even more impressive was the story of the local African-Americans (volunteers) who stripped off to bring water into the fort at night! I hope some of them were among the freed Black people who made it to Canada later.

Waxhaws battlesite is pretty, but beware of low-strung barbed wire - one of my stockings and the ankle within became minor Loyal American casualties. At least I can now claim to have shed blood in the cause, and had the scar for several months to prove it!

The nearby Buford Sports Bar , where we had lunch, is full of local colour - classic Southern Americana, with a 1950s feel. I half-expected the Fonz, or the cast of Grease, to walk in... Over 40 pictures of Elvis (which Max insisted on counting!), James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Budweiser freebies, stuffed geese (as decor, not on the menu) and deer-heads. It also does tasty Hush Puppies, which, in this context, are not sensible shoes, but frittered nuggets of corn.

Waxhaws also has an inaccurate monument in terms of numbers (Ban was in fact outnumbered!) and omissions of information - like the fact that Buford was offered extremely good terms of surrender, which he rejected, and insisted on fighting "to the last extremity". While making sure he himself wasn't the last man on the field...

1860 Monument

1955 Monument: side 1; side 2

Holley says of Waxhaws: "It's a hot, dusty little Southern crossroads. I confess it made me physically ill, but I'm glad I went."
Methinks that was the deep fried Mozarella sticks at the Sports Bar! (We warned you...!), NOT Buford's Revenge for our wicked rewrites of Monty Python 's 'Ballad of Brave Sir Robin' ("When danger reared its ugly head,/ He bravely turned his tail and fled...") or of Adam Skirving's Johnnie Cope... ("Say, Abram B, ye werena blate/ To leave your men in sic a strait,/ And come wi' the news o' your ain defeat/ Upon the field o' the Waxhaws...")

Brattonsville is picturesque and rural - the site of Hoeck's defeat and death in a skirmish in 1780. Christian H. (however you spell him) was a German lawyer from Philadelphia who served with Emmerich's Chasseurs (if you wanted to join he was the recruiting contact in New York, as per the adverts in Rivington's Royal Gazette) and then in the Legion in the Carolinas. He got a bad reputation for roughing up the local Bible-bashers, and ended up shot through the throat. Mind, in a head-to-head between Hoeck and Ben 'Jabba the Hutt' Cleveland for extra-curricular non-fatal amusements, allegedly burning psalm-books is a bit tame next to making people chop off their own ears... You can always buy a new book, but ears are a bit more complicated...

The interiors of the historic buildings in Brattonsville are closed due to filming of the latest Mel Gibson assault on history. Gossip picked up from inside sources around the town confirmed worst suspicions that, in terms of historical accuracy, The Patriot is NOT going to be a happy experience... It may arouse interest in the period, but unfortunately will feed myths and misconceptions, and the re-enactor community indicates it will be a Farb-fest... The film-within-the-film in Sweet Liberty (a video of which, funnily enough, is doing the rounds among the crew, our secret sources suggest!) now seems like a cinematic prophecy...

See our special Patriot feature for the inside information we gleaned on this...!

We were, however, thoroughly charmed by the appealing ducks, geese and turkeys at the farm. Baby Tom Turkey was especially loveable, with his bright-eyed, innocent wee face! (Not that this will stop me eating any of their relations, of course!)

Thanks to all who made it such a special trip!!!!

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