The War in the Northwest 321 



to go to Gates with the request for the appointment 

 of a general to command them. 33 For some days 

 the men had been living on the ears of green corn 



33 Gates MSS. (in New York Hist. Soc.). It is possible 

 that Campbell was not chosen chief commander until this 

 time; Ensign Robert Campbell's account (MSS. in Tenn. 

 Hist. Soc. ) explicitly states this to be the case. The Shelby 

 MS. and the official report make the date the ist or 2d. One 

 letter in the Gates MSS. has apparently escaped all notice 

 from historians and investigators ; it is the document which 

 McDowell bore with him to Gates. It is dated "Oct. 4th, 

 1780, near Gilbert town," and is signed by Cleavland, Shelby, 

 Sevier, Campbell, Andrew Hampton, and J. Winston. It 

 begins: "We have collected at this place 1500 good men 

 drawn from the counties of Surrey, Wilkes, Burk, Washing- 

 ton, and Sullivan counties {sic) in this State and Washington 

 County in Virginia." It says that they expect to be joined in 

 a few days by Clark of Ga. and Williams of S. C. with one 

 thousand men (in reality Clark, who had nearly six hundred 

 troops, never met them) ; asks for a general; says they have 

 great need of ammunition, and remarks on the fact of their 

 "troops being all militia, and but little acquainted with dis- 

 cipline." It was this document that gave the first impres- 

 sion to contemporaries that the battle was fought by fifteen 

 hundred Americans. Thus General Davidson's letter of Oct. 

 roth to Gates, giving him the news of the victory, has served 

 as a basis for most subsequent writers about the numbers. 

 He got his particulars from one of Sumter's men, who was in 

 the fight; but he evidently mixed them up in his mind, for 

 he speaks of Williams, Lacey, and their companions as join- 

 ing the others at Gilbert Town, instead of the Cowpens; 

 makes the total number three thousand, whereas, by the offi- 

 cial report of October 4th, Campbell's party only numbered 

 fifteen hundred, and Williams, Lacey, etc., had but four hun- 

 dred, or nineteen hundred in all ; says that sixteen hundred 

 good horses were chosen out, evidently confusing this with 

 the number at Gilbert Town ; credits Ferguson with four- 

 teen hundred men, and puts the American loss at only twenty 

 killed. 



