362 The Winning of the West 



Having thus made a very pretty stroke, Sevier 

 returned to the French Broad, where Campbell 

 joined him on the 22d, with four hundred troops. 

 Among them were a large number of Shelby's men, 



he evidently knew that the white men were more numerous 

 than their foes. His mistake as to the number of Indian dead 

 is easily explicable. The official report gives twenty-nine as 

 the number killed in the entire campaign, and Haywood, as 

 in the Island Flats battle, simply puts the total of several 

 skirmishes into one. 



Thirty years later comes Ramsey. He relies on traditions 

 that have grown more circumstantial and less accurate. He 

 gives two accounts of what he calls "one of the best fought 

 battles in the border war of Tennessee"; one of these ac- 

 counts is mainly true; the other entirely false; he does not 

 try to reconcile them. He says three whites were wounded 

 although the official report says that in the whole campaign 

 but one man was killed and two wounded. He reduces 

 Sevier's force to one hundred and seventy men, and calls 

 the Indians "a large body." 



Thirty-four years later comes Mr. Kirke, with the "Rear- 

 guard of the Revolution." Out of his inner consciousness he 

 evolves the fact that there were "not less than a thousand" 

 Indians, whom Sevier, at the head of one hundred and sev- 

 enty men, vanquishes, after a heroic combat, in which Sevier 

 and some others perform a variety of purely imaginary feats. 

 By diminishing the number of the whites, and increasing 

 that of the Indians, he thus makes the relative force of the 

 latter about twenty-five times as great as it really was, and 

 converts a clever ambuscade, whereby the whites gave a 

 smart drubbing to a body of Indians one-fourth their own 

 number, into a Homeric victory over a host six times as 

 numerous as the conquerors. 



This is not a solitary instance ; on the contrary it is typical 

 of almost all that is gravely set forth as history by a number 

 of writers on these Western border wars, whose books are 

 filled from cover to cover with just such matter, almost all 

 their statements are partly, and very many are wholly, with- 

 out foundation. 



