Nov. 24, 1906.1 
FOREST AND STREAM 
811 
SNIPE SHOOTING OVER DECOYS.-PHOTO BY GEO. SHIRAS, 3D. 
One hundred and ten bagged in one shot. Flying 75 miles an hour. 1/1000 second exposure. Revels Island, Virginia. 
From the National Geographic Magazine, Washington, D. C. Copyright, 1906, by Geo. Shiras 3d. 
“Morgan’s Men.” 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
In your issue of Oct. 27 I notice some objec¬ 
tions to a paragraph in chapter three of “The 
Mountain Moonshiner” in which I mentioned cer¬ 
tain services performed by our backwoods rifle¬ 
men in the Revolution. My words were deliber¬ 
ately chosen, and exactly stated my meaning; but 
they have been misconstrued (inadvertently, no 
doubt) by your correspondent, who has also mis¬ 
understood the context. If he will turn to the 
original he will find that I was not speaking of 
the North Carolina militia (who were not moun¬ 
taineers), but of the Alleghany and trans-Alle¬ 
ghany backwoodsmen, and especially of that regi¬ 
ment of sharpshoters who were the first troops 
enlisted by the Continental Congress. These men 
were not from Carolina, and were not militia, 
but regulars—in fact the first regulars that ever 
served under a Federal banner in America. They 
formed the first regiment of foot of the Conti¬ 
nental army, and were drawn as follows : Eight 
companies from Pennsylvania, two from Mary¬ 
land, and two from Virginia. All of them were 
“expert riflemen” by the terms of enlistment, and 
all, save Nagel’s company of Berks county 
“Dutch,” were drawn from our western frontier, 
there being no sharpshooters along the seaboard, 
where the rifle was practically an unknown 
weapon. I was writing neither a eulogy nor a 
brief, but simply a plain statement of solid fact. 
I have already told the story of our Colonial 
and Revolutionary riflemen, briefly in Harper’s 
Magazine for May, 1899, (to which reference was 
made in my footnote) and in considerable detail, 
with references to authorities, in Shooting and 
Fishing from Jan. 1897, to March, 1898. My data 
were not compiled from popular histories, but 
from original sources, such as Provincial and 
State archives, American and British newspapers 
of the Colonial and Revolutionary periods, per¬ 
sonal narratives, official dispatches, and other 
contemporary records, which I compared with 
nearly everything that had since been published 
on the military annals of the Revolution. I 
spent five years in finding and sifting out this 
material before writing a line on the subject. As 
the result is already in print, I shall not weary 
either myself or your readers with a repetition. 
Your correspondent Fair Play is evidently 
not familiar with the history of the Revolution 
and has quite failed to grasp the situation that 
faced the backwoodsmen. For example, it will 
be news to historical students that Washington, 
and not the sharpshooter Morgan, won the battle 
of the Cowpens, and that King’s Mountain was 
carried by “a mob.” 
As for the backwoods method of fighting—did 
Fair Play ever assimilate the lesson of Brad- 
dock’s defeat, or did he ever try to push a 
skirmish line through thick forest? He asserts 
that at King’s Mountain the frontiersmen “ran 
from the first fire of the British, each man seek¬ 
ing shelter of rock, tree, stump, everything that 
would shelter their [jfc] precious bodies from 
harm.” If that be so, then they must have run 
back again; for they swept up and stormed a 
forest-clad mountain from which the British com¬ 
mander, Ferguson, had boasted that “God Al¬ 
mighty cannot drive us.” Fair Play calls this 
band of backwoodsmen “a mob.” Then, by all 
means, let us ever have such mobs; for they an¬ 
nihilated the enemy, in an uphill rush, and them¬ 
selves received barely a scratch. If the object 
of war is to inflict the utmost damage upon the 
foe, while suffering the least ourselves, then our 
mountain mob certainly displayed good general¬ 
ship. As a matter of fact, they had good Leaders, 
obeyed them, and more—they were capable of 
doing what regular troops have only recently 
learned to do; fight in extended order, and still 
cohere when out of sound of their officers’ voices. 
That is a hard lesson to learn, and there are some 
men who will never learn either the art itself 
or the common sense of it. There have been 
instances within the memory of to-day’s school¬ 
boys. However, the notion that backwoods tactics 
consist merely in a scramble of “everyone for 
himself and devil take the hindmost” is rank 
nonsense. There is leadership even in a bear- 
drive, to say nothing of battle against intelligent 
beings. 
Your correspondent's other count against the 
Tennesseeans is that “they did not stick to the 
campaign.” There was excellent reason. Had 
they done so, their wives and daughters would 
have been scalped within a fortnight. No Gov¬ 
ernment was protecting those little log cabins in 
the wilderness. All honor to the “men folks” 
who left them long enough to make that superb 
dash across the mountains! More honor to the 
“women folks” who mounted guard against the 
Indians while husbands and brothers were away! 
Allow me to express the conviction that no 
one is competent to write the history, as it should 
be written, of our sharpshooters in the Revolu¬ 
tion unless he is both a trained historical student 
and a practical marksman as well. The material 
is hidden from all but bibliographers who know 
the resources of American and foreign libraries 
and public archives, while the subject is too tech¬ 
nical for anyone who is not himself a rifleman. 
To show how grievously even the best of his¬ 
torians may blunder I need only cite the late 
John Fiske’s eulogium of Morgan’s sharpshooters. 
Unfortunately, I must quote from memory, being 
myself, at this time, far back in the woods; but 
you can find the passage for yourself by consult¬ 
ing the index to Fiske’s “American Revolution.” 
This distinguished writer asserts that every man 
under Morgan could hit a squirrel (I think he 
says a running squirrel) through the head with 
his rifle at two hundred yards! 
Medun, n. c. Horace Kephart. 
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Adv. 
