contemporary official report is explicit.  There were three hundred whites and seventy Indians.  Of the latter, thirteen were slain.  Campbell’s whole report shows a jealousy of Sevier, whom he probably knew well enough was a man of superior ability to himself; but this jealousy appears mainly in the coloring.  He does not change any material fact, and there is no reason for questioning the substantial truth of his statements.

Forty years afterward Haywood writes of the affair, trying to tell simply the truth, but obliged to rely mainly on oral tradition.  He speaks of Sevier’s troops as only two hundred in number; and says twenty-eight Indians were killed.  He does not speak of the number of the Indians, but from the way he describes Sevier’s troops as encircling them, 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 accounts 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 seventy 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, without foundation.]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, under the command of Major Joseph Martin.  The next day the seven