Composed of the most violent Rebels I ever saw, particularly the young ladies.

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 206.

Lieutenant Anthony Allaire also became aware that the countryside harbored people not “sensible of their error.” On the 15th of September, with forty American Volunteers and a few hundred militia, he “got in motion” again, in one four-mile stretch found Cane Creek “so amazingly crooked that we were obliged to cross it nineteen times,” and on the following day encountered a “very handsome place,” still known as Pleasant Gardens, a settlement “composed of the most violent Rebels I ever saw, particularly the young ladies.” For despite the ability of Ferguson and his command to move at will through the countryside, despite numbers of people coming into Gilbert Town for protection, implacable enemies were everywhere in the Back Country, including militia bands to the north that had not yet even entered the main contest. They were located in Wilkes and Surry Counties on the upper reaches of the Yadkin River, under strong leaders, Colonel Benjamin Cleveland and Major Joseph Winston. And far to the northwest, deep in the Appalachians, 100 miles or so over the steep, tortuous trails of the Blue Ridge, were small bands of pioneers who had moved beyond where the British government had forbade them to go as early as 1763. They were the cutting edge of an irresistible flood of humanity driven by the twin hungers of land and opportunity. They were part of a vast folk movement to America that began prior to their coming and is still going on. One of their leaders, John Robertson, described their purpose with a candor rare and unfashionable in our times: “We are the Advanced Guard of Civilization; Our way is across the Continent.” The British called them, among other things, Backwater men. They are known to history as the Over Mountain Men.