We depended on what chance or kind providence might cast in our way

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 125.

The “next day we shouldered our guns and went to Moffitt,” James recalled. When they arrived, Moffitt said, “‘Well, Daniel, I suppose you intend to fight.’ My father said he had come to that conclusion.” Captain Moffitt turned to James, who carried an old shotgun. “‘Well, James,’ he said to me, ‘we shall have plenty for you to do.. .. We will try to
take care of you and not let the Tories catch you.’”10 Thus 16-year-old James Collins rode off to war, to the peach orchard at Williamson’s and the death of “my Lord Hook,” to the life of a guerrilla fighter on the run, on to the bloody fields of King’s Mountain and Cowpens. Unlike our other teenage warrior, Thomas Young, he admitted doubts, fears, second thoughts, yearnings to be away from it all. He also left us a valuable description of the outfitting of a militia guerrilla band.

Captain Moffitt’s band was composed, as James described it, of a “set of men acting entirely on our own footing, without the promise or expectation of any pay. There was nothing furnished us from the public; we furnished our own clothes, composed of coarse materials, and all home spun; our over dress was a hunting shirt of what we called linsey woolsey [coarse linen and wool, or cotton and wool] well belted around us. We furnished our own horses, saddles, bridles, guns, swords, butcher knives, and our own spurs; we got our powder and lead as we could, and often had to apply to the women of the country, for their old pewter dishes and spoons, to supply the place of lead; and if we had lead sufficient to make balls, half lead and half pewter, we felt well supplied. Swords, at first were scarce, but we had several good blacksmiths among us; besides, there were several in the country. If we got hold of a piece of good steel, we would keep it; and likewise . . . take all the old whip saws we could find, set three or four smiths to work in one shop, and take the steel we had to another. In this way we soon had a pretty good supply of swords and butcher knives. Mostly all of our spurs, bridle bits and horsemen’s caps were manufactured by us.” They made their caps of leather greased with tallow, with two steel straps crossed to reinforce it, “a small brim attached to the front, resembling the caps now worn, a piece of bear skin lined with strong cloth, padded with wool passed over from the front to the back of the head; then a large bunch of hair was taken from the tail of a horse, generally white, was attached to the back part and hung down the back; then a bunch of white feathers, or deer’s tail, was attached to the sides, which completed the cap.” Unlike British and Tory regulars, they traveled light. “We carried no camp equipage, no cooking utensils, nor any thing to encumber us; we depended on what chance or kind providence might cast in our way, and were always ready to decamp in a short time.”

These were the formidable partisan fighters of the Back Country Lord Cornwallis would learn he had to reckon with.