Sunday, April 19, 2015

Now Someone Here Realizes Why I Took Her to King's Mountain--Thank You, Bill Paxton

We went to King's Mountain in 2007. Uncle Jim Johnston has a big brass plaque there, and another dozen or so of my folks (counting in-laws) were there. Johnston's son Will's brother-in-law the historian Cyrus Hunter in SKETCHES OF WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA does a good job of celebrating the COMMITTEE OF SAFETY man Robert Ewart and his son and sons-in-law who were there. GGGG Grandpa Robert Knox's pension application takes some of the fun away: Johnston had sent him off on "some business." You go four miles on foot away from King's Mountain and once you hear gunshots you can't make it back before it is all over! Now, thank you Bill Paxton, everyone in the house understands that it really WAS the turning point of the Revolution in the South.

And just now I checked my battered copy of Lyman Draper and see that Benjamin Sharp's narrative is reprinted there and that Draper uses him a couple of dozen times through the book. My great 1881 copy was thrown out by the POST LIBRARY of FT CAMPBELL, KENTUCKY, if you can imagine that.

I have not seen AMERICAN SNIPER but today came news that in Michigan student protests kept it from being shown. Should Bill Paxton not have been shown being moved at King's Mountain by the exploits of his ancestor?

The writers for WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? censored Ferguson's threat that so enraged the Overmountain man and the locals like my crew (but some of the Overmountain men were my guys, too, picked up on the way in Wilkes or Surry County, including Aunt Rachel Bicknell's husband who did not die from his King's Mountain wound for two months). Better to say what Ferguson threatened to do to the women and houses. Better to talk about "Tarleton's quarter."

Better not to think about what a nanny state we are becoming.

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