First published in 1881, Lyman Draper’s King’s Mountain and Its Heroes is a treasured chronicle of the important American victory at King’s Mountain on October 7, 1780. Draper (1815 - 1891) was a librarian and researcher who spent decades collecting rare manuscripts, memoirs, letters, and artifacts relating to the battle. Today the book remains not only one of the best accounts ever written about King’s Mountain, but also an important reference for modern historians, considered in the canon of American Revolution histories.

King’s Mountain and Its Heroes is far more than just a standard battlefield account. Rather, it is a history of the months and days leading up to the battle in what was then the border of the American frontier-the western Carolinas and Virginia, east Georgia and east Tennessee. By October 1780, this entire region had erupted into bloody civil war following the British conquest of South Carolina that May, with decisive consequences for the outcome of the American Revolution. And when a talented, aggressive British officer named Patrick Ferguson marched into this powder keg, challenging a colony of rugged mountaineers, the famed Overmountain Men, it was like striking a match.

Long out of print, King’s Mountain and Its Heroes is presented here in an abridged version edited by Andrew Waters in clear, modern text. An inveterate researcher, Draper’s all-inclusive style is rich with folkloric accounts of frontier life and culture but can be a challenge for modern readers seeking a sleeker narrative. This abridgement streamlines Draper’s account, focusing on the main story of the battle, its circumstances and aftermath, and the men who played a decisive role in it.

Andrew Waters is the editor of The Battle of Cowpens: Primary & Contemporary Accounts. A resident of Spartanburg, South Carolina, he is the author of two histories of the American Revolution: The Quaker and the Gamecock: Nathanael Greene, Thomas Sumter, and the Revolutionary War for the Soul of the South and To the End of the World: Nathanael Greene, Charles Cornwallis, and the Race to the Dan. His writing also appears at The Journal of the American Revolution (allthingsliberty.com) and elsewhere on the Internet.