The frontiersmen who beat the British at Kings Mountain came from a people who had been fighting the English crown for 400 years. The Overmountain Men's ancestors were the Border Reivers, the raiding clans of the lawless frontier between England and Scotland. For three centuries they were loyal to their family names over any king. When the crown finally beat them in the 1600s, it shipped many to northern Ireland. Generations later, their descendants crossed the Atlantic and pushed into the most dangerous edge of colonial America, the Appalachian backcountry. They were the Scots-Irish. And when a British officer threatened to march over their mountains, hang their leaders and lay their country waste with fire and sword...they did what their ancestors had done for 400 years. At Kings Mountain in 1780, they surrounded Major Patrick Ferguson's force and destroyed it in an hour.