Many British leaders, like Major Hanger, voiced low opinions of the pioneers who lived on the farthest edges of the Empire, even as one British officer said these men could travel 200 miles through the woods without road or path, guided by the sun by day and the stars by night, to kill a particular opponent. As the first shots rang out, the woods here were filled with 160 such men, who had traveled more than 200 miles of roadless wilderness to oppose the King. Leaving their hard-ridden horses tied a mile from Kings Mountain, rough riflemen rushed along the slope to take up their assigned place here and block the Tories if they tried to escape and rejoin Lord Cornwallis. These were Major McDowell's militia from Burke and Rutherford Counties in western North Carolina, western Carolina Whigs who in late September had ridden over the highest mountains in the East to answer the call for patriots to rally at Sycamore Shoals, Tennessee, and who crossed 4,700-foot-high Roan Mountain coming back east through snow already "shoe-tongue deep."