During less than three years of the Revolutionary War, Francis Marion won enduring fame. By the nineteenth century, he was remembered as the Swamp Fox, a partisan commander who always eluded the British and their Loyalist allies. His achievements were significant and real, but some of his fame rested on exaggerated stories in a biography by Mason Weems, the biographer of George Washington who fabricated the famous story of Washington chopping down a cherry tree. Much about Marion remained unknown, and the Swamp Fox, obscured by legend, was almost as elusive to history as he had been to the British.