Episode Details

While the British took Quebec in the north, the southern colonies fought a war almost nobody up north was watching — a brutal frontier war against the Cherokee, the most powerful nation of the southern mountains, and until a year before, their own ally. This is the story of how that alliance came apart: of warriors murdered and scalped for bounty on their way home from fighting England’s war, of a blood debt the colonists never understood, of a peace delegation locked in a frontier fort and killed there, and of Fort Loudoun — a starving British garrison hundreds of miles from help, fed in secret by the Cherokee wives of its own soldiers, surrendered and then destroyed. It is the story of two armies sent into the mountains to burn a people’s towns and cornfields, of a young lieutenant named Francis Marion who found the work a shocking sight, and of a victory won not in battle but by fire and famine. And of the new fact settling over the whole continent at once: with France finished, there was no second empire left to lean on.