Military Service
Hardin’s first documented military service shows his appointment as a major of the 2nd North Carolina Minute Men (of the Salisbury District) in 1775. That same year, he appears in the rolls as a captain in the Tryon County Colonial Light Horse Rangers. Hardin took part in Moore's Cherokee Expedition into the Washington District late the following year. Beginning in 1777, Hardin carried a captain’s commission in Locke's Battalion (part of General Allen Jones' Brigade) seeing action against Britain and its Native American allies.
It was during this time that Hardin moved his family to the western settlements for safe keeping. As a member of the Overmountain militia, he fought in the Battle of Ramsour's Mill, between the Tories (Loyalists to the Crown) and the Whigs (American Patriots) on June 20, 1780 and later that year at the Battle of Kings Mountain, on Oct 7.
After the cessation of the ground war with Britain (1783), Hardin was appointed colonel of the North Carolina Militia for "The Western Counties" (Re.: Tennessee) due to the continuing hostilities with the Chickamauga Indians.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Hardin, Sr.
Famous quotes containing the words military and/or service:
“The military mind is indeed a menace. Old-fashioned futurity that sees only men fighting and dying in smoke and fire; hears nothing more civilized than a cannonade; scents nothing but the stink of battle-wounds and blood.”
—Sean O’Casey (1884–1964)
“The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)