the British subjects of King George III. Around April or May 1775, the young Harpes left North Carolina and went to Virginia to find overseer jobs on a slave plantation. Big Harpe later traveled in the company of two women, Susan and Betsey/Betty Roberts, possibly sisters, both of whom bore him children. Little Harpe married Sarah "Sally" Rice, the daughter of a Baptist minister. Involvement in American Revolutionary War and American Indian Wars Little is known of the Harpes' precise whereabouts at the outbreak of the American Revolution. According to the eyewitness account of Captain James Wood of the Continental Army, they joined a Tory "rape gang" in North Carolina. These predatory Loyalist criminals took advantage of wartime lawlessness by raping, stealing, murdering and burning and destroying property, especially the farms of Patriot colonists. The Harpes' gang took part in the kidnapping of three teenage girls, with a fourth girl being rescued by a Captain Wood. The Harpes also served as military associators, who were not provided soldiers' uniforms, weapons, and pay by the British government. Like many other Loyalist volunteers, they survived by foraging, robbery, and the looting of battlefields. Captain Wood's son was Frank Wood, a Patriot soldier of the frontier Overmountain Men and the older brother of Susan Wood, who was later kidnapped and made the wife of Micajah Harpe. Frank Wood claimed to have seen the Harpe brothers, serving "loosely" as Tory militia, at the Battle of Kings Mountain in October 1780, under British commander Major Patrick Ferguson. During the three-hour engagement, Wood took aim at Big Harpe but missed his target. Later, the Harpes served under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton's British Legion at the Battles of Blackstocks in November 1780 and Cowpens in January 1781. Following the decisive British defeat by Patriot and French forces at Yorktown in 1781, the Harpes left North Carolina, dispersing with their Indian allies, the renegade Chickamauga Cherokee, to Tennessee villages west of the Appalachian Mountains. On April 2, 1781, they joined war parties of four hundred Chickamauga to attack the Patriot frontier settlement of Bluff Station at Fort Nashborough (present-day Nashville, Tennessee), which would be assaulted by them again on either July 20, 1788, or April 9, 1793. On August 19, 1782, the Harpes accompanied a British-backed Chickamauga Cherokee war party to Kentucky at the Battle of Blue Licks, where they helped to defeat an army