These "overmountain men" or "backwater men," as they were called east of the hills, were trained in Sevier's method of Indian warfare--the secret approach through the dark, the swift dash, and the swifter flight.

"Fight strong and run away fast" was the Indian motto, as their women had often been heard to call it after the red men as they ran yelling to fall on the whites.

The frontiersmen had adapted the motto to fit their case, as they had also made their own the Indian tactics of ambuscade and surprise attacks at dawn.

To sleep, or ride if needs must, by night, and to fight by day and make off, was to them a reasonable soldier's life.
But Ferguson was a night marauder.

The terror of his name, which grew among the Whigs of the Back Country until the wildest legends about his ferocity were current, was due chiefly to a habit he had of pouncing on his foes in the middle of the night and pulling them out of bed to give fight or die.