Snow's Island
Francis Marion's partisan campaign · 1780-1781 · Pee Dee River, South Carolina
13 contours at 2 m, traced from USGS 3DEP 10 m elevation data. Every 5th line is drawn heavier.
What happened
After the fall of Charleston left no Continental army in South Carolina, Francis Marion ran a partisan campaign out of the swamps of the Pee Dee - hitting supply lines and outposts, then vanishing. The British called him the Swamp Fox because they could not follow him home.
Why the ground mattered
Snow's Island is high ground only by local standards: a patch of dry land a few feet above the water, ringed by the Pee Dee River, Clark's Creek and cypress swamp. That was the entire defence. British regulars in column with wagons could not enter the swamp, and mounted patrols that tried got lost in ground where the paths change with the water level and only locals knew them. Marion never had the numbers to hold anything; he had terrain that made him impossible to pin down.
Watch
The Real Patriot - Francis "The Swamp Fox" Marion
How Marion actually operated out of this swamp, and the distance between the record and the legend that grew on top of it.
Images
No freely licensed photographs of this ground turned up on Wikimedia Commons. The contour map above is the picture.