The Cherokee called her the War Woman. She was a tall, red-haired, cross-eyed frontier wife who could not read or write, and according to the most famous story of the Georgia backcountry, she once captured a whole squad of enemy soldiers single-handedly, in her own cabin, with their own guns. Her name was Nancy Hart, and she is the only woman in the history of Georgia to have a county named after her. Hart lived on the raw Georgia frontier during the Revolution, in a region torn apart by a savage, personal civil war between Patriots and Loyalists. She was a fierce rebel, and she made no secret of it. She spied, she smuggled, and she was known to disguise herself to gather information on the enemy. The Loyalists and their Native allies knew her and feared her temper, and she earned that ominous nickname, the War Woman, with a creek near her home named for her. The legend that made her immortal goes like this. A group of Loyalist soldiers, five or six of them, came to her isolated cabin one day. They had been hunting a Patriot leader, and they barged in, bragging about their deeds, and demanded that Nancy cook for them. She played the part of the grumbling but obliging hostess. She killed the last turkey, set it cooking, and, crucially, kept the men's cups full of wine and corn liquor. As the soldiers relaxed, ate, drank, and let their guard down, they stacked their muskets against the wall, out of easy reach. That was their mistake. There was a gap or chink in the cabin's log wall, and as the men grew drunk and careless, Nancy quietly began slipping their muskets, one at a time, out through that opening to the outside, while sending her daughter to signal for help. She got several guns out before the soldiers noticed. When one of them finally realized what was happening and lunged for the weapons, Nancy snatched up a musket, leveled it, and warned them she would shoot any man who moved. One did. She shot him dead. Another rushed her, and she shot him too. Then she held the rest at gunpoint, alone, until her husband and neighbors arrived. And the ending is grim frontier justice. The surviving Loyalists begged to be treated as prisoners of war. Nancy would have none of it. She insisted, over milder suggestions, that shooting was too good for them, and the captured Tories were hanged. For a long time this was dismissed by some as pure tall tale, backcountry folklore that grew with the telling, and to be fair, the details have surely been polished over two centuries. But then history offered a chilling footnote. Generations later, in the early 1900s, workers building a railroad near the site of Hart's old cabin dug up a neat row of skeletons in a shallow grave, right where the story said the bodies should be. Bones do not prove every detail of a legend. But they gave the story a weight that has never quite gone away. Georgia never forgot her. They named a county after her, Hart County, the only one in the entire state named for a woman, along with a lake and a town. Remember Nancy Hart, the War Woman, who did not wait for an army to protect her home, and who proved that on the Revolutionary frontier, some of the most dangerous soldiers around were not soldiers at all.