In November 1759, reporting on his audacious mission to destroy the French-allied Indian village of Saint-François in Quebec, Maj. Robert Rogers wrote that he and his elite Rangers “(had) marched nine days through wet sunken ground; the water most of the way a foot deep, it being a spruce bog.”
The return journey through that same unforgiving terrain, now pursued by Canadian militia and Indian warriors seeking vengeance, is one of the great epics of the American frontier.
And Rogers, in John F. Ross’ sweeping account, “War on the Run,” stands as one of the most skilled tacticians of small-unit, backcountry warfare — a war of endurance and stealth.
An unschooled farmboy growing up on the New Hampshire frontier, Rogers volunteered in 1748 for a local militia unit after seeing the bodies of neighbors who had been killed in an Indian raid.
Over the next dozen years, as war with French Canada raged across the northern New England frontier, Rogers organized an elite commando-style unit, leading it in raids against French outposts, ambushing French patrols — and being ambushed in turn.
“It would be his signature genius,” as Ross puts it, “to create a new and formidable mode of warfare; the invisibility and sweeping range of the forest people would be cleverly united to the newcomers’ technologies, strategic vision, and cultural appetite for innovation.”
It would be a brand of warfare, he writes, “to match not only the continent’s environment, but also its magnitude.” It is no surprise to learn that Rogers’ “Rules of Ranging” are now taught at Camp Rogers, the U.S. Army’s Ranger School at Fort Benning, Ga.
Ross, executive editor of American Heritage magazine, has crafted a thrilling narrative from Rogers’ “Journals,” the accounts of British and French commanders, and those of Rangers. In addition to such traditional sources, Ross has hiked and kayaked over much of Rogers’ territory and conveys a fine sense of place.
There was a brief period of recognition when Rogers was appointed commandant at the Great Lakes trading post at Michilimackinac, envisioning it as the gateway to an overland Northwest Passage. Suspected of planning to defect to his former French Canadian foes, he was court-martialed, but exonerated.
When the Revolution began, Rogers offered his services to the Continental Army. But Gen. Washington distrusted him, suspecting that he was a British agent, and ordered his arrest for treason. Rogers fled, received a command from the British, and in an act of typical cunning, tricked Nathan Hale into revealing himself as an American spy.
A romantic marriage, marred by long absences, had long since ended in divorce, and Rogers died, deeply in debt, in London in 1795.
War on the Run: The Epic Story of Robert Rogers and the Conquest of America’s First Frontier
by John F. Ross, $30
