Books: Forest Fighter

ROBERT ROGERS OF THE RANGERS (299 pp.)—John R. Cuneo—Oxford ($6).

When TV next manages to turn a folk hero into a public nuisance, by marinating his name in an indelible jingle and spreading his face, printed on T-shirts, across millions of tiny chests, there can be no more likely candidate than Robert Rogers. He was a woodsman and explorer of great skill, a brilliant military innovator, and an Indian fighter so widely feared that he was a myth before he was 30. The fact that the redoubtable French and Indian Warrior was, at one time or another, a resident of debtors’ prison, a suspect in a counterfeiting ring, and a defendant in a treason trial should not, Author Cuneo argues in his able and straightforward biography, be held against him.

1n 1755, according to colonial practice, any man could become an officer who recruited enough soldiers to serve under him. When New Hampshire asked for men to protect the interior, 23-year-old Farmer Rogers presented himself with 50 volunteers and was made a captain.

For a decade French-led Indians had whooped down on outlying New England farms, and the colonial defenders had done little to stop the raids. In the summer of ’55 Rogers’ New Hampshire unit was attached to an offensive aimed at Crown Point on Lake Champlain. The British colonials had struck no effective blow, had no notion of enemy strength. Rogers volunteered for missions into the wilderness, returned with the required intelligence—and news that his party had shot up a French canoe. It was the first offensive action of a sorry campaign.

Bush Fighters. As the woodsman became bolder, his sorties changed from mere reconnaissance missions to raids in force. The commando warfare was brand-new to the British and confounding to the French. A Rogers raid against Ticonderoga in December 1757 was typical of his methods. In weather that would have clogged ordinary troop movements, Rogers led 150 men through the untracked forest, ranged them about the fort, and, when the French refused to stir outside, slaughtered their cattle and burned their wood supplies, leaving a receipt for what he had destroyed.

Such shenanigans delighted the troops, but they did not always please British commanders—notably General Thomas Gage, whose light infantry showed up poorly in comparison with the bush fighters, who had become known as “Rogers’ Rangers.” Gage became Rogers’ lifelong enemy, and years later, when the New Hampshire man commanded the outpost at Michilimackinac on Lake Michigan, Gage was to bring a wholly unfounded charge of treason against him.

Aroused Indians. But as long as there were French and Indians to fight, Rogers’ stock was high. His most famous raid, which took him 150 miles into enemy territory, obliterated the troublesome Indian village at St. Francis, near the St. Lawrence River. The raiders had bad luck; the French discovered their cache of food and boats for the return voyage, and cut off all possibility of retreat. “This unlucky circumstance,” Rogers recorded laconically, “put us in some consternation.” But the Rangers pushed on, slogged for nine straight days through a vast spruce bog. Sacking the Indian town was comparatively easy, but the journey back to Crown Point was harrowing. The corn supply quickly ran out, and the Rangers, split into small hunting parties, were easy prey to the aroused Indians. At one point, faint with hunger, a detachment of Rangers found the bodies of comrades butchered by the Indians, and ate them raw. Rogers, as usual, survived (49 others died) and commented simply: “I had the good fortune to succeed.”

Most of the rest of his life ran downhill. His accounts were snarled, and the British refused to honor bills he had run up for provisions. Soldiers rescued him from debtors’ prison in New York, but in London, on one of the trips he made to raise money, he was jailed for 22 months. His most ambitious moneymaking venture, which gave Novelist Kenneth Roberts the title for his book about Rogers, was to find a northwest passage to the Pacific. But debt, circumstance and such enemies as Gage kept him from searching for the ‘ overland route that the Lewis & Clark expedition found in 1805. During the American Revolution, he offered his services to General Washington, fought briefly for the British after he was turned down. After the war, in one of U.S. history’s more jarring ironies, his name was listed among those forbidden to set foot in New Hampshire.