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Ambiguous Heroes
When you say “Ranger” in the context of the early American frontier of the 18th century, one name is sure to come to mind: Robert Rogers.
He wasn’t the first British colonist to adopt the Ranging Way of War; Benjamin Church beat him to that honor 80 years previously. Gorham’s Rangers, first seeing action in 1744 in King George’s War, were a highly effective prototype of a ranging force.
Rogers gained preeminent fame in part because he fought in a larger war, in an era when the press had become robust and was looking for good copy. And Robert Rogers was good copy. His fame was largely eclipsed after the French & Indian War, as his career foundered on accusations of corruption, and debt and boozing eroded his stature.
The Americans mistrusted him and rejected him for service in the American Revolution, and his service to the Crown was short-lived and mostly ineffectual.
His legend was given new life by Kenneth Roberts’ 1937 novel Northwest Passage and the 1940 movie starring Spencer Tracy as the intrepid Major Rogers. The movie landed as Great Britain faced the Nazis alone, and the U.S. was poised to come to her aid. He was the perfect military hero to serve as an avatar of British-American cooperation.
When Americans developed a special operations force to match the British Commandos, we called them Rangers. General Lucien Truscott said:
“I selected ‘Rangers’ because few words have a more glamorous connotation in American military history … It was therefore fitting that the organization destined to be the first of the American ground forces to battle Germans on the European continent in World War II should be called Rangers—in compliment to those in American history who exemplified such high standards of individual courage, initiative, determination and ruggedness, fighting ability, and achievement.”
Truscott did not explicitly cite Rogers Rangers, but Ranger historians note the currency of Northwest Passage at the time.*
Major Robert Rogers by Jud Hartmann.
Rogers looms so large in the history of the development of American Spec Ops that it seems iconoclastic to question his effectiveness. And yet… the very first Frontier Partisans post on June 1, 2011 recounted the encounter between Rogers Rangers and a French-Indian force led by the French-Ottawa partisan Charles Michel de Langlade in the winter woods around Lake George in 1757.
Langlade got the better of Rogers in that firefight, which exemplified a lot of Rogers’ operations. He fought with great personal bravery, held his men together under tremendous pressure, and extricated them from a nasty ambush. But… they were ambushed, and they took a lot of casualties. Rogers’ most famous exploit, the 1759 Raid on St. Francis, has long been hailed as a legendary long-range special operation — but it seems to have done a lot less damage than Rogers claimed, and the return devolved into a survival epic. Again, Rogers performed with great fortitude, but at high cost — and with ambiguous strategic results.
It pisses some folks off to say so, but I think the evidence is clear that Rogers’ adversaries — Langlade, Ensign Langy, Joseph Marin de la Malgue — were the more effective partisans.
If you’re going to take on the Ranging Way of War as I am, you have to reckon honestly and forthrightly with Rogers, which means measuring the legend against the man. I am pleased to see that a new tome is on the horizon that seems to be aiming to do just that. The Fort Plain Museum sent out a notification on a major new biography, coming in October:
Robert Rogers, Ranger: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon by Martin Klotz is a fresh look at the life of this famous, yet highly flawed man. Rogers undeniably had great personal strengths. He was brave nearly to the point of fearlessness. He was physically robust, always the one to cover the retreat, carry the wounded, or go for help when no one else could carry on. He was an intrepid explorer who wrote with eloquence about the splendors of the American frontier. He was bold and unconventional, good at thinking outside the box. He was an outstanding scout and intelligence gatherer who provided invaluable service to a British army inexperienced in woodland warfare.
At the same time Rogers had enormous weaknesses that undermined his ability to lead effectively. His boldness was never tempered by judgment, and he was prone to grandiose schemes that came to nothing or, worse, to disaster. His constant self-promotion—including embellishing and lying about his battlefield successes—contributed to his popularity but damaged his reputation with peers and superiors. He succumbed to alcoholism and gambling, was profligate, especially with money—his debts were enormous—and routinely skirted the edges of the law. Rogers never found a comfortable place in America.
Instead, his aristocratic patrons in London, who knew him mostly from his own self-description, gave him his most valuable opportunities, including commanding an important military and trading center on the colonial frontier and establishing the Queen’s Rangers to fight alongside Crown forces during the Revolution. But when the British cause failed in America, Rogers became an anathema on both sides of the Atlantic. A fascinating inquiry into an eighteenth-century life, Robert Rogers, Ranger presents this American legend as he lived, crossing the line between fame and misfortune.
John F. Ross’ War on the Run was a good modern bio, but this looks to be a more rigorous dive into the life of an ambiguous hero. Westholme Publishing publishes the Journal of the American Revolution, and their books on American military history meet a very high standard.
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Westholme also has a brand new release on George Rogers Clark’s legendary campaign in the Illinois Country in 1778-79.
Clark’s campaign, especially his long trek to take Fort Sackville at Vincennes, is one of the great epics of the Ranging Way of War. We did a four-part series on Clark back in 2019. He’s unquestionably one of the all-time great Frontier Partisan Captains — but he, like Rogers, had a rough go of it for much of his adult life. His greatest successes came when he was in his 20s, and then failure (and shoddy treatment at the hands of the new American Republic) began to dog him. Like Robert Rogers, he descended into alcoholism and wrecked his health and character.
I have not yet read Sterner’s other works on the Eastern Frontier — Anatomy of a Massacre: The Destruction of Gnadenhutten, 1782 and The Battle of Upper Sandusky, 1782, but I have listened to his guest appearances on Brady Krytzer’s Dispatches: The Journal of the American Revolution Podcast, and found him impressive.
In late 1778, leading a small force of one hundred and fifty men, George Rogers Clark entered the Illinois Country where they would capture Great Britain’s major posts along the Mississippi and take British lieutenant governor Henry Hamilton prisoner to achieve one of the most singular victories during the American Revolution. Having suffered at the hands of British-supported Native American raids in Kentucky, Clark and his men embraced a confrontational approach, lumping all Native American nations together as inveterate blood enemies. For years, Clark’s daring achievement was lionized as the embodiment of American initiative. Now, in light of Clark’s treatment and participation in the subjugation of Native peoples, his legacy has reversed, with his statue at the University of Virginia recently being removed. His lack of nuance led him to misinterpret Indian responses to his military campaign and conclude that his approach produced results. In fact, many Native American nations simply used the American presence on the Mississippi to extort greater support from the British.
In Till the Extinction of This Rebellion: George Rogers Clark, Frontier Warfare, and the Illinois Campaign of 1778–1779 Eric Sterner views the campaign from the American, British, and Indigenous perspectives and illustrates the wide geographic impact of the American Revolution west of the Appalachians, particularly on the French and Native American communities in the area.
Clark’s expedition was sanctioned by Virginia in order to protect its western border, and the author provides an overview of this rationale along with the strategies, tactics, and logistics Clark employed, particularly his ability to operate over great distances in remote areas. In particular, the author pays close attention to the psychological battlefield and how Clark combined mobility, surprise, and a calculated reputation for violence—a tactic respected by the Native peoples—to achieve dominance over his adversaries, often enabling the Americans to achieve their goals without harming anyone. The book culminates with the capture of Fort Sackville/Vincennes, in which Clark and his men fought the only pitched battle of the Illinois Campaign. The resounding success of Clark’s expedition laid the foundation for credible American postwar claims to lands as far west as the Mississippi, opening even more territory to new settlements at the expense of the Native peoples. Till the Extinction of This Rebellion is an important contribution to understanding the impact of the American Revolution on both Native peoples and westward expansion.
Paulina Springs Books is hunting this one down for me.
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I think it is of great importance and value to truly understand men like Rogers and Clark, who exemplified both the heroic achievements and epic flaws of the Frontier Partisans. The work they did was enormously difficult; they had precious little of the logistical and technical support that underpins modern special operations. Indeed, part of the reason both men got into trouble is that they sunk their own funds into making their enterprises reality.
Their descent is hard to look at, but it is important to recognize that alcoholism plagued all too many Frontier Partisans — it was a way of self-medicating for painful physical breakdown and psychological trauma. It’s still a problem in analogous communities today.
Only exceptional men would have conceived of and taken on the nigh-impossible missions Clark and Rogers assigned themselves, and it is worthwhile to contemplate to what degree their exceptional nature was integrally tied to their personal troubles. This ain’t about knocking over heroes — it’s about understanding the true makeup of the Frontier Partisan. It’s a quest that I find endlessly compelling.
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*In The Unvanquished, Patrick O’Donnell notes that Wild Bill Donovan’s concept of special operations that he would develop in the World War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was derived from the exploits of Civil War Partisan Rangers.