Reviews
“a lively, evocative and at times moving biography”
- Wall Street Journal, 5/22/09
“a thrilling narrative”
- Boston Globe, 5/19/09
“white-knuckle-exciting”
- Washington Times, 6/28/09
Advanced Praise for WAR ON THE RUN
“This vivid and deeply engaging book tells the story of Robert Rogers, who with his small force of Rangers developed a new American way….Rogers himself appears as a character of high complexity. Distrusted by leaders on all sides, his loyalty was to the land itself. His writings taught British settlers to think of their backcountry as a continental frontier, and his stage play Ponteach portrayed American Indians with sympathy and respect. John F. Ross has given us a memorable portrait of an authentic American-antihero, and an historical figure of high importance.” —David Hackett Fischer, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Washington’s Crossing
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“This is an epic tale of America’s first great war, told with novelistic flair, and bringing to life the greatest American military leader that most readers have never encountered until now.”—Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize-Winning author of Founding Brothers: the Revolutionary Generation
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“There are good books and extraordinary books. War on the Run is one of those latter rarities. Ross has restored an authentic American hero, Robert Rogers, to the national pantheon by vividly retelling his heartbreaking story with new depth and understanding.”—Thomas Fleming, author of The Perils of Peace: America’s Struggle to Survive After Yorktown
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“Robert Rogers and his intrepid rangers played a vital role in shaping colonial America into the future United States. Ross relates their phenomenal feats in a thrilling, meticulously researched, highly readable narrative.”—Stanley Karnow, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Vietnam: A History
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“The ceaseless innovation that Robert Rogers applied to warfare on the American frontier is pivotal to understanding the country’s twenty-first century struggles among regions and people equally remote to many of us. Only a work of singular historical rigor, as produced by John F. Ross, could make these timeless qualities of elite close-quarter combat so vividly clear.”—Derek Leebaert, author of To Dare and to Conquer: Special Operations and the Destiny of Nations from Achilles to Al Qaeda
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“War on the Run is a saga of the 18th-century American frontier that has it all—a two-fisted backwoods hero in Robert Rogers, bloody fighting with the French and Indians, political treachery, scandal, and espionage. A terrific read.”—Edwin G. Burrows, author of Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War
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BOOKLIST
War on the Run: The Epic Story of Robert Rogers and the Conquest of America’s First Frontier.
Ross, John F. (Author)
May 2009. 576 p. Bantam, hardcover, $28.00. (9780553804966). 973.3092.
Modern practitioners of military special operations know of Robert Rogers’ principles of their craft, but history readers are apt to ask, Rogers who? American Heritage editor Ross answers that query absorbingly, creating a colorful portrait of a remarkable American colonial officer of the French and Indian War. Of Scots-Irish immigrant heritage, Rogers (1731–95) experienced frontier raids in what is now New Hampshire in his boyhood. As a young man, Rogers acquitted himself with shrewd scouting as well as in brutal battles with woodland parties of the French and their Indian allies and was awarded an officer’s commission in the British army (an honor George Washington coveted in vain). Rogers’ hard-won eminence in colonial society came apart after the peace of 1763. He was court-martialed, went to debtors’ prison, sided with Tories in 1776, ensnared Nathan Hale, then receded from history. Ross’ recovery of Rogers from the footnotes closes a gap in colonial historiography with a sanguinary war biography that is practically a movie script unto itself. Buffs of the period will love it.
— Gilbert Taylor
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Wall Street Journal, 5/22/09
By Arthur Herman
The Pioneer of Special Ops
Frontiers Robert Rogers and the roots of the U.S. Army Rangers
People once knew Robert Rogers as the steel-eyed hero played by Spencer Tracy in the film “Northwest Passage” who leads his men, including Robert Young and Walter Brennan, through heartbreak and hardship to victory over Abenake Indians during the French and Indian War. Today Rogers is almost forgotten except by the U.S. Army Rangers, who revere him as their founder and role model.
Ft. Ticonderoga
Robert Rogers as the artist Thomas Hart imagined him in 1776.
John Ross, the executive editor of American Heritage magazine, has taken it upon himself to bring this extraordinary man back to life. He succeeds with “War on the Run,” a lively, evocative and at times moving biography. Rogers is the godfather of modern Special Ops. His spirit still hovers over the elite units who do extraordinary things in Afghanistan and Iraq, from the Rangers to the Navy SEALs, Marine Recon and Delta Force.
Rogers was also the original American frontiersman. Born in the wilds of New Hampshire in 1731, he explored the far reaches of the North American wilderness up to the western shores of Lake Michigan. His obsessive hope of finding a land passage to the Pacific made him the “expounder of a realm never made coherent by map or report,” Mr. Ross writes, a realm stretching from the Appalachians to Oregon (a name Rogers coined for the Pacific Northwest Territory) and “so vast and alien in its contours, fauna, botany, and human occupation that it resembled a new planet.” Thirty years later Meriwether Lewis and George Rogers Clark took up the challenge of charting its immensity. Still, it is Robert Rogers, far more than Daniel Boone or Lewis and Clark, who spawned the American idea of going where no one has gone before.
Tall, broad and strong, Rogers had trapped, canoed, hunted and fought Indians across the British colonies in America since his early teens. His restless and unstable temperament also landed him in trouble. In 1755 he was actually about to be indicted of counterfeiting when news came of the outbreak of war against the French. For Rogers it meant a pardon, an officer’s commission and an opportunity to apply the crafts he had learned from the Indian tribes, and from the trappers and traders who passed among them, to the art of war.
Rogers realized that the American wilderness of swamp, forest, river and mountain, far from imposing a barrier, actually opened a daring opportunity to seize the initiative and carry the war to the French and their native allies. He became the David Petraeus of his time: It took the possibility of defeat to convince others that he was right. Like certain commanders in Iraq, British generals—Edward Braddock comes to mind—were skilled and experienced in conventional European warfare but unable to adapt to their new combat environment. When on July 9, 1755, Braddock was killed and some 900 of his 1,300 men killed or wounded by a smaller French and Indian force, it was a sign that a new approach was needed.
An ambush led by Rogers in 1758 during the French and Indian War.
Rogers was put in command of a group of irregulars designated the Independent Company of Rangers. What emerged was a new kind of soldier and, in Robert Rogers, a new kind of leader. If Rogers had ever read Sun Tzu’s “Art of War,” he would have heartily approved of one of its core principles: that battle requires fluidity and flexibility in the face of the enemy—in this case, the American wilderness made ambush and the lightning raid the norm. Like Sun Tzu, Rogers understood that victory was as much a matter of psychology as firepower or numbers: In an unconventional war in the wilderness, the general’s job is to overcome his men’s fear of the savage and unknown and impose it on the enemy. He once scalped a captured French soldier in full view of a fort’s French garrison: The French surrendered a short while later.
Rogers rapidly transformed his ragtag force of volunteers into American ninjas. He dressed them in green woolen jackets and canvas trousers, allowing them to move virtually unseen through the forest, and gave them moccasins borrowed from the Indians. Instead of wearing the usual tricornered hat, Rogers’s Rangers sported a bonnet of Scottish origin—the distant ancestor of the Ranger beret.
Rogers trained his men to be savage fighters but also brothers in adversity. He taught them how to avoid ambush, move silently through miles of underbrush, and how to pursue a retreating enemy through a trackless forest. His men were to be mentally tough and ready to take the initiative if their officers failed. “Every man’s reason and judgment must be his guide,” he wrote at the end of Rogers’s Rules, “according to the particular situation and nature of things.” It was in fact a useful frame of mind for men ready to shoulder the responsibilities of American democracy.
Rogers put his entire system to the test in his famous raid on Saint Francois north of Montreal on the Saint Lawrence River in 1759—the raid that inspired the “Northwest Passage” movie. Rogers led his 200 men on a 150-mile trek through uncharted territory to hit the settlement of French Indian allies. The rangers defied starvation, disease and vicious attacks by neighboring Indian tribes.
Men had to carry a handful of parched corn in their mouths all day to make it edible by evening. When the corn ran out, they resorted to boiling their leather straps and belts—even the scalps of Indians they had killed along the way and, in the retreat home, even the corpses of their companions.
The attack on Saint Francois was a surprise and success: and although the rangers killed far fewer Abenakes than Rogers claimed or the movie suggests, the raid taught Native American tribes in the upper Northwest that they were no longer safe as allies of the French. Rogers’s raid went a long way in demoralizing the French cause in North America, and sent a signal that a new confident power was in charge.
Rogers taught that those who exceed the limits of the conventional are going to command the future. It was the lesson taken up by American strategists in their rebellion against the British Crown 15 years later. The image of Americans sniping at redcoats from behind rocks and trees and using the contours of the land to disrupt British plans was an emblem of what Americans had learned from Rogers and his ranger tactics. They almost had the guru himself show them how to do it. Although a retired officer still in the king’s pay, Rogers approached George Washington to offer his services. Washington, however, was deeply suspicious and discouraged the Continental Congress from taking up the offer. Perhaps Washington realized that the American Revolution would only have room for one military legend at a time.
So Rogers fought instead for the British, and formed the Queens Rangers. He also captured the American spy Nathan Hale, and one of his last successes was surprising and capturing the American garrison at Mamaroneck during General Howe’s advance on New York. By then, however, his British superiors were having doubts about an irregular force made up of “Negroes, Indians, Mulattoes, Sailor and Rebel Prisoners,” and relieved Rogers of command. He wound up back in England, a broken bitter man without a command or a purpose. Rogers died a penniless alcoholic in 1795, while the fame he craved and deserved as North America’s greatest soldier, was never his.
Still, as Mr. Ross notes, Robert Rogers had forced his fellow Americans to rethink their continent and their place in it. He is the godfather not only of Special Ops but of Manifest Destiny. Roger’s kind of unconventional warfare, which halted al Qaeda in Iraq and may still rescue us in Afghanistan, is also one, Mr. Ross would argue, ideally suited to the American temperament. Members of the SAS and Royal Marines might disagree. But there is no denying that thanks to Robert Rogers it’s still the Americans, and the Rangers, who lead the way.
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Boston Globe, 5/19/09
By Michael Kenney
Tales of a stealth warrior before the Revolution
In November 1759, reporting on his audacious mission to destroy the French-allied Indian village of Saint-François in Quebec, Major 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, has become one of the great epics of the American frontier.
And Rogers, in John F. Ross’s sweeping account, “War on the Run,” stands forth 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’s “Rules of Ranging” are now taught at Camp Rogers, the US Army’s Ranger School at Fort Benning, Ga.
Ross, the executive editor of American Heritage magazine, has crafted a thrilling narrative from Rogers’s “Journals,” the accounts of British and French commanders, and those of Rangers themselves. In addition to such traditional sources, Ross has hiked and kayaked over much of Rogers’s territory and conveys a fine sense of place.
Here is Ross bringing the reader into those spruce bogs that the Rogers Rangers had traversed on the trek to Saint-François.
“As the men stepped into cold, dark water the color of long-steeped tea, each step proved uncertain: one foot might gain good purchase, the next sink in above the ankle or knee. Submerged, unseen branches, roots, and logs ripped at moccasins and stubbed now-numb toes. Stiff, sharp back spruce needles raked weary, stumbling bodies. Human beings entering any [such] habitat become conscious only slowly of the sheer magnitude of its life-sucking otherness. The glow of yellow tamarack needles in their fall splendor did little to temper the foreboding.”
Rogers would live for another 36 years after the Saint-François raid.
There was a brief period of recognition when he 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, he offered his services to the Continental Army. But General 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.
Rogers has been a heroic figure for this reader since first encountering him some 60 years ago in Kenneth Roberts’s classic 1937 novel, “Northwest Passage.”
Here is Roberts’s narrator describing Rogers on the night before the attack on Saint-François:
“Rogers, it seemed to me, could go beyond the limits of human endurance; and then, without rest, buoyantly hurl himself against the fiercest opposition of Nature or man, or both. There was something elemental about him – something that made it possible for men who were dead with fatigue to gain renewed energy from him, just as a drooping wheat-field is stirred to life by the wall of wind that runs before a thunder-storm.”
It deepened the pleasure of reading “War on the Run” to find that historian Ross has matched the narrative skills of novelist Roberts.
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Washington Times, 6/28/09
By Philip Kopper
Master of the wilderness, taker of risks
If you want to write a great novel, Melville said, pick a great theme. But if you want to publish a great biography, engage an author with a great appreciation of his subject and an intimate understanding of the realm in which his subject lived.
So be it that John F. Ross is the right one to assay Robert Rogers, the hero of the French and Indian Wars whose exploits involved his mastery of the wilderness and his genius at taking risks. Longtime Smithsonian editor, executive editor of the revived American Heritage and author of “Living Dangerously,” a study about modern risk-taking, Mr. Ross won membership in the Explorer’s Club by navigating a virgin river through Canadian tundra to the Bering Sea.
He has “dogsledded with the Polar Inuit in northwestern Greenland, chased scorpions in Baja, and dived 3,000 feet in the Galapagos,” according to his publisher. (Full disclosure: Mr. Ross is a friend of mine, and I’ve written for his magazines. More importantly, he has written a fierce contribution to our colonial history and added a thread to its fabric, that of ferocity itself.)
Robert Rogers bestrode the Adirondacks like a colossus. He was without equal, the Superman of the conflicts in America that Europe knew as the Seven Years War. Rogers’ triumphs on this continent abetted England’s success in Europe, all of which led to the annexation of Canada and redrafting the map of North America.
Lionized in London and received at court by King George III, Rogers wrote two books and became the most famous man in the empire for more than a quarter of a century. But what a man of spectacular parts. Like Don Quixote, Rogers championed an impossible cause in searching for the mythic Northwest Passage. Like Lord Jim, he virtually ruled in the wild after forging alliances with disparate Indian nations in the most effective back-country diplomacy of his time. And when diplomacy was pointless, he waged war on the wilderness’ own terms and by the enemy’s rules.
He invented a new kind of warfare as he crossbred the savagery of native warriors with European military discipline, then added two traits to make his savage beast truly deadly: appreciation for terrain and terror tactics.
Much of this has been told before, notably in John R. Cuneo’s 1988 study “Robert Rogers of the Rangers” and Kenneth Roberts’ 1937 blockbuster novel “Northwest Passage” and its Hollywood version starring Spencer Tracy.
But Mr. Ross brings new understanding through his own wilderness experience, and illuminates Rogers’ exploits in the light of modern science. The small bands of Rangers he led through hundreds of miles of wilderness in deep snow without food (and without the comfort of campfires) knew their bellies cramped and mental capacities failed; Mr. Ross explains the physiology involved, thus confirming the peril of their physical condition.
When he explicates the mechanics of hypothermia, Rogers’ winter march from Lake George into Ontario appears all the more superhuman. He argues that Rogers accomplished these feats through the genius of pure leadership, that his arsenal of technical skills, heightened by charisma and an intuitive understanding of men, forged his Joe Colonial volunteers into a unique fighting force.
In fact, his legacy inspires our special forces today, especially the U.S. Army’s Rangers, who honor Rogers by training in the deadly use of one of his favorite weapons, the tomahawk. The field manual he wrote of 23 rules is required reading at Fort Benning, a bible for small-unit combat that was heretical if not revolutionary.
Where English armies marched into battle wearing scarlet and honored almost all chivalric codes, Rogers wrote “If you are obliged to receive the enemy’s fire, fall, or squat down, till it is over, then rise and discharge at them.”
Torching villages, he contrived hit-and-run pillage deep in enemy territory for no tactical gain, only for the purpose of terrorizing the populace and keeping defenders on edge by proving he could strike anywhere that he had the will to reach. Which leads even a friendly reviewer to deter some readers: those with weak stomachs. Rogers himself scalps adversaries faster than I can turn a page, as do the English, French and Indian combatants, and they all keep bloody souvenirs as trophies of war. Nor are those the worst actions committed by starving soldiers in buckskin who encounter human corpses.
Herein lies another lesson that sanitized histories ignore: While this nation was founded on high-sounding principles voiced by Enlightenment savants, the woods rang out with tortured screams. Long before Africans’ slavery became common and Indians’ genocide government policy, our forefathers practiced violence with extreme prejudice and sang froid. America was born in brutality many times over, a fact that we moderns would do better to study than ignore if we are ever to defang the blacker angels of our nature.
His derring-do aside, Rogers championed westward expansion and believed in manifest destiny before its time. He blazed new paths, negotiated with Indians in good faith and, inevitably, made political enemies in high places. He faced bankruptcy, largely because his superiors failed to pay his troops’ wages, and by the time his countrymen were choosing sides in the Revolution, he was caught in the middle. British brass, such as Gen. Gage, suspected him of leading Indians against the crown; Continentals called him traitor for retaining his English officer’s commission because he needed the half-pay.
Hoping to join the American cause, he had an encounter with the one man who matched his larger-than-life reputation and persona. George Washington won the faceoff, and Rogers was jailed (not for the first time). Breaking out of prison, he offered his services to Gen. Howe, who welcomed him. His last great deed was to unmask a spy gathering intelligence for the rebels, arrest him and see him hang: Nathan Hale.
Suffice it to say that Robert Rogers, backwoods child of a nascent nation, was heroic, admirable, brutal, canny, ambitious, duplicitous, visionary and much more — like America itself. In this exhaustive book, variously scholarly and white-knuckle-exciting, John Ross has done the great man justice.
• Philip Kopper, who writes about history, the arts and the natural world, is publisher of Posterity Press.
