Haughty Conquerors

During 1763 and 1764, a loose coalition of Native American tribes ranging from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River and from the Ohio Valley to the Great Lakes revolted against the oppression and neglect of their newly installed British masters. This Great Uprising ranks among the most successful wars in Native American history with the assault and capture of nine forts, the siege of Forts Detroit and Pitt, and, finally, a negotiated peace that met most of their demands. Yet, the victories proved to be fleeting as tribal enthusiasm waned. Within a generation, another wave of settlers and a frontier war would conquer much of what the unfortunate tribes would cling to with their victory. There would be no simple solution to the conflict. Now nearly dependent on the white man's technology and trade, tribal leaders were forced to face the prospects of an uncertain future. Supplies captured from the forts would last only so long, and the war had diverted valuable manpower from the yearly hunt. While the British had managed to quell the uprising, they did so largely through diplomacy, and they paid a high political price with negotiations conceding nearly every tribal demand. However, within a generation yet another wave of settlers and a frontier war would conquer much of what the unfortunate tribes would cling to with their victory.

Often hailed as the godfather of today’s elite special forces, Robert Rogers trained and led an unorthodox unit of green provincials, raw woodsmen, farmers, and Indian scouts on “impossible” missions in colonial America that are still the stuff of soldiers’ legend. The child of marginalized Scots-Irish immigrants, Rogers learned to survive in New England’s dark and deadly forests, grasping, as did few others, that a new world required new forms of warfare. John F. Ross not only re-creates Rogers’s life and his spectacular battles with breathtaking immediacy and meticulous accuracy, but brings a new and provocative perspective on Rogers’s unique vision of a unified continent, one that would influence Thomas Jefferson and inspire the Lewis and Clark expedition. Rogers’s principles of unconventional war-making would lay the groundwork for the colonial strategy later used in the War of Independence—and prove so compelling that army rangers still study them today. Robert Rogers, a backwoods founding father, was heroic, admirable, brutal, canny, ambitious, duplicitous, visionary, and much more—like America itself.