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. “A lively, evocative and at times moving biography . . . Ross [brings] this extraordinary man back to life.”— The Wall Street Journal “Nothing less than a tour de force that will appeal to a wide range of readers . . . This remarkable book should go far to rescue a once-famous figure in American history.”— Winston-Salem Journal   “In this exhaustive book, variously scholarly and white-knuckle exciting, John Ross has done the great man justice.”— The Washington Times   “Rousing . . . The story of Rogers, as told by Ross, is an American tale.”— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette   “[A] sweeping account . . . a thrilling narrative.”— The Boston Globe John F. Ross is executive editor of American Heritage magazine and a former member of the Board of Editors at Smithsonian magazine, where he wrote six cover stories. His articles have been published in Reader’s Digest, Parade, the New York Times, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the Sunday Telegraph, and more. He has appeared on more than fifty radio and television programs and has keynoted conferences across the continent. His organization of the most northern canoe trip ever taken earned him a membership in the Explorers Club. On assignment he has dogsledded with the Polar Inuit in northwestern Greenland, technical mountain climbed in Siberia, and dived 3,000 feet in the Galápagos. He is the author of Living Dangerously and lives in Bethesda, Maryland. Chapter One Into the Wilderness This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic, Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms. Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline Early one spring morning in 1739 James Rogers cinched the knots securing his family's belongings to an oxcart. Several sacks of corn kernels, some to be used for food, others for seed, huddled among well-worn tools and implements: an ax, a hoe, an iron pot, and a skillet. On the wagon's sill he propped his heavy smoothbore, loaded and primed with powder and shot. The New Hampshire air still carried the lingering bite of winter. Nearby the Spicket River gurgled more quietly than usual, denied its usual springtime roar by two years of drought. The fir-shaded clearing in front of the small log cabin bustled with even more activity than usual for this characteristically large frontier family. His wife, Mary, brought out the last belongings, while their 13-year old daughter, Martha, looked after her mother's two-year-old namesake. Their five sons—Daniel, 16, Samuel, 14, James, 11, Robert, 7, Richard, 5—dashed around. In November James the elder had bought a one-sixth interest in 2,190 acres of tallgrass meadow and evergreen forest 35 miles northwest of their present 44-acre homestead in Methuen. During the long winter evenings James had read to the children from his small but choice library, which included the Geneva Bible that he had carried over from Ireland. He may have enthralled them with the resourcefulness of the shipwrecked hero of Robinson Crusoe, one of the few novels forever passing from hand to hand on the frontier. Buried in that grave but spirit-raising adventure lay a moral that resonated with those who ventured into any wilderness: things get done not by wishing but by willing. Perhaps for young Robert, as Friday passed out of the unknown into Robin's service, the story lent strength to the idea that friends could be found in the impassive wilderness. James may have also read them The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan's allegorical epic, in which the highest qualities of worldly adventure sweep through the Slough of Despond and Valley