Harking back to Kenneth Roberts' Roberts' "Northwest Passage," Rogers' life after the legendary mission to destroy the nest of Abenaki vipers equally unbelievable.
Did you know that Rogers undertook with just two companies of Rangers an equally legendary 1763 expedition into what was called the Northwest (the Ohio territory) to accept the surrender of the French posts to the British, who had in that year won the French and Indian War?
This trip afoot took Rogers nearly halfway across the continent. In fact, Rogers proposed to the British Crown an expedition to the Pacific, an exploration which one of his captains later partly accomplished while Rogers was stuck commanding Fort Michilmackinac in what would later become Michigan.
Thus Rogers almost achieved in 1763 what Lewis and Clark wouldn't actually fully achieve till some 40 years later -- an expedition of exploration to the Pacific Ocean.
Rogers was indeed turned down by George Washington at the start of the American Revolution as a volunteer Ranger in the colonial forces. Instead, Washington had Rogers arrested and tossed into prison.
Understandably rankled by this, Rogers broke out of jail and went over to the British.
Rogers is the guy of whom George Washington said: "He is the only man I ever feared."
We have our unfathomably brave predecessors in the Rangers to thank for the British colonists' ultimate victory in the 150-year-long war against the French and Indians -- America's longest war, and one that NO elementary or high school ANYWHERE in America teaches ANYTHING about.
Robert Rogers was larger than life. He is often called the Father of U.S. Special Forces, for his work pioneering the colonial rangers in early America. His Rules for Ranging are still required reading by the U.S. Rangers and Green Berets.
But Rogers wasn't the first colonial ranger. It is uncertain who could claim that title, because the tradition of "ranging" goes back to early England and Scotland. The colonists took that tradition with them when they settled America. Rangers were deployed in Jamestown.
Ranger Benjamin Church, who was instrumental in winning King Philip's war (1675-1678) in New England, is also called the Father of the Rangers. It was his team that hunted down and killed King Philip (aka Metacomet) in Rhode Island.
King Philip's War is another one of those gigantic historical struggles not taught in our schools.
This was the war in which the Indians pushed the American colonists all the way back to the shoreline towns all across New England (except in Connecticut, where there were just a few battles), and almost into the ocean.
Did you know that New England's colonists almost starved during that war, and would have had it not been for ships full of emergency provisions sent from England? The Indians banded together -- most of them, but not all -- to exterminate the white man.
But the colonists won that war.
They won all of the other Indian wars in New England too.
Rogers is the guy who turned the tide in the last such war.
If you read anything about Rogers and the men he fought with, you will not believe the hardships they endured to bequeath us our free and easy lives of today. Those who sling arrows at Rogers and his Rangers from their easy chair in a warm home on land won by their forebears from the Indians have no conception - absolutely none - of just how feral the so-called native Americans were.
FACT: Like most Stone Age peoples, most Indian tribes engaged in constant warfare. Tribal death rates, as a percentage, were far higher than any of the white man's wars. The Comanches would become the apex tribe in North America when it comes to aggression, outstripping even the Abenakis and Pequots. In fact, the Comanches were so powerful that they hunted the terrifying Apaches for fun, and chased all of the Apache tribes off the plains. Read "Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History" by S.C. Gwynne if you want to understand Stone Age pathologies.
The "noble savage" is a myth. Most tribes, given half a chance, would exterminate enemy tribes in a New York minute. They extracted positive orgasmic delight in the most heinous and protracted tortures. These cultures refined torture for century upon century. This had nothing whatsoever to do with the New Age apologetics about "absorbing a victim's spirit." Balderdash. They just liked torture.
Rogers' bushwhacking victory over the Abenaki Indians -- the Northeast's Islamofacist terrorists of one-quarter of a millennium ago -- helped finally end the last of the five consecutive French and Indian wars in New England. Ironically, these wars had been going on pretty much continuously almost from the year of discovery -- 1609 -- i.e., the year that Samuel de Champlain (the "Father of New France") discovered the lake named for him, the same year that Henry Hudson sailed up the river named for him.
Yes, the year of discovery was 400 years ago in 2009 and the year of British victory in the 150-year war against New France was 1759, 250 years ago in 2009.
Tempus fugit.
