Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits by John Arquilla Read Free Book Online

began to take hold—continued to mount patrols and raids of their own. 13 Rogers and his men found themselves, even at this late point in the war, engaging in some sharp fights and getting the worst of matters on more than one occasion. Returning to Crown Point with a dozen new ranger recruits the winter after the raid on St. Francis, Rogers was ambushed by a roving enemy war party that killed five and took four prisoners. Somehow he and a few others escaped. 14
    This wasn’t the only time Rogers and his men had been in grave personal danger. From time to time throughout the war Rogers found himself cut off, pursued, or engaged in running fights on long retreats when patrols and raids went bad. In these situations his indomitability and endurance were the keys to survival for himself and his men. In this kind of war even a victorious action could quickly turn about. Coming back from the raid on St. Francis, for example, Rogers was pursued by large numbers of French and Indians for more than a hundred miles. Only his iron will and the fitness his drills and training had forged kept his hundred-odd rangers moving at a faster pace than the sizable groups of pursuers tracking them. That they eluded capture and were able to come back, albeit having lost about a third of the raiding force, is perhaps the most powerful evidence that Rogers had created truly elite troops, the first of such quality, purpose-built, that the world had seen.
    Rogers, not yet thirty at the time of the St. Francis raid, had given birth to a type of military unit and enlivened a way of war that made possible huge improvements in British military practices. Even skeptics among the king’s officers came to see this, and the British soon multiplied the number of “light” and “flank” companies of their own infantry units, arming many of them with the accurate, longer-ranging rifles that were coming into use and which a few rangers had employed during the war. Yet what Rogers had achieved in the realm of irregular warfare not only helped win a continent for the British Empire; he had also forged an instrument that would soon imperil much of the Crown’s North American holdings in a full-throated revolution. The hard-pressed Redcoats, who would barely hold their own against an Indian uprising just after the fall of the French, would lose the war designed to maintain control over their American colonists—largely because of the colonials’ masterful irregular operations. As to Rogers himself, the great architect of wilderness warfare, in middle age he would choose to become the enemy of his own people and end his days in defeat, exile, and ignominy.
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    The fall of Montreal in 1760 to Jeffery Amherst’s converging columns—each of which Robert Rogers and his rangers had done so much to guide and empower—was a high point for the British. After that almost all the going proved to be downhill. Amherst, so patiently skillful in defeating the French, proved to be a colonial administrator of indifferent qualities. And in the immediate wake of the war the Native Americans quickly realized that without French backing their situation had worsened dramatically. Only broad unification of the tribes and concerted action would give them any chance of holding on to their homelands. At this point in 1763—the same year the Treaty of Paris concluded the Seven Years’ War—a broad insurgency erupted. Pontiac’s War was named after the visionary, semi-mystic Ottawa leader who sought to unite the tribes by helping spread the idea, first advanced by Delaware Indian prophets, that the Almighty had brought down grave troubles upon them because of their consumption of alcohol. Purification of the people, via the embrace of abstemiousness, was the only way to rekindle past successes. The example provided by such personal discipline, it was thought, would so impress the king of France that he would send his forces once again to fight alongside the Indians.
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