Battling the Elements: Reconstructing the Heroic in Robert Rogers

Abstract

Robert Rogers was an eighteenth-century American military figure who attracted envy and malice in his own day, and continues to evoke both admiration and contempt in our own. Famous on both sides of the Atlantic for his exploits during his lifetime, before the end of the century he had died in penury and disgrace, utterly forgotten. His heroic identity was resurrected in the following century and has remained perennially under (re)construction ever since. While much attention has naturally focused on his colorful military career and turbulent personal life, he is also remarkable for having published two-possibly three-books arising from his experiences as a frontiersman and colonial soldier. A Concise Account of North America, as well as The Journals of Robert Rogers recounting his adventures in the Seven Years' War, were both published in London in 1765. While Concise Account, with its description of the topographies, waterways, forests, and natural resources of eastern North America, would appear to have had the greater role in constructing perceptions and apprehensions of the new world's natural environment, I will argue that it was rather the military journals that played a greater role in this cultural undertaking. The staging of the heroic in the wilderness of what is now upper New York State and Quebec gripped the popular imagination, and for two and a half centuries, the narrative of Rogers' dominion over a hostile natural environment continues to be retold and reimagined in new genres and media. The Real Robert Rogers Robert Rogers emerged as a heroic figure from what is generally identified as the French and Indian War, the arena of the Seven Years' War located in North America. Having grown up on a frontier farm in New Hampshire, Rogers recruited a group of neighbors and joined the New Hampshire Regiment in 1755. When his particular talent for reconnaissance and scouting missions was noted, he was instructed to raise a company of rangers. Rogers and his rangers quickly became renowned for their ability to scout, gather intelligence, adopt the irregular tactics of the enemy, and engage in what we now call guerrilla warfare. Unlike the regulars, rangers traveled deep into French territory, traveled by skate and snowshoe in the winter, carried only a pack and a blanket, and were armed with tomahawks and scalping knives. Robert's brother also joined the rangers, and as early as 1756, an army engineer writing back to London referred to him as the Brother of the famous Captain (Gordon 177). In 1758, General James Abercromby formally commissioned Rogers as Major of the Rangers in his Majesty's Service. The following year, James Wolfe requested Rogers and his rangers for his assault on Quebec, but the new commander-in-chief, MajorGeneral Jeffery Amherst, kept him at Fort Edward to help with the attack planned on Canadian forces from the south. In September of 1759 (the same month that General Wolfe engaged the French at Quebec City), Amherst ordered Rogers on an expedition north from the fort at Crown Point, at the south end of Lake Champlain, to the shore of the St. Lawrence to destroy the Abenaki village of Odenak, also known as St. Francis. The mission was intended as a punitive response to a recent attack on two officers traveling under a flag of truce, but was also meant to destroy a stronghold of aboriginal support for the French. The rangers traveled through the wilderness of what is now upper New York State to the St. Francis River, following it north to its mouth on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, between Montreal and Quebec. The rangers descended on the village just before dawn of October 6, firing the buildings, massacring the inhabitants as they stumbled out of their dwellings, and taking only a handful of prisoners. Retribution was swift, not from their enemy, but from their environment. The original plan to rendezvous following the raid was thwarted when French forces found and destroyed the boats and provisions the rangers had hidden for their return journey. …