Battle on Snowshoes: Rogers' Rangers at Lake George

In the winter of seventeen fifty-eight, a company of British Rangers set out from Fort Edward in snowshoes, moving north through the frozen forests toward French-held Fort Carillon. They would not reach it. What happened instead became one of the most dramatic small-unit actions of the French and Indian War, and it produced a legend that has outlasted the conflict by more than two and a half centuries.

The Rangers were led by Captain Robert Rogers, a twenty-six-year-old New Hampshire man who had spent years learning the guerrilla tactics of Indigenous woodland warfare and turning them into a system. Rogers' Rangers, as his unit was known, operated in ways that baffled conventional European officers: moving in dispersed lines, using terrain as cover, fighting at night, traveling in conditions other soldiers considered impossible. The snowshoes were typical.

On March thirteenth, seventeen fifty-eight, Rogers led approximately one hundred eighty men northward along the western shore of Lake George. French scouts had detected the Rangers and set a counter-ambush. Rogers sprang his own ambush against the first French party, but a second, larger French and Indigenous force had positioned itself behind him. Caught in a crossfire, the Rangers were overwhelmed. They lost more than one hundred twenty-five men, killed, wounded, or captured.

Rogers himself escaped. The story that spread afterward described him sliding four hundred feet down the cliff now called Rogers Slide to the frozen surface of Lake George. Historians debate it, but storytellers have never been able to leave it alone.

The battle did not change the course of the war, but Rogers survived to write the famous twenty-eight rules of ranging that defined light-infantry tactics for generations, influencing American military doctrine through the Revolution and beyond. The defeat near Lake George was, in its way, the school that made the doctrine credible.