Rangers

History

The English first used range as a verb in the 14th century to describe the act of patrolling specific areas by military and law enforcement bodies; in North America, Anglo-Americans applied that description to those who fought Indians. Rangers first appeared on the American military scene in the late 17th century. Before King Philip's War and the Susquehannock wars, Americans depended upon a small cadre of European mercenaries to lead their armies of settlers in pitched battles against indigenous peoples. By the mid-1670s, however, an evolution in Native Americans’ tactics from organized battle to what is loosely known as guerrilla warfare presented Anglo-Americans with a new military challenge. Pitched battles with Native Americans proved increasingly difficult and dangerous.

Colonists on the frontier grasped that small parties of soldiers could sortie forth and strike indigenous communities before Native American raiders could destroy isolated farms and settlements. Ranger warfare also allowed frontier settlers to wage war relatively cheaply and without large outlays of men and matériel. Beginning with Benjamin Church, an officer in the Plymouth militia who in King Philip's War sought tutelage from friendly Native Americans on how to operate effectively in the wilderness, settlers gradually developed a way of war in which Rangers burned indigenous villages and fields and killed combatants and noncombatants alike. The focus on hit-and-run raids, ambushes, and the brutalization of enemy noncombatants, often fueled by bounties placed on Native American scalps, dominated war making in backcountry North America in King William's War, Queen Anne's War, the Tuscarora War, the Yamasee War, Dummer's War, and the early wars of King George II (the War of Jenkins’ Ear and King George's War). Over time, two types of Ranger forces developed: in the North, Rangers were primarily infantry, while in the South, Rangers were more akin to the mounted dragoons of Europe. Only with the arrival of large numbers of British regulars to fight the Seven Years’ War—the last of the Anglo-French imperial wars in North America—did European approaches to warfare challenge the primacy of Ranger warfare among frontier settlers.

Even in those conflicts in which British regulars bore an increasing burden of war, Rangers remained a crucial component of American expansion on the frontier. In King George's War in Nova Scotia, Ranger companies of Anglo-Americans and Native Americans of New England commanded by John Gorham proved to be key to Great Britain's subjugation of the indigenous peoples and French Acadians of the Maritime Provinces. During the Seven Years’ War, successive British commanders depended on Robert Rogers's Rangers to serve as the scouting and intelligence arm of their Army. Rogers's Rangers accepted the surrender of the French outposts in the Ohio country and Upper Great Lakes region following the Peace of Paris in 1763, and Rogers's “19 Standing Orders,” the first written instructions for making war by an American, has remained the basis for the U.S. Army's Ranger doctrine.

...