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the St. Lawrence River to the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec. As the final campaign against Montreal began to unfold in 1760, a three-pronged convergent assault, Rogers would use his fertile brain to find even more uses for his rangers—at one point employing them as “combat swimmers” in a lightning attack on five French warships that were blocking the British advance along the Richelieu River.
    More than all this, the rangers would point the way to transforming the British army in North America. No longer would the Redcoats be subject to the sort of ambush that had destroyed Braddock’s force. No longer would they move so slowly, be so loud and visible. Instead of remaining in massed formation when under fire, they would come to respond to such new commands to take cover as “Tree all!” Soon Lord Howe’s successor, Jeffery Amherst, found himself in command of an army that would scarcely have been recognizable as British had the king come to inspect it. As Fred Anderson has described this startling transformation:
Since 1758 they had routinely cut the tails of their coats back almost to the waist; had trimmed the brims of their hats to within a couple of inches of the crown, and had worn them slouched, not cocked; had had their hair cut to a length of just an inch or two. At least one Highland regiment had given up their kilt in favor of breeches. Officers now seldom wore the gorgets and sashes that invited the attention of enemy marksmen; some had taken to wearing ordinary privates’ coats. A few had even begun to carry tomahawks. 11
    Amherst himself was a highly deliberate general, almost Roman-like in his insistence on fortifying every position to which his army had marched, and on hacking out one stretch of road after another through the wilderness. Yet, like Howe, he saw the great value in cultivating a capacity for irregular warfare. He agreed with the colonial governor of New York, Lord Loudoun, whose view was simply that “it is impossible for an army to act in this country without rangers.” 12 But this did not preclude rangers from acting without a regular army. And if Amherst’s major field operations were achingly slow-paced, he was nonetheless willing to give Rogers his head by setting him loose upon the French and their Indian allies. It was Amherst who ordered the ranger raid on the Abenaki Indian village of St. Francis, still one of the greatest acts of long-range penetration in the history of irregular warfare.
    Traditionally, military campaigning came to a halt during winter. This was certainly true in the harsh North American climate in the eighteenth century, and generally holds true even today in wintry places like the mountains of Afghanistan. But throughout the French and Indian War, as the main British and colonial American forces hunkered down during the months of snow and ice, the rangers remained active. Rogers led them in a series of patrols, raids, and skirmishes that saw them turn up in the least likely places, at the most inopportune moments—for the enemy. Snowshoes, a technology borrowed from the Indians, gave the rangers mobility overland, allowing them to do reconnaissance, take prisoners, and strike at supply columns. As rivers commonly froze over during winter, the French used sled convoys on them to move needed goods and ammunition between their forts and outposts. While they could move swiftly in this fashion, the rangers were able to outpace them by using their ice skates. Soon nothing became more ominous for those running the convoys than to hear the sound of blades scraping the ice, looming nearer and nearer. Given that it was often too cold for firearms to work, these were grim fights with knife and tomahawk.
    But the rangers didn’t have things entirely their own way. As the war dragged on, the French and their remaining Indian allies—the latter diminishing in number in the wake of the ranger raid on St. Francis, and as a sense of the impending British victory