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��Robert Rogers, the Ranger.
��On the tenth of December, after disposing of the French force found in the fort, and having taken possession of the forts Miamie and Gatanois, with characteristic ardor Rogers pushed still farther westward for Michilimackinac. But it was a vain attempt. The season was far advanced. Indeed, the winter had already come, and while the ice prevented his progress by water, the snows rendered impracticable his ad- vance by land. With reluctance he re- linquished for the first time the com- pletion of his mission. Turning east- ward, after a tedious journey, he reached New York on the fourteenth of February, 1761.
From New York, there is reason to suppose, that he went this same year as Captain of one of the His Majesty's In- dependent Companies of Foot to South Carolina, and there aided Colonel Grant in subduing the Cherokees, who had for a year or two been committing depre- dations upon the Carolinian frontiers.
From this time onward for the next two years we lose sight of Major Rog- ers, but he re-appears at the siege of Detroit in 1763. Hither he went with twenty Rangers as part of a body of soldiers sent from Fort Niagara under the command of Captain Dalzell for the re-inforcement of the beleagured fort. He arrived on the twenty-ninth of July, and on the thirty-first took an active part in the fierce battle of Bloody Bridge. His valor was as useful as it was conspicuous on that occasion, and but for his daring efforts the retreat of the British troops would have been more disastrous even than it was. Hav- ing, for a time, in the house of the Frenchman, Campean, held at bay a throng of savages which surrounded it, his escape with a few followers at one door was hardly achieved ere these burst in at another.
��The next glimpse we get of Major Rogers is at Rumford (now Concord) where he had a landed estate of some four or five hundred acres. Good old Parson Walker, who here kept open house, and for more than fifty years watched with solicitude the interests of his parish and his country, says, in his diary for 1764, against date of February 24 : " Major Rogers dined with us " and again December 22 : "Major Rogers and Mr. Scales, Jr., dined with me."
It is probable that his private affairs now occupied his attention. A year or so after the surrender of Montreal he was married to Elizabeth, daughter of Rev. Arthur Brown, Rector of St. John's Church, in Portsmonth, New Hamp- shire. He considered this town his resi- dence, and in papers executed this very year (1764) sometimes designates him- self "asof Portsmouth," and at others, as " now residing at Portsmouth."
For three or four years, between 1762 and 1765, he trafficked a good deal in lands, buying and selling nu- merous and some quite extensive tracts. Some twenty-five different conveyances to him are on record in the Recorder's office of Rockingham County, and half as many from him to other parties.
Some of these lands he seems to have purchased and some to have received in consideration of military services. In 1764 Benning Wentworth, as Gov- ernor of New Hampshire, conveyed to him as "a reduced officer " a tract of three thousand acres, lying in the south- em part of Vermont.
- One conveyance made by him and
- The old " Rogers house," so called, is still standing
upon the former estate of Major Rogers, on the east side and near the south end of Main Street, in Concord, New Hampshire. It must be at least a hundred years old, and faces the South, being two stories high on the front side and descending by a long sloping roof to one in the rear. It was occupied for many years by Captain and Mrs. Roach, and later by Arthur, son of Major Rogers, who was a lawyer by profession and died at Portsmouth, in 1841.
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