05/28/05 Associated Press Chris Carola "FORT EDWARD, N.Y. - Maj. Robert Rogers, the frontiersman whose 18th century manual on guerrilla warfare has become a blueprint for Army Ranger fighting tactics, is getting what some consider a long-overdue honor: a statue in his memory. But some veterans believe unveiling the monument on Memorial Day is insensitive because Rogers was loyal to England during the Revolutionary War. ... Fearing Rogers was a British spy, Washington turned down his request to join the Continental Army at the outset of the American Revolution. Rogers went on to raise a company of loyalist rangers, but failed to have the impact he had in the previous war. A heavy drinker, he died a pauper in England in 1795 and lies buried somewhere beneath the streets of London. ... Controversy aside, a tribute to Rogers is long overdue, said Stephen Brumwell, a British author whose latest book, "White Devil," details the most famous exploit of Rogers' Rangers: the 1759 revenge raid on an Abenaki Indian village in Quebec. The raid that inspired the 1826 novel "The Last of the Mohicans," by James Fenimore Cooper. ... "He earned his statue the hard way," Brumwell said in a telephone interview from his home in the Netherlands. "While others were sitting out the French and Indian War in Boston and New York, he was leading patrols into enemy territory, often in the very depths of winter."
Review of Northwest Passage
