Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
[M]isery stalked Robert Rogers and his Rangers just as they stalked their enemies during the French and Indian Wars. Racing home through the wilds of Vermont in 1759 after decimating an Abenaki village in present-day southern Quebec, Rogers and his men nervously eyed the surrounding woods for the French troops and Abenaki warriors they knew must be following. More than fear of attack gnawed at them, however.
As they fled, they were hounded by hunger. When the corn they had stolen from the village of St. Francis ran out, they ate leaves and mushrooms. When foraged food didn’t satisfy their hunger, they cooked and ate their leather straps and cartridge boxes, and devoured tallow candles. Finally, they ate each other.
In the years that followed, the Rangers spoke surprisingly freely of the incidents of cannibalism. Perhaps they believed that, given the extreme conditions they had faced, history would be forgiving. In that, they were right. Most people, if they have heard of Rogers’ Rangers at all, know them as indomitable colonial woodsmen with remarkable reconnoitering and survival skills who fought for the British during the French and Indian War of the 1750s and ’60s.
But that’s the adventure-story version of events. History is always more complicated.
Robert Rogers was a tremendously rugged, brave and skilled frontiersmen, as were his men, but he was also undisciplined. Superiors, impressed with his other abilities, were willing to overlook this trait and make him a major.
In Sept. 13, 1759, British Gen. Jeffrey Amherst ordered Rogers and his Rangers to march north from the fort at Crown Point on the New York side of Lake Champlain into southern Quebec. There, they would smash the village of St. Francis, home of Abenakis who were allies of the French.
The Rangers packed lightly in order to move quickly. They planned to pick up supplies at Missisquoi Bay at the north end of Lake Champlain that would sustain them until they reached St. Francis. After the raid, they would seize more food from the village and, augmenting it with wild animals they would shoot along the way, make their return.
The first sign of trouble came when Robert Rogers and his roughly 140 men reached Missisquoi Bay. The food that had been stashed there was missing, having apparently been discovered by the French or Indians.
Empty bellies didn’t stop the Rangers. They sneaked into St. Francis and devastated the village. They shot and stabbed anyone they saw and burned most of the dwellings. In his later account, Rogers said his men killed about 200 Abenaki and suffered only one death themselves. More a massacre than a raid if this account is true, but Rogers would be lionized for it.
Some historians question Rogers’ version, noting that Abenakis and French authorities reported that the death toll among the Abenaki was more like 30, about 20 of them women and children, and that Rogers’ losses were worse than he admitted.
As the dwellings burned, Rogers’ men ransacked the village and filled their packs with corn. Rangers with different appetites, raided the mission church and made off with gold coins, gold candlesticks, and a large silver statue of Mary. The precious metals took up precious space in their packs and weighed them down. The men would lose and discard the items on the journey south, filling the dreams of treasure hunters ever since.
Now it was time to outrun the French and Abenaki who Rogers assumed were hunting them. The day after the raid, men were already complaining of hunger. Soon, they were asking Rogers to let them split into smaller groups. A group of 140-odd men tramping through the wilderness wasn’t conducive to tracking down game, which the men reported was strangely scarce. Within eight days of the raid, they were completely out of food. Some men had had their last meal three or four days before the raid.
Rogers divided his men into 11 groups and sent them along different routes south through Vermont. Three parties would return to Crown Point. The others would converge along the Connecticut River, which they would follow to Fort No. 4 in Charlestown, New Hampshire. Since waterways were the highways of the day, the men’s escape routes read like a river atlas of Vermont. Some groups took the Clyde River to Island Pond, then the Nulhegan River to the Connecticut. Others found their way along the Barton, Wells and Passumpsic rivers.
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[R]ogers was right: The French and Abenaki were on their tail. The Rangers led by Ensign Elias Avery were the first attacked. They were surprised and captured near Lovering Lake, just west of Lake Memphremagog in extreme southern Quebec. One Ranger was tied to a tree and stabbed repeatedly until he died. Six others were taken captive and marched back to St. Francis. Two would be killed there, but four others would be exchanged months later with the British for French prisoners. The remaining three managed to escape their attackers and find Rogers’ detachment.
The group led by Lt. William Dunbar was even less fortunate. Several days after the attack on Avery’s group, Dunbar and his 17 men were ambushed in marshes south of Norton Pond in northeastern Vermont. By one account, the French and Indians outnumbered Dunbar’s group five to one. Dunbar and seven of his men were killed on the spot, their scalped and mutilated bodies left in the marsh. Another three men were marched back to St. Francis and killed there.
Groups that avoided attack battled intense hunger. Men began to act irrationally. When one party shot a moose, and the injured animal loped into the woods, only three men were strong enough to follow. When they found it, the moose had been beset by a pack of wolves. The men apparently challenged the wolves for the meat and were killed in the process.
Lt. George Campbell wrote later that some of his men had “lost their senses; whilst others, who could no longer bear the keen pangs of an empty stomach, attempted to eat their excrements.”
After cooking and eating much of the leather they carried or wore and having gone three weeks without a decent meal, Campbell’s group stumbled upon some butchered human remains.
The troops assumed the bodies were “those of some of their own party,” Campbell wrote, probably Dunbar’s detachment. “But this was not a season for distinctions. On them, accordingly, they fell like Cannibals, and devoured part of them raw; their impatience being too great to wait the kindling of a fire to dress it by. When they had thus abated their excruciating pangs they before endured, they carefully collected the fragments and carried them off.”
Others also resorted to cannibalism. The sole survivor of a detachment that had wandered into New Hampshire’s White Mountains stumbled out of them with a bloodstained pack and a chunk of human flesh, all that remained of the supply that had kept him alive.
Of the 140 or so men who set out from Crown Point, roughly 50 were dead. The French and Indians had killed 19; the others died on the trek home.
Looking back decades later, one Ranger, Sgt. David Evans, remembered not the glory that has been passed down in history books and novels, but a horrific ordeal. One night during the trek, Evans told a historian, he had searched another Ranger’s pack and found in it three human heads. Evans admitted that he had cut off a piece of flesh, and had cooked and eaten it. He told the historian that “he would die with hunger, before he would do the same again.” Evans was racked with guilt over what he’d done, saying that “when their distresses were greatest, they hardly deserved the name of human beings.”
