When I was in high school, I read “Northwest Passage” by Kenneth Roberts, and immediately became fascinated with Roger's Rangers and with the colonial-era Rangers in general. Rangers were specialized troops picked from the woodsmen and hunters of the colonial frontier. They fought far behind enemy lines as a matter of course, worked closely with Indian allies and made war on the Indians allied with the French. Rangers were renowned for fighting “Indian style”- in other words, via the raid and the ambush and all the other features we would now think of as guerilla warfare.

“Northwest Passage” is the story of Robert Rogers, the larger-than-life commander of the boldest and most successful of all the Ranger units. The first half of the novel tells the story of the Rangers' raid on (and massacre of) the Indian village of St. Francis in retaliation for the raids committed by the inhabitants of that village against colonial towns. The second half of the novel tells the story of Rogers' doomed attempts to find the Northwest Passage, a mythical water-route to the Pacific, and of his eventual decline and fall. Rogers was not only a military hero but also a scam artist and crook. Eventually he became a lecherous old drunk. The story of Robert Rogers is a Greek tragedy- the tale of a man who had both great qualities and great moral failings.

Ranger units frequently committed acts we would now think of as war crimes, such as killing all of the men in an enemy village whether they were under arms at the time or not. Their enemies waged war in exactly the same way. If the brutality of frontier warfare is too ugly a topic for your preferred type of fiction, you might not enjoy this. If you like your history with warts and all, you should find this fascinating.