Mounted Rangers

In his first-rate book Bushwhackers: Guerrilla Warfare, Manhood, and the Household in Civil War Missouri,  Joseph M. Beilein, Jr. notes that the men who rode with Confederate guerrillas under Captain William Clarke Quantrill, Bloody Bill Anderson, Lt. George Todd and the like saw themselves as part of a tradition of frontier Mounted Rangers — protectors of their households, like men who had ridden out in frontier defense for generations stretching back a century.

We readily call to mind the image of the Texas Ranger, a-horseback, booted and Spanish-roweled.

That’s not the image we conjure of the Ranger of the Eastern Frontier. The Rangers of New England — Benjamin Church, Rogers Rangers, Gorham’s Rangers — operated on foot, on snowshoes, out of whaleboats. The iconic images of Nathaniel Poe in Last of the Mohicans are of a runner.

The operational protocols of the Rangers in the northern theater of the French & Indian War were dictated in part by terrain. New England and Upstate New York was heavily forested, and the theater of operations was largely dominated by a chain of lakes and rivers. That situation was repeated during the American Revolution; the critical Saratoga Campaign was fought in the same country. In the bitterly contested Mohawk Valley, Rangers and Indians tended to operate on foot. The northern colonies did not have a strong “horse culture” during this period.

In the Southern backcountry, though — from Virginia down through the Carolinas to Georgia — the Ranger quickly took to horseback.

The country was no less forested, but distances made horseback travel more imperative — and the Southern Colonies developed a passionate horse culture quite early. The campaigns against the Cherokee towns in the 1760s were conducted on horseback, and the Rangers that patrolled the Georgia frontiers were riders.

The Overmountain Men who smashed Patrick Ferguson’s Loyalists at Kings Mountain in 1780 fought the battle on foot — but they got there on horseback.

It goes against the general mental image of the Eastern Woodland warrior, but the native peoples of the Dark and Bloody Ground also ranged on horseback. By the Revolutionary War era, the Shawnee maintained herds of horses. They did not ride into battle the way the warriors of the Comanche and Lakota did — but they used horses for transport and hunting, and in patrolling their own country. Having to cross the broad Ohio River to get at American settlements militated toward operating on foot — but they stole horses at every opportunity for the return trip.

Horse-stealing raids became warfare and sport for the wild young men of both the settler and the native communities. Simon Kenton’s capture by Shawnee warriors in 1778 came when he and two companions attempted to steal some Shawnee horses on hte north side of the Ohio River. One man escaped back across the Ohio, Kenton was captured, while another man was killed and scalped. The warriors bound Kenton and slapped him across the face with the bloody scalp of his comrade, shouting:

“Horse thief! You steal Shawnee horse!”

They then bound him facing backwards on one of the horses he had endeavored to lift, and drove it through the trees and brambles as a form of torture and sport. Fun times on the frontier…

 

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So, the horse was a factor in Frontier Partisan warfare from fairly early on — but the Mounted Ranger tradition was pretty much a Southern thing.

By the War of 1812, Mounted Rangers were a common element of frontier military mobilization. Daniel Boone’s son Nathan was a Captain of Rangers.

From the Missouri Encyclopedia:

During the War of 1812 Boone helped organize a group of mounted rangers for three months. In March 1812 he raised a company for one year, serving under General Benjamin Howard as a captain. Boone’s rangers patrolled a two-thousand-square-mile area known as the St. Charles District, which extended from the mouth of the Salt River on the Mississippi to Fort Clemson at the mouth of Loutre Creek on the Missouri River. 

Had him a fine rifle, too.

 

Nathan Boone would lead Mounted Rangers again when the U.S. Army mobilized the United States Mounted Rangers for patrol duty along the Santa Fe Trail in 1832. The unit was commanded by Henry Dodge, and Boone led a company. The unit was disbanded after their one-year enlistment ran out. The Rangers were regarded as lacking sufficient discipline, and were replaced by a less expensive Dragoon regiment. Too bad, cuz the United States Mounted Rangers had the best U.S. Army uniform ever…

Kentucky Militia didn’t take too long to become a horse-centric outfit. It was a contingent of Mounted Rifles that broke the British and Tecumseh’s native confederacy at the 1813 Battle of the Thames in Canada. This was a straight-up cavalry action, but the men who made that savage charge were experienced Rangers, like the legendary Guardian of the Wilderness Road, William Whitley, who died in the melee.

The Texas Rangers came to the fore in the Mexican War (1846-48) — serving with great effectiveness, but also with a record of extreme violence. General Zachary Taylor noted:

“One species of mounted force, peculiar to the western frontier of the United States is … efficient. The inhabitants of that frontier, from their vicinity to hostile Indians, are well practiced in partisan warfare, and although they will not easily submit to discipline, yet take the field in rough, uncouth habiliments, and, following some leader chosen for his talent and bravery, perform partisan duties in a manner hardly to be surpassed.”

That set the template through the rest of the century and well into the next. By the middle of the 19th Century, Rangers were invariably Mounted Rangers. Men on both sides of the Union/Confederate divide, men who took on the role of protector — and predator — in their communities were all operating in that tradition. On horseback. And they were riding with the devil.