[ROGERS] ROGERS, RANGER AND LOYALIST 51 
timate knowledge of the continent from Labrador to the mouth of the 
Mississippi, has ever since been regarded as a valuable authority upon the 
geographical history of this country. 
With the early and more brilliant part of the career of Robert 
Rogers, whose exploits as a partisan or light-infantry officer fill a large 
space in the history of the French and Pontiac wars, we are not im- 
mediately concerned. He has been the object of enthusiastic praise and 
of no less virulent detraction. 
It is, however, a source of what, I trust, you will not regard as alto- 
gether unpardonable pride to my family and myself, that one of our 
name should have been thus intimately concerned in a transaction which 
was virtually the inception, as part of the British dominions, of what is 
now the Province of Ontario, a province which, from its earliest settle- 
ment, has been our home. 
The interval between the close of the Seven Years War or, rather, 
of the Pontiac War, in which he also bore a part, and the revolt of the 
colonies was occupied by my great-great-grandfather, James Rogers, in 
the building up of an estate in that part of the province of New York 
which was subsequently erected into the State of Vermont. Partly by 
grant as a reward for his services, and partly by purchase, he acquired 
what was, in extent, a very considerable property, scattered from twenty 
miles west of the Connecticut River to the shores of Lake Champlain. 
The crown patent for some 22,000 acres of this estate in Windham 
County is still in the possession of the family. We knew from a letter 
in the Haldimand Correspondence, dated 1780, that the value he placed 
upon his property in the colonies was between thirty and forty thousand 
pounds.t Frequent references in the same correspondence show that 
the position he had occupied in Vermont, previous to the Revolution, 
was one of influence and authority. 
The respect in which he was held in the country that had formerly 
been his home, is testified to by the fact that even after the Peace, viz., 
in the spring of 1784, he had been invited by the leading men of the 
State to pay a visit to Vermont in order to facilitate the removal of his 
wife and family to their new home in the British Dominions. 
Notwithstanding the efforts of his friends, the reception which he 
met with was not unmixed with insult at the hands of the owners of the 



1 The picture which Sir Geo. Trevelyan has drawn, in his recent volume on the 
American Revolution, of the Utopian condition of colonial society in the days imme- 
diately preceding the rebellion, although perhaps too highly coloured, is not without 
considerable foundation in fact. The strong pro-American tone of the volume is 
perhaps only what was to be expected from the nephew of Macaulay and from the 
depositary par excellence of the Whig tradition. 
