Section II., 1908. [123] Trans. R. S. C. 



IV. — History of the Queen's Rangers. 



By James Hannay, D.C.L. 

 (Read May 26, 1908.) 



Of the forty or more battalions of Loyalists which enlisted in the 

 service of the Crown during the Revolutionary war, none has been so 

 widely celebrated as the Queen's Rangers. This, no doubt, is partly due 

 to the fact that they found a historian in Lieut.-Col. Simcoe, their com- 

 manding officer, who wrote a book to chronicle their achievements ; yet 

 after making all allowance for this advantage, it must be admitted, with- 

 out detriment to the other Loyalist corps, that the Queen's Rangers ex- 

 ceeded them all in length and variety of service. What the famous 

 Light Division was in Wellington's Peninsular Campaigns the Queen's 

 Rangers became to the British army in America ; whenever there was an 

 enterprise that demanded celerity and daring, the Queen's Rangers were 

 selected for the service, if they happened to be at all near the place where 

 it was to be performed. Their six years of active service in the war 

 made them veterans, and their peculiar orgauization enabled them to ac- 

 complish feats which would have been quite beyond tlie power of an 

 ordinary battalion of the line. There can be little doubt that during the 

 last campaigns of the war the Queen's Rangers was the most efficient 

 regiment in the British service in America. 



The name " Rangers," a survival of the old French war, is that by 

 which they were almost universally known, although in official docH- 

 ments they appear occasionally as the " King's First American Regi- 

 ment;" an honorable distinction granted them in 1779. In the French 

 war Major Robert Rogers, of New Hampshire, was commander of a 

 corps known as Rogers' Rangers, which did good service prior to the fall 

 of Quebec. When the Revolutionary troubles arose Rogers received a 

 commission from the Crown as Colonel, and proceeded to enlist men to 

 serve against the Revolutionary armies. This was the beginning of the 

 Queen's Rangers, whom Rogers naturally enough named after his own 

 old corps. The Rangers were enlisted in the summer and autumn of 

 1776 in Connecticut and the vicinity of New York. They mustered at 

 one period above four hundred men, all Americans and all Lovalists. 

 Recruiting for the Queen's Rangers was a service of no small danger, 

 as may be inferred from the fact that Daniel Strang, who, early in 1777, 

 was captured near Peekskill with a paper in his possession, signed by 



