300 miles. Zero pay. No food. Boiling leather for soup. This is the winter that won America. From Stark’s gauntlet to Knox’s iced cannons, this is how the Green Mountain Boys changed history. This story begins in 1728. John Stark was born to Scottish immigrants in Londonderry, New Hampshire. When he was eight years old, his family moved to a frontier homestead in Derryfield, what we now call Manchester. By his early twenties, Stark had become a skilled hunter and trapper along the Baker River. But on April 28, 1752, everything changed.
While on a trapping expedition with his brother William and neighbor David Stinson, a war party of Abenaki warriors attacked. Stark told his brother to flee downstream in a canoe. Stinson was killed instantly, and John Stark was taken prisoner. While held captive, the Abenaki forced him and other prisoners to run through what was called the gauntlet, a double line of warriors armed with clubs, swung at full force. Instead of cowering, Stark seized the first club that struck him and fought back fiercely, stunning the entire village. So impressed was the Abenaki chief that he adopted Stark into the tribe. The following spring, a Massachusetts agent paid 103 Spanish dollars to ransom him. Stark returned home fluent in Native woodland tactics and utterly fearless.
He soon joined Major Robert Rogers’ Rangers during the French and Indian War. Rogers’ Rangers were an elite colonial guerrilla unit, famed for their snowshoe raids and wilderness survival. Stark learned these tactics on the same frozen shores of Lake Champlain that would soon spark a revolution across the New Hampshire Grants, what is today the state of Vermont. Another frontier giant was making noise. His name was Ethan Allen. Born in 1738 in Litchfield, Connecticut, Allen had settled in the New Hampshire Grants by 1769 with his brothers and cousins. The Grants were disputed lands claimed by both New Hampshire and New York, and New York surveyors were attempting to forcefully evict settlers with court orders. Allen responded in 1770 by forming the Green Mountain Boys, roughly 300 farmers, millers, and ex-soldiers from towns like Bennington, Arlington, and Manchester, Vermont. Their uniform: green hunting frocks. Their creed: no surrender to Yorkers.
On May 9, 1775, a breathless rider galloped into the taverns of the Grants, carrying news that the British had fired on colonial militia at Lexington and Concord three weeks earlier. This ignited the six-foot-four, Bible-quoting giant Ethan Allen and sent the Green Mountain Boys into immediate action. They launched boats under cover of darkness across Lake Champlain. At dawn on May 10, they stormed Fort Ticonderoga. The British garrison was caught asleep. Allen kicked open the commander’s door and roared: “Come out, you old rat! In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!” The commandant, Captain William Delaplace, surrendered in his nightshirt. There were zero American casualties and zero shots fired.
The Boys seized 59 serviceable cannons, 78 muskets, and tons of shot. The fort’s fall gave the Patriots their first offensive victory in the war, and the artillery needed to change the course of history. Enter another hero of the war: Henry Knox, a 25-year-old Boston bookseller, self-taught artillerist, and George Washington’s new colonel of artillery. Washington ordered Knox to bring Ticonderoga’s artillery to Boston, a journey of 300 miles. Knox arrived with his brother William and a crew of Green Mountain Boys. They built 42 massive sleds in Rutland, Vermont, each 16 feet long. On December 9, they began loading 43 cannons of up to 5,000 pounds each, 14 mortars, and two howitzers, for a total weight of 120,000 pounds.
Knox’s 120-ton train had to climb and descend the same steep, snow-choked Berkshire mountain ridges that today form the spine of the Appalachian Trail, with peaks rising 2,000 to 3,000 feet and grades so brutal that modern highways still switchback for miles to tame them. These starved, unpaid men hauled cannons heavier than pickup trucks on sleds with nothing but ropes, oxen, and frostbitten hands. They began with Lake George. Flat-bottomed gondolas rowed the guns 30 miles south through freezing spray. Knox wrote: “The men were up to their knees in water, yet they sang and laughed as if on a pleasure excursion.”
Next, they braved the Hudson River. It was Christmas Day, and the ice was too thin for the massive load. A 5,000-pound cannon broke through and sank in the river. Knox’s men dove into the frigid water, looped ropes under it, and hauled it out with oxen. Green Mountain Boy, John Becker, wrote: “We thought the river had swallowed our hopes.” But the colonel said, “Gentlemen, the Republic needs that gun.” John also wrote: “We had no pay, no glory, just the thought that Boston’s children were starving under British bayonets.”
This selfless bravery pushed the men through the giant Berkshire mountains, where sleds tipped on the steep grades. Knox ordered chains wrapped around wheels and straw stuffed between spokes to muffle every creak, since British troops were never far. A sled overturns. Knox wrote: “The people of every village came with torches and oxen. God bless their patriotic hearts.”
Now came the final push to Boston. On the night of March 4, they hauled the guns up Dorchester Heights using rope slings and windlass cranes built on site. Fake wooden painted logs, known as Quaker guns, were added to exaggerate the threat. At dawn, British General William Howe looked up and said: “The rebels have done more in one night than my army could do in a month.” And on March 17, 1776, 9,000 British troops and 1,100 loyalists sailed from Boston, never to return.
Thank you, Green Mountain Boys, and happy Veterans Day to all of our veterans who have sacrificed life and limb for our freedom.
