Snowshoe

He's gonna set out on skis that he brought, [laughs] and he's gonna find-

Snowshoes.

They had snowshoes, yeah.

Well, he was...

I came in on a trail that gets steady winter use.

Snowshoes, a few skiers.

It had been broken out and packed down for weeks, so it was a hard white ribbon about three feet wide running through the trees, raised up a bit above the snowpack on either side from all the compression.

Late afternoon I started looking for somewhere to camp.

In the beginning of June, as the snow began to melt, progress grew more and more difficult.

Snowshoes became a useless encumbrance, and on the tenth of the month even the sledges were abandoned.

Every man must now shoulder a heavy load.

Hearne himself staggered under a pack which included a bag of clothes, a box of papers, a hatchet and other tools, and the clumsy weight of his quadrant and its stand.

They passed over a rugged country of stone and marsh, buried deep in snow, with here and there a clump of stunted pine or straggling willow.

Bitter weather with great gales and deep snow set in in October.

Snowshoes and sledges were made.

Many small lakes and rivers, now fast frozen, were traversed, but the whole country is still so little known that Hearne's path can hardly be traced with certainty.

It is a desperate, bloody masterclass in survival.

The legendary Battle on Snowshoes, where Robert Rogers proved that even when surrounded, bleeding, and fighting off an entire army in a blizzard, you can never count him out of the fight.

Hello, and welcome back to Badass of the Week, the show where we tell the badass history of badasses.

I am joined today by a special guest, an author friend of mine from long ago and a badass himself.

The truth is that traveling in Rupert's Land in winter would be impossible but for a machine which enables men to walk on the surface of the snow without sinking more than a few inches.

This machine is the snowshoe.

Snowshoes vary in size and form in different parts of the country, but they are all used for the same purpose.

Some are long and narrow, others are nearly round.

They vary in size from three to six feet in length and from eight to twenty inches in breadth.

Robert's Rangers, Rules of Ranging, okay? So just to give a little context, the 75th Ranger Regiment formally adopted Roger's 1757 Rules of Ranging and his standing orders in the 1950s, and both are still part of the Ranger handbook and Ranger school curriculum today.

Rogers wrote the original 28 rules of Rogers Island at Rogers Island in Hudson after the battle on Snowshoes in January 1757.

Colonel William Darby read the rules verbatim to his 1st Ranger Battalion before action in World War II, which is interesting, the first modern military use of them as a unit briefing, not just as a historical artifact.

And then this is important.