[Footnote A:  Stark’s History of Dunbarton, p. 178.]

[Footnote B:  Parker’s History of Londonderry, p. 180.]

Parson McGregor and his people had been in their new homes but four years when they had ready for occupancy a log school-house, sixteen feet long and twelve feet wide.  It was in this, or in one like it, that Robert Rogers acquired his scanty stock of “book-learning,” as then termed.  But education consists in much besides book-learning, and he supplemented his narrow stock of this by a wider and more practical knowledge, which he obtained amid the rocks and stumps upon his father’s farm and in the hunter’s camp.

The woods, at this day, were full of game.  The deer, the bear, the moose, the beaver, the fox, the muskrat, and various other wild animals existed in great numbers.  To a young man of hardy constitution, possessed of enterprise, energy, and a fondness for forest sports, hunting afforded not only an attractive, but a profitable employment.  Young Rogers had all these characteristics, and as a hunter, tramped through large sections of the wilderness between the French and English settlements.  On such excursions he mingled much with the Indians, and somewhat with the French, obtaining by such intercourse some knowledge of their languages, of their modes of hunting, and their habits of life.  He also acquired a fondness for the woods and streams, tracing the latter well up towards their sources, learning the portages between their headwaters, many of the Indian trails and the general topography of the great area just mentioned.

During the French and Indian wars small bodies of soldiers were often employed to “watch and ward” the frontiers, and protect their defenceless communities from the barbarous assaults of Indians, turned upon them from St. Francis and Crown Point.  Robert Rogers had in him just the stuff required in such a soldier.  We shall not, therefore, be surprised to find him on scouting duty in the Merrimack Valley, under Captain Ladd, as early as 1746, when he was but nineteen years of age;[A] and, three years later, engaged in the same service, under Captain Ebenezer Eastman, of Pennycook.[B] Six years afterwards, in 1753, the muster rolls show him to have been a member of Captain John Goff’s company, and doing like service.[C] Such was the training of a self-reliant mind and a hardy physique for the ranging service, in which they were soon to be employed.

[Footnote A:  New Hampshire Adjutant General’s Report, 1866, vol. 2, p. 95.]

[Footnote B:  Same, p. 99.]

[Footnote C:  Same, p. 118.]

I ought, perhaps, to mention, that in 1749, as Londonderry became filled to overflowing with repeated immigrations from the North of Ireland, James Rogers, the father of Robert, a proprietor, and one of the early settlers of the township, removed therefrom to the woods of Dunbarton, and settled anew in a section named Montelony, from an Irish place in which he had once lived.[A] This was before the settlement of the township, when its territory existed as an unseparated part only of the public domain.  He may, quite likely, have been attracted hither by an extensive beaver meadow or pond, which would, with little improvement, afford grass for his cattle while he was engaged in clearing the rich uplands which surrounded it.