On the tenth of December, after disposing of the French force found in the fort, and having taken possession of the forts Miamie and Gatanois, with characteristic ardor Rogers pushed still farther westward for Michilimackinac. But it was a vain attempt. The season was far advanced. Indeed, the winter had already come, and while the ice prevented his progress by water, the snows rendered impracticable his advance by land. With reluctance he relinquished for the first time the completion of his mission. Turning eastward, after a tedious journey, he reached New York on the fourteenth of February, 1761.
From New York, there is reason to suppose, that he went this same year as Captain of one of the His Majesty’s Independent Companies of Foot to South Carolina, and there aided Colonel Grant in subduing the Cherokees, who had for a year or two been committing depredations upon the Carolinian frontiers.
From this time onward for the next two years we lose sight of Major Rogers, but he re-appears at the siege of Detroit in 1763. Hither he went with twenty Rangers as part of a body of soldiers sent from Fort Niagara under the command of Captain Dalzell for the re-inforcement of the beleagured fort. He arrived on the twenty-ninth of July, and on the thirty-first took an active part in the fierce battle of Bloody Bridge. His valor was as useful as it was conspicuous on that occasion, and but for his daring efforts the retreat of the British troops would have been more disastrous even than it was. Having, for a time, in the house of the Frenchman, Campean, held at bay a throng of savages which surrounded it, his escape with a few followers at one door was hardly achieved ere these burst in at another.
The next glimpse we get of Major Rogers is at Rumford (now Concord) where he had a landed estate of some four or five hundred acres. Good old Parson Walker, who here kept open house, and for more than fifty years watched with solicitude the interests of his parish and his country, says, in his diary for 1764, against date of February 24: "Major Rogers dined with us" and again December 22:—"Major Rogers and Mr. Scales, Jr., dined with me."
It is probable that his private affairs now occupied his attention. A year or so after the surrender of Montreal he was married to Elizabeth, daughter of Rev. Arthur Brown, Rector of St. John’s Church, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He considered this town his residence, and in papers executed this very year (1764) sometimes designates himself "as of Portsmouth," and at others, as "now residing at Portsmouth."
For three or four years, between 1762 and 1765, he trafficked a good deal in lands, buying and selling numerous and some quite extensive tracts. Some twenty-five different conveyances to him are on record in the Recorder’s office of Rockingham County, and half as many from him to other parties.
Some of these lands he seems to have purchased and some to have received in consideration of military services. In 1764 Benning Wentworth, as Governor of New Hampshire, conveyed to him as "a reduced officer" a tract of three thousand acres, lying in the southern part of Vermont.
One[14] conveyance made by him and bearing date December 20, 1762, arrests our attention. By it he transferred to his father-in-law, Rev. Arthur Brown, before mentioned, some five hundred acres of land in Rumford (now Concord, New Hampshire) together with "one negro man, named Castro Dickerson, aged about twenty-eight; one negro woman, named Sylvia; one negro boy named Pomp, aged about twelve and one Indian boy, named Billy, aged about thirteen." For what reason this property was thus transferred I have no means of knowing. If the object of the conveyance was to secure it as a home to his wife and children against any liabilites he might incur in his irregular life, the end sought was subsequently attained, as the land descended even to his grand-children.[15]
And I may as well, perhaps, just here and now anticipate a little by saying that Major Rogers did not prove a good husband, and that seventeen years after their marriage his wife felt constrained, February 12, 1778, to petition the General Assembly of New Hampshire for a divorce from him on the ground of desertion and infidelity. An act granting the same passed the Assembly on the twenty-eighth day of February and the Council on the fourth of March following.[16]
"Whereas, Elizabeth Rogers of Portsmouth, in the County of Rockingham, and State aforesaid, hath petitioned the General Assembly for said State, setting forth that she was married to the said Robert Rogers about seventeen years ago; for the greater part of which time he had absented himself from and totally neglected to support and maintain her—and had, in the most flagrant manner, in a variety of ways, violated the marriage contract—but especially by infidelity to her Bed; For which reasons praying that a divorce from said Rogers, a vinculo matrimonii, might be granted. The principal facts contained in said petition being made to appear, upon a full hearing thereof. Therefore,