Before Delta Force

Before the Navy SEALs

Before the Green Berets

There was Rogers' Rangers

America's first special operations unit

Founded in 1757

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Robert Rogers grew up on the New Hampshire frontier, where the line between settler and soldier didn't exist.

He learned to track, hunt, and fight from Native scouts and woodsmen.

By 30, the British were paying him to do what he'd been doing his whole life.

At Gettysburg, a college professor and 358 lumberjacks held the line

Outnumbered and out of ammunition

They did the unthinkable

Fixed bayoneted and charged straight into the enemy

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It's the second day of Gettysburg

The Union left flank is collapsing. Confederate General Longstreet's men are swarming toward a rocky hill called Little Round Top.

If taken, they can roll up the entire Union line.

The 20th Maine rushes into position and Colonel Joshua Chamberlain is ordered:

"Hold the ground at all hazards."

Henry Knox was tasked with the impossible:

Move 60 tons of cannons
Over 300 miles
In the dead of winter

These guns were crucial to dislodge the British from Boston.

But what Washington did when Knox finally returned to camp made him cry.

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November 1775. Boston was under British occupation. Washington's army had almost no heavy artillery.

25 year old bookseller Henry Knox stepped forward with a wild plan:

Go to recently captured Fort Ticonderoga and haul every cannon back through snow, ice and mountains.