In the winter of 1775, George Washington had a problem. His ragged army had the British pinned inside Boston, but no artillery to force them out. Then a 25-year-old bookseller from Boston had an idea.
Henry Knox had spent years reading every military book in his shop. He had no combat experience. What he had was audacity. Knox proposed to Washington that he personally retrieve the cannons recently captured at Fort Ticonderoga, 300 miles away in upstate New York, and drag them back through the Berkshire Mountains. In winter.
Washington said yes.
Knox reached the fort in December 1775 and found 59 cannons, howitzers, and mortars, some weighing a ton or more. He loaded them onto boats to cross Lake Champlain, built massive sleds, rounded up oxen, horses, and sheer stubbornness, and set off through the mountains. Cannons crashed through lake ice. Sleds overturned on frozen hillsides. Knox improvised, cajoled, and pushed on.
He arrived in Cambridge in late January 1776, remarkably, without losing a single gun.
On the night of March 4th, Washington moved the cannons silently onto Dorchester Heights, overlooking Boston Harbor. By dawn, British General Howe stared up at fortifications that had materialized overnight. He reportedly said it looked like the work of 20,000 men. Unable to dislodge the cannons, the British evacuated Boston on March 17, 1776, and never returned.
Knox went on to serve as Washington's chief artillery officer for the entire war, and became America's first Secretary of War.
Not bad for a bookseller.
