Henry Knox

Henry Knox was a Boston bookseller who taught himself gunnery from the stock. Washington made him chief of artillery. In the winter of 1775–76 Knox hauled the Ticonderoga cannon across frozen rivers and Berkshire hills to the lines around Boston — fifty-six guns and mortars, oxen, sleds, and a timetable that did not care about comfort.

Dorchester Heights received the guns. The British left Boston in March 1776. Knox spent the rest of the war moving batteries, training crews, and being the large, competent man Washington could send when a siege needed mathematics.

After the war he became the first Secretary of War under the Constitution and tried to build a peacetime establishment the republic could afford. He retired to the District of Maine, then still Massachusetts, and died there on October 25, 1806, after a chicken bone and an infection that the eighteenth century could not out-argue.

The Noble Train is easy to romanticize. The work was ice, rope, and not losing a gun in a creek. That is how Boston was freed.