Henry Knox’s Noble Train: The Story of a Boston Bookseller’s Heroic Expedition That Saved the American Revolution

Students of American history already familiar with George Washington ascending the Dorchester Heights above Boston during the frozen night of March, 1776, may be equally familiar with the cannons of Fort Ticonderoga, which pushed the British from Boston and out of the harbor. This book focuses primarily on how those sixty tons of cannon, known as Knox’s Noble Train of Artillery, got from the wilderness of the Canadian border, a journey of more than three hundred miles over mountains and rivers, in the dead of winter.

Hazelgrove writes with novel-like flare as opposed to a high school textbook approach. He sometimes goes to extremes to bring these historical characters back to life within the narrative while employing the use of letters and journal entries to weave the events together. Nevertheless, the repetition stretches the story out as if the author were under a quota. A more concise rendering might trim the book to something less than two hundred pages and greatly improve the telling. By the time the fabled guns reach their destination, the reader is exhausted from the journey.

Hazelgrove drums home several redeeming points that we need to remember these days, including the fact that our Continental Army was an integrated fighting force that offered freedom to the slaves a century before the Civil War. Hazelgrove also reminds us that American ingenuity is not limited to the well-born, but more often than not originates from those who find themselves most disadvantaged.