Deaths on January 17

Benjamin Church, American colonel (b. 1639)

Benjamin Church (c. 1639 – January 17, 1718) was an English colonist in North America. He was a military leader of the historic predecessor of the United States Army Rangers, captain of the first Ranger force in America (1675). Church was commissioned by Josiah Winslow, the Governor of the Plymouth Colony, to form the first ranger company for King Philip's War. He later commanded the company to raid Acadia during King William's and Queen Anne's wars in the early 1700s, as French and English hostilities played out in North America. The two powers were competing for control in colonial territories. He was promoted to major and ended his service at the rank of colonel, as noted on his gravestone.

Church designed his forces to emulate Indian practices of warfare. Toward this end, he worked to adopt Indian techniques of small, flexible forces that used the woods and ground for cover, rather than mounting frontal attacks in military formation. English colonists developed as rangers under the tutelage of their Native American allies. (Until the end of the colonial period, rangers depended on Indians as both allies and teachers.)Church developed a special full-time unit that combined European colonists, selected for their frontier skills, with friendly Indians in order to carry out offensive strikes against hostile Indians and French in difficult terrain. He used such rangers as militia where the normal practices of having troops march and attack in formation were ineffective. His memoirs, Entertaining Passages relating to Philip's War, were published in 1716 and are considered to constitute the first American military manual.