[4] Recruited in the summer of 1744 at the start of King George's War, Governor William Shirley ordered the unit raised as reinforcements for the then-besieged British garrison at Fort Anne in Annapolis Royal.

They were known for surprise amphibious raids on Acadian and Mi'kmaq coastal or riverine settlements, using large whaleboats, which carried between ten and fifteen rangers each.

The company was recruited in the late-spring / early summer of 1744 after Nova Scotia Lieutenant-Governor Paul Mascarene wrote to Massachusetts governor William Shirley requesting military aid.

While in New England in February 1745, Gorham was commissioned a lieutenant colonel and given second-in-command of his father's regiment, the 7th Massachusetts Infantry, which took part in the Siege of Louisburg in the late spring and early summer of 1745.

In the raid they captured nine Indian rangers and the Anglo-American crew members of two supply schooners moored at the island and took the prisoners to Quebec.

Gorham stayed in Louisburg through the spring of 1746 before returning to Annapolis and leading the rangers in a series of small expeditions against the Mi'kmaq and skirmishes with Acadians over the next several years.

Between 1747 and 1749, with the support of two armed sloops provided by Gorham himself, this company was largely responsible for the defense of British possessions in Nova Scotia, and counter-insurgency campaigns against the Acadians and their Indian allies.

Not merely a combat unit, both John and Joseph Gorham, as well as their Pigwacket adjutant Captain Sam (see personnel list below), took part in high-level diplomatic negotiations with Le Loutre, various Mi'kmaq chiefs, and Acadian leaders who were hostile to the British.

Throughout 1755 to 1760, when not assigned elsewhere, they were central players in Britain's efforts to quell a low-level insurgency in Nova Scotia, fought by the Mi'kmaq Indians as well as Acadians.

Gorham's men dressed as Acadian fishermen and sailed a captured fishing vessel rechristened "His Majesty's Schooner Monckton" directly into the harbor at night.

[7] Throughout most of the Seven Years' War, Gorham's rangers were based out of Halifax, but they often operated in tandem with a sister unit, stationed at Fort Cumberland on the Isthmus of Chignecto.

Some had served in Indian ranger companies twenty years earlier during Governor Dummer's War (1722-1726), a regional conflict the colonies of Massachusetts and New Hampshire fought against the Abenaki and other members of the Wabanaki Confederacy in Maine.

These included a man British colonists called "Captain Sam" (probably the Pequawket sachem mentioned in French records as Jérôme Atecuando).

After three years in the field, the company was much reduced, with Gorham himself noting that almost three quarters of the original Indian members had been killed, captured, or died from disease.

A muster roll from February 1748 shows a revived company of sixty-five rangers, with Native Americans, still the preferred recruits, making up almost two thirds of the complement.

A partial muster roll from January 1750, showing about half of the unit that was sent on a mission to capture Acadians at Minas, reveals that Native Americans were less than one third of the detachment.

By the mid-1750s, most of the original Indian members of Gorham's Rangers had long since been killed in combat, deserted, been captured, died from disease, or had chosen not to reenlist.

And yet while Indians gradually dwindled to a small minority within the company, the unit nevertheless continued to utilize the same tactics pioneered by the original Wampanaog, Nauset and Pequawket members in the 1740s, which were taught by the Gorhams to other Anglo-American and British commanders as well as rank and file troops.

Scholarship on Gorham's Rangers frequently perpetuates a long-standing myth that the company was initially made up of Mohawks from New York or Métis from Canada.