Ernest Alexander "E. A." Cruikshank (1853 - 1939), was a Canadian Brigadier General, a historian who specialized in military history and the first Chairman of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada.Butler's Rangers (1777-1784) was a British provincial regiment composed of Loyalists (or "Tories") in the American Revolutionary War, raised by Loyalist John Butler. John Butler (1728-1796) was a Loyalist who led an irregular militia unit known as Butler's Rangers on the northern frontier in the American Revolutionary War. He led Seneca and Cayuga forces in the Saratoga campaign. He later raised and commanded a regiment of rangers. After the war he resettled in Upper Canada, where he was given a grant of land by the Crown for his services.Cruikshank writes:"MANY thousand descendants of the brave men who formed Butler's Rangers are now living in Ontario and other British Provinces, ancestors who were eminently distinguished by the none too common virtues of inalterable loyalty, unfailing courage, and unconquerable endurance, and who sacrificed everything for the cause which they had embraced. It has been my aim to make a fair statement of the facts by sifting the evidence on both sides. It may be said that these were hard, fierce, and revengeful men, but it should be remembered that they lived in a stormy time, in a hard, fierce, and revengeful world. Their story has never yet been told from a sympathetic, or even a fair-minded, point of view."The present narrative is based chiefly upon unpublished official documents, but every book and pamphlet bearing in any way upon the subject, within the writer's reach, has also been consulted."