The Dawn at Fort Ticonderoga

Just three weeks after the shot heard 'round the world, a group of Vermont woodsmen called the Green Mountain Boys had a bold idea.

Their leader Ethan Allen teamed up with a young officer named Benedict Arnold, and they marched to a big stone fort on Lake Champlain called Fort Ticonderoga.

At sunrise on May 10, 1775, they crept in through a gate and woke the sleepy British soldiers without a single shot.

The fort was full of enormous cannons — exactly what Washington's new army did not have.

A bookseller-turned-officer named Henry Knox later hauled 59 of those cannons about 300 miles through the snow to Boston, which finally chased the British out.