Knox Expedition
An ox team hauling Ticonderoga's guns
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| Date | November 17, 1775 – January 25, 1776 |
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| Location | British provinces of New York and Massachusetts Bay |
| Participants | Henry Knox |
| Outcome | Fortification of Dorchester Heights |
The noble train of artillery, also known as the Knox Expedition, was an expedition led by Continental Army Colonel Henry Knox to transport heavy weaponry that had been captured at Fort Ticonderoga to the Continental Army camps outside Boston, Massachusetts during the winter of 1775–1776.
Knox went to Ticonderoga in November 1775, and, over the course of three winter months, moved 60 tons of cannons and other armaments by boat, horse and ox-drawn sledges, and manpower, along poor-quality roads, across two semi-frozen rivers, and through the forests and swamps of the lightly inhabited Berkshires to the Boston area. Historian Victor Brooks has called Knox's exploit "one of the most stupendous feats of logistics" of the entire American Revolutionary War.
The route by which Knox moved the weaponry is now known as the Henry Knox Trail, and the states of New York and Massachusetts have erected markers along the route.
Shortly after the American Revolutionary War broke out with the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, Benedict Arnold, a militia leader from Connecticut who had arrived with his unit in support of the Siege of Boston, proposed to the Massachusetts Committee of Safety that Fort Ticonderoga, on Lake Champlain in the Province of New York, be captured from its small British garrison. One reason he gave to justify the move was the presence at Ticonderoga of heavy weaponry. On May 3, the committee gave Arnold a Massachusetts colonel's commission and authorized the operation.
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