From Albany, the train turned south and east, threading through Kinderhook and into the Berkshires — rugged, sparsely settled country that offered little in the way of roads. Towns along the route pitched in with extra men and draft animals as the sleds pushed through Great Barrington and on toward the Massachusetts lowlands. Knox had told Washington that eighty yoke of oxen would haul the guns as far as Springfield, but his diary tells a different story: the oxen negotiation fell through over price, and he rented horses instead, acquiring at least 124 pairs to do the bulk of the pulling. At Springfield, Knox swapped in fresh teams for the exhausted ones that had hauled the guns that far, then continued through Brookfield, Spencer, Leicester, Worcester, Shrewsbury, Marlborough, Framingham, Waltham, and Watertown. On January 24, 1776, Knox's "noble train of artillery" finally entered Cambridge, with the guns temporarily parked at Framingham, about twenty miles short of Washington's headquarters, until they were needed.

Remarkably, for all that ice and mountain travel, the guns themselves survived intact. Historians still point to one loose thread: an old British six-pound cannon, pulled from the Mohawk River around 1853 near a crossing point on Knox's likely route, which raises the possibility that not every piece made the full journey — though the question has never been settled. 

Historian Victor Brooks later called the whole affair "one of the most stupendous feats of logistics" of the American Revolutionary War, and it's not hard to see why. In roughly ten weeks, through the dead of a New England winter, a bookseller with no military training had moved sixty tons of cannon three hundred miles — across a frozen lake, over a half-frozen river, and through mountains that barely qualified as passable — without losing a single gun to the ice or the cold. Few operations of the entire war demanded more improvisation, endurance, and sheer stubbornness, and Knox had delivered all three, arriving in Cambridge with exactly what Washington's army had been missing all along.