The Eyes of the Woods

The Eyes of the Woods is the fifth book in Joseph Alexander Altsheler’s Young Trailers series, published in 1917. It continues the adventures of Henry Ware, Paul Cotter, Shif’less Sol Hyde, Long Jim Hart, and Tom Ross, the five Kentucky scouts who have by this point become the established cast of the series. The Young Trailers books had begun in 1907 with the first volume and had by 1917 settled into a comfortable pattern of frontier adventure that Altsheler could turn out at a reliable annual pace.

In this volume the five scouts are again operating in the Kentucky borderlands during the late eighteenth century, watching the movements of hostile war parties from north of the Ohio River and trying to give the settlements warning of attacks. The eyes of the woods of the title are the scouts themselves, whose job it is to see what is happening in the great forests of the Old Northwest at a time when most settlers had no knowledge of what was beyond the next ridge. The plot involves an extended scouting mission, several encounters with native warriors, a long sequence in which the scouts must shelter through a difficult winter in the forest, and a climactic action when the long expected war party finally moves south.

By this stage of the series Altsheler had a comfortable working method. The five scouts know each other so well that the dialogue moves easily, with the established running jokes about Shif’less Sol’s laziness, Long Jim’s cooking, and Tom Ross’s silences. The Native American antagonists are handled in the conventional manner of the period, more as a force of nature than as fully drawn individuals, although there are occasional moments of more nuanced treatment.

The novel runs about three hundred pages and works either as a standalone forest adventure or as the fifth book in the series. For readers following the Young Trailers in order, the next volume is The Border Watch, the final book in the sequence. For readers wanting more of the small group woodland tracking material, The Eyes of the Woods is one of the stronger entries in the series. It pairs naturally with The Keepers of the Trail and The Border Watch.