The Forest Runners

The Forest Runners is the second book in Joseph Alexander Altsheler’s Young Trailers series, published in 1908. The series follows Henry Ware and Paul Cotter, two Kentucky frontier boys, through a long sequence of adventures during the late eighteenth century border wars in what is now the American Midwest. The Forest Runners picks up shortly after The Young Trailers and is one of the most popular books in the run.

In this volume Henry and Paul are sent on a mission to carry gunpowder from the Kentucky settlements to the militia at the Falls of the Ohio, with hostile war parties between them and their destination. Most of the book is the journey itself, told in Altsheler’s plain steady style. There is forest tracking, river crossing, a long sequence in which the boys are captured and have to escape, and a series of small confrontations with both the wilderness and the Shawnee bands operating in the region. The historical period is roughly the early 1780s, the years just after the Revolution when the frontier wars in the Northwest Territory were intensifying.

Altsheler was a Kentucky journalist who wrote dozens of historical adventure novels for boys in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century. His method was simple. He picked a real historical setting, did his reading, invented sturdy young protagonists, and ran them through carefully described physical action. The result is closer to G A Henty than to James Fenimore Cooper, with cleaner prose and less of either Henty’s empire boosting or Cooper’s tangled romanticism.

The Forest Runners reads well today as a piece of straightforward adventure fiction. The frontier history is dated in some of its assumptions about the Native American characters, particularly the broad treatment of the Shawnee as obstacles rather than as fully drawn people. But the woodcraft details are accurate and the pacing is good. Readers who enjoy this book usually go on to the other Young Trailers volumes, especially The Riflemen of the Ohio and The Border Watch.