The Great Sioux Trail A Story of Mountain and Plain

The Great Sioux Trail is a standalone novel by Joseph Alexander Altsheler, published in 1918. It sits outside his main series and is one of his later books, written when he had been turning out boys’ adventure fiction for fifteen years. The story is set in the high plains and Rocky Mountain country in the years just after the Civil War, when small parties of trappers, prospectors, and emigrants were still moving through territory dominated by the Lakota and Cheyenne.

The protagonist is a young man named Will Clarke who has joined an expedition heading west from a Missouri river town. The expedition is small, just a handful of men with a wagon and pack animals, and they are looking for a particular valley believed to contain gold. They pick up an experienced guide and a friendly Crow scout, and most of the novel is the long journey across the plains and into the mountains. There are encounters with the Sioux, a long sequence in a snowbound cabin, a buffalo hunt, and the eventual reckoning at the gold valley.

Altsheler is at his best in the physical descriptions of country he had seen. The plains sections in particular have a clean clear weather to them. The pacing is slower than in his frontier wars books, with longer stretches of travel and observation between the action set pieces. The Crow scout is one of the better drawn Native American characters in his work, treated with more individual attention than the more conventional handling of Native Americans elsewhere in the series.

The book is one of Altsheler’s better standalones and a reasonable place to start for a reader who does not want to commit to a series. It runs about three hundred pages and works as a single sitting on a long evening. For readers who liked it, the natural follow ons are The Lost Hunters and The Horsemen of the Plains, both of which use similar western settings.