The Hunters of the Hills

The Hunters of the Hills is the first book in Joseph Alexander Altsheler’s French and Indian War series, published in 1916. The series is one of his later projects, written when he was an experienced writer with a clear method, and it takes the standard frontier adventure formula back into the 1750s for one of the most important and least remembered American conflicts.

The protagonist is Robert Lennox, a young man of mixed Scots and Iroquois background raised in the New York colony. He is a friend of the Mohawk chief Tayoga and serves as a scout and runner during the early months of the war, when the conflict was still spreading from skirmishes along the Pennsylvania frontier into a full struggle between the British colonies and New France for control of the interior. Most of the book is set in the Lake George and Lake Champlain country, with long sequences in the deep forests and the Mohawk valley.

Altsheler is good on the woodcraft and the geography. The lake country and the Adirondacks were known to him and the routes the characters travel correspond reasonably well to the actual trails and waterways. Tayoga is one of the better drawn Native American characters in his work, and the friendship between Robert and Tayoga is treated as a real partnership rather than as a stock pairing of a white hero and an Indian sidekick. The political background, with the divided loyalties of the Iroquois Confederacy and the early British failures, is also handled with care.

The novel runs about three hundred pages and sets up a six book sequence that runs through the major actions of the war up to the fall of Quebec. For readers new to Altsheler, this is a good starting point because the historical period is less worked over than the Civil War or the Revolution, and the woodland material is some of his strongest. The natural follow on is The Shadow of the North, which continues Robert and Tayoga’s story into the disastrous Braddock campaign.