The Keepers of the Trail

The Keepers of the Trail is the fourth book in Joseph Alexander Altsheler’s Young Trailers series, published in 1916. It comes after The Free Rangers and continues the adventures of the five Kentucky scouts. By this volume the group, Henry Ware, Paul Cotter, Shif’less Sol Hyde, Long Jim Hart, and the silent Tom Ross, are established figures with their own running jokes and habits, and the books have settled into a comfortable formula.

In this volume the five scouts are watching a long forest trail that leads from the Shawnee towns north of the Ohio River into the Kentucky settlements. A large war party is expected, and the scouts have been sent ahead to monitor the gathering and warn the settlements as soon as the attack moves. Most of the book is small group woodcraft. There are weeks of careful tracking, hidden camps, scouting reports, and the slow building tension as the war party finally assembles and starts south. The climax involves a long running fight as the scouts try to delay the attack while the settlements prepare to defend themselves.

Altsheler is at his most comfortable in this kind of small group forest action. The five characters know each other’s habits and the dialogue has the slow easy rhythm of men who have spent years together in difficult country. Shif’less Sol’s deadpan complaints, Long Jim’s cooking opinions, and Tom Ross’s silences are by this point reliable pleasures rather than character introductions. The Native American antagonists are handled with the broad treatment typical of the series, more as a force of nature than as fully drawn individuals.

The book runs about three hundred pages and works either as a standalone forest adventure or as a continuation of the series. For readers following the Young Trailers in order, the next is The Eyes of the Woods. For readers wanting more of the careful woodland tracking material, the natural pairing is with The Border Watch and The Last of the Chiefs.