The Masters of the Peaks

The Masters of the Peaks is the third book in Joseph Alexander Altsheler’s French and Indian War series, published in 1918. The series follows Robert Lennox, a young man of mixed Scottish and Iroquois background raised in colonial New York, and his Mohawk friend Tayoga through the major events of the war between the British colonies and New France from 1754 to 1760.

In this volume the action moves from the Mohawk Valley and the Lake George country of the earlier books into the high mountains of the Adirondacks. Robert and Tayoga are sent on a long scouting mission into the remote country between the British and French positions, charged with monitoring the movements of French rangers and their native allies through the difficult mountain terrain. Most of the novel is a sustained woodland adventure, with the kind of detailed observation of mountain country that Altsheler had developed over the years of writing frontier fiction. There are several extended sequences of tracking and counter tracking, a long winter sojourn in a snowbound mountain cabin, encounters with both friendly and hostile native warriors, and a climactic running fight as the scouts try to bring back vital intelligence to the British army.

What sets this volume apart from the more conventional frontier adventure is the friendship between Robert and Tayoga, which by this third book in the series has become the emotional center of the narrative. The two characters know each other so well that the relationship is one of the most fully developed cross cultural friendships in the popular adventure fiction of the period. Tayoga in particular is treated with more individual attention than the typical handling of Native American characters in early twentieth century American boys fiction, with his own personality, his own theology drawn from Iroquois tradition, and his own complicated relationship to the conflict.

The novel runs about three hundred and fifty pages. For readers following the French and Indian War series in order, it sits between The Shadow of the North and The Lords of the Wild. For readers new to Altsheler, the better starting place is the first book in the series, The Hunters of the Hills.