The Scouts of the Valley

The Scouts of the Valley is the sixth book in Joseph Alexander Altsheler’s Young Trailers series, published in 1911. It continues the long sequence of frontier adventures featuring the five Kentucky scouts Henry Ware, Paul Cotter, Shif’less Sol Hyde, Long Jim Hart, and Tom Ross. The series had begun in 1907 and was by this point one of the most popular American boys adventure series of its period.

In this volume the five scouts are operating in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, the territory of the famous Wyoming massacre of July 1778 during the American Revolution. The action of the novel covers the months leading up to and including the historical Wyoming campaign, when a Loyalist and native force under Colonel John Butler attacked and largely destroyed the Patriot settlements in the valley. Henry Ware and his companions, having traveled east from Kentucky to assist with the defense, find themselves caught up in the most violent episode of the frontier war in the Pennsylvania country.

Altsheler handles the historical material with the care that ran through all his series fiction. The broad outline of the Wyoming campaign as he gives it is correct, and the various historical figures who appear in the novel are handled with reasonable accuracy. The fictional plot involves the five scouts trying to warn the settlements in advance of the attack, to assist with the defense during the action, and to help the survivors flee through the wilderness afterward. The long retreat sequences are some of the more dramatic in the series, with the scouts trying to protect women and children making their way back through the forests to the relative safety of the older settlements.

The novel runs about three hundred pages. The Native American characters are handled in the conventional manner of the period, more as a collective force than as fully drawn individuals, although the British Loyalist commanders are given more nuanced treatment. For readers following the Young Trailers series, this volume extends the geographical range from the usual Kentucky setting into the Pennsylvania frontier. It pairs naturally with the other volumes in the series and with the historical literature on the Wyoming massacre, which has been written about extensively from various perspectives.