The Young Trailers

The Young Trailers is the first book in Joseph Alexander Altsheler’s Young Trailers series, the long running historical adventure sequence about young scouts and frontiersmen in the late eighteenth century American wilderness. Published in 1907, the novel introduces the central protagonists Henry Ware and Paul Cotter and establishes the wider Kentucky frontier setting that the rest of the series would develop across multiple connected entries.

The Young Trailers series follows the two young scouts and their various companions through the contested Kentucky territory of the late 1700s, when American settlement was pushing into lands that the Shawnee, Miami, and other indigenous nations had been defending for generations. Altsheler put a lot of effort into rendering the Kentucky wilderness setting with attention to the specific terrain, the various indigenous nations involved, and the wider colonial and early national American military and political situation that the period was working through. The series became one of the most popular boys’ adventure series of the early twentieth century and remained widely read for several decades after.

Altsheler had built his reputation as a journalist before turning to historical adventure fiction, and his prose moves with the brisk pacing that newspaper writing tends to teach. His action sequences capture the chaos and the danger of frontier warfare in ways that the genre rewarded, and his characters are distinct enough that the reader can follow them across the multiple connected novels of the wider series. The series functioned both as adventure entertainment and as informal history education for the young readers who absorbed substantial information about the American frontier period through the connected narrative.

The period assumptions about race, particularly the depiction of the indigenous antagonists, are very much present in the series in ways that have not aged well and that contemporary educators have addressed in various discussions of the wider Altsheler catalogue. The Shawnee and other indigenous fighters are typically rendered as dangerous obstacles rather than as fully developed characters with their own legitimate political and military objectives, and the wider colonial and early national American narrative that the series operates within reflects the historical assumptions of the early twentieth century moment when Altsheler was writing.

For scholars of early twentieth century American children’s literature, of the historical fiction tradition that shaped how American boys learned about their country’s past, or of the wider career of Joseph Alexander Altsheler, the Young Trailers series is essential. The Young Trailers as the foundational entry in the series is the natural starting point for readers wanting to follow Altsheler’s connected Kentucky frontier narrative across the many books in the wider series. Many of his books are now in the public domain.