Woods Runner

Another of Paulsen’s goals was to depict some of the harsh realities of war. Paulsen explains, “There is a tendency to clean up the tales of war to make them more palatable, focusing on rousing stories of heroism and stirring examples of patriotism, all clean, pristine, antiseptic” (162). Woods Runner does what it can to undermine that type of narrative, showing instead the human costs and horrible conditions. Some of this motif can be linked to the repeated discussion of the conditions of frontier life. As Paulsen makes clear, approximately 4,400 of 110,000 casualties in the Revolutionary War were on the battlefield. The rest were due to disease and infection, both as a result of the scarcity of supplies and generally undeveloped nature of medicine at the time.

The novel endeavors to show the reader how the conditions of prisoners also led to a lot of pain and death. One informational passage tells us that “over ten thousand prisoners died of intentional neglect—starvation and untreated disease” (131). Another passage tells us that it wasn’t until the 19th century “that supplies for captives were expected to be provided by their captors” (140) and that, instead, prisoners were sustained by the meager (and often reduced) supplies provided by their own people. These realities make their way into the narrative through Samuel’s head injury, the murder of Annie’s family, and Samuel’s parents’ experiences as prisoners in New York. Though Woods Runner focuses on a small slice of the larger War for Independence, Paulsen is careful to show how brutal and bloody the situation was for even the most innocent of civilians.

A good amount of attention is given to the challenges of traversing space in the 18th century. The vastness of the North American continent was always a challenge for its settlers, if we remember the Oregon Trail and the pursuit of Manifest Destiny. Though we could drive from eastern Pennsylvania to New York City in a matter of hours today, the journey on foot (or even horseback) was much longer. One of Paulsen’s informational passages clarifies that, at the time of the novel, “the fastest form of travel for any distance over thirty or forty miles was by ship. With steady wind, a sailing vessel could clock one or two hundred miles a day for weeks on end” (12). Horses could cover 30-40 miles per day, though they needed to stop and rest. Coaches “could do a hundred miles in a twenty-four-hour day by changing horses every ten or fifteen miles, but only if the roads were in good shape” (12). Without any of these resources, however, most people were limited to walking on foot. A man could cover 20-30 miles in a day under ideal circumstances, but the standard was closer to 15 miles a day. This meant that people, goods, and information traveled slowly.

The calculation of distance and travel time recurs often in the book. We see Samuel first perform this arithmetic when he spots the fire that alerts him to trouble at the settlement: “Distance home: eight miles in thick forest. Time until dark: an hour, hour and a half. No moon: it would be hard dark. Could he run eight miles an hour through the woods in the dark?” (21). He calculates again when he tries to determine how long it will take him to catch up with his parents: “Moving slowly—as they would with prisoners—they might make two miles an hour. With a rest of perhaps six hours they might have traveled fourteen to sixteen hours. Twenty-four to twenty-eight miles” (38). Coop, too, talks about the distinction between travel and time when he updates a newly conscious Samuel on their movements: “We be about twelve miles from where you got that egg on your head. Twelve miles in distance, more’n that in time” (59).

The limitations of distance and travel are repeated after Abner releases his carrier pigeon: “He’ll roost somewhere tonight if he doesn’t get there before dark. It’s probably only forty miles in a straight flight, an hour the way they move, so he should make it. Imagine, moving through the air at forty miles an hour. Just imagine” (119). This ongoing consideration of distance and travel time echoes Paulsen’s exploration of the hard conditions of frontier life. The journey from eastern Pennsylvania to New York to Philadelphia was likely somewhere in the area of 300-350 miles for Samuel—a distance we wouldn’t think too much of with our contemporary means of travel, but which was an incredible accomplishment for a 13-year-old with nothing but a rifle and a pair of moccasins.