 | "The Dime Novel in American Life" |  |
II
By the close of the seventies several sorts of "dime," "half-dime," and "nickel" novels appeared, the Indian eventually dropping out as the reservation corraled him, and the cowboy, the detective, and the train robber taking his place. At length the dime novel — a term applied to all the cheap fiction indiscriminately — became an atrocity. Many are published to-day in the United States, and almost as many like them in quality and scope are printed in England.
Not all the dime novels, though, even of to-day, deserve this epithet. Between some of them and some of the bound novels the only recognizable difference is the difference between ten cents and $1.50.
Of the writers of the "dimes" and the "half-dimes" of the past third of a century the best were Thomas C. Harbaugh, Albert W. Aiken, Edward L. Wheeler, Joseph W. Badger, Jr., and Col. Prentiss Ingraham. There are whole "libraries" of Buffalo Bill "dimes," but Ingraham wrote most of them. Bill himself is credited with the authorship of about a dozen of them. Among them is Death Trailer, the Chief of the Scouts, or Life and Love in a Frontier Fort. As Colonel Cody had seen something of life, and possibly of love, at frontier posts, the reader would presume that this book would be the "real thing." It starts out briskly, as most of the "dimes" did: —
"Mingling with the rumble of wheels and the rattle of hoofs upon the stone road, came the clear notes of a bugle, piercing the deepest recesses of the chapparals, and floating far off over the prairie until the sound died away upon the evening air. Suddenly out of a dense piece of timber dashed a horseman, well mounted, and wearing the uniform of an officer of the cavalry of the United States army."
Dime novel horses never trot or walk, — they always gallop. The officer who dashed out of the timber was Col. Hugh Decatur, the place was Texas, near the Rio Grande, and the colonel, with his daughter Helen and an escort of four dragoons, was on the way to Nebraska, where he was to take command of a military post. After a breathless succession of encounters with Cortina's Mexican guerrillas, road agents, renegade jayhawkers and villains of a promiscuous and desperate order of villainy, — in which regulators, avengers of different kinds, British noblemen, and other titled personages figure, and in which daylight is let into many sorts of mysteries, — the end came at Castle Glyndon, in England, where Helen became Lady Radcliffe.
Injun Dick, Detective, or Tracked from the Rockies to New York, is a typical tale by Aiken, who was probably the most skillful, and nearly the most prolific, of writers of detective stories.
"You have seen your last sunrise, as I am going to shoot."
Thus the story opened. There was no preface. In dime novels deeds and not words talk. Scene: A mining camp on the Bear River, in southwestern Colorado. Personages: Dick Talbot, hero of a score of Aiken's tales; Joe Bowers, another Aiken favorite; Limber Bee, and Limber's wife, Alethea, "about twenty-five, tall and queenly, with the most magnificent hair, and eyes black as the raven's wing." Limber, drunk as usual, and insanely jealous of Talbot, was to be the executioner, and Talbot the victim.
"You have been trying to separate me from my wife, the peerless Alethea, and you must die."
Right here Joe Bowers's frying-pan, loaded with flapjacks, hit Limber in the face; he went down under the blow; the bullet intended for Talbot flew wide of the mark, and Talbot sprang upon him and held him down until he begged for mercy. Alethea, angry at Talbot for sparing Limber, revenged herself subsequently on both by running away with a mysterious stranger, who assassinated Limber, and by making off with Talbot's, Bowers's, and Limber's gold, hidden in their cabin. Tracked across the
Aiken had a record of one story a week for a long time. When pressed, Wheeler and Badger often equaled this gait. Some of the dime-novel writers had several aliases. Col. Thomas C. Harbaugh wrote under his own name and those of Capt. Howard Holmes and Maj. A. F. Grant (in the "Old Cap. Collier" series). Though retired from the dime providing business, Col. Harbaugh is an active contributor to-day to literary papers in Chicago and other places.
The most prolific, however, of all the dime novelists was Col. Prentiss Ingraham, who wrote more than six hundred cheap stories in all, besides many plays and poems. One of his "dimes," forty thousand words, was written on a "rush" order in twenty-four hours, and that was before the popularization of the typewriter. It has been mentioned here that Ingraham wrote most of the Buffalo Bill stories. Ingraham had been an officer in the Confederate army, and afterward served under Juarez in Mexico, in the Austrian army against Prussia, in Crete against Turkey, and in part of the Cuban war of 1868-78 against Spain; and he had traveled widely in Europe, Asia, and Africa. He led a far more adventurous life than Buffalo Bill, and more adventurous than did the hero of almost any of his own tales. In A Rolling Stone, one of Beadle's books, his friend William R. Eyster, a well-known dime novelist, told some of the story of Ingraham's life. In the past quarter of a century the average compensation to Aiken, Ingraham, and their associates was $150 for writing "dimes," and $100 for "half-dimes."
| "The Dime Novel in American Life" | |