Moving away from Fenimore Cooper-style frontiersmen, dime novel heroes began a new
trend when somebody had the bright idea of dramatising real life ‘folk’ heroes. Daniel
Boone, Davy Crockett and especially Kit Carson were soon starring in ten-cent libraries
of their own. ‘Kit Carson, Mountain Man’ apparently wrote his own reports of his
adventures, which were then edited by Jessie Benton Fremont into readable narratives.
Published in the early 1840s, these formed the foundation for wilder versions adapted for
the excitement-hungry readers of weekly story-papers. These were the broadsheets of
fiction published in the big cities for family consumption, containing exciting and
romantic fiction in serialised chapters. Compiled, these episodes were reprinted (both
with and without permission) as dime novels, such as Kit Carson, the Prince of the Gold
Hunters.
It was in The New York Weekly at Christmas 1869 that the greatest of all wild western
heroes of the combined fact-fiction genre made his gun-toting bow. The title was Buffalo
Bill, King of the Border Men, the hero was Colonel William F. Cody, and the author Colonel
Ned Buntline. Buntline’s real name was Edward Zane Carroll Judson, born 1822 in
Philadelphia, who had started writing hack fiction for The Knickerbocker Magazine in
1838 at the age of sixteen. His many early titles included The Black Avenger of the
Spanish Main, or The Fiend of Blood— a typical title for a typical tale of bloodthirsty
buccaneering. Buntline met Cody in Nebraska, saw the possibilities in the Indian scout’s
meat-hunting enterprises, and formed a partnership that would prove one of the most
prosperous of the day. It is safe to say that the ensuing worldwide popularity of the dime
novels and magazine serials made Buffalo Bill the box-office attraction that he shortly
became. However, although Buntline profited by $20,000 in the deal, he and Cody fell
out over how the profits should be shared. As a result he was fired by Cody, who hired
another ‘Colonel’, Prentiss Ingraham. The dime novels continued without interruption or
noticeable change in literary style: ‘I could see his eyeballs start in agony from his head,
the beaded sweat, blood colored, ooze from his clammy skin, each nerve and tendon
quivering like the strings of a harp struck by a maniac hand!’ Ingraham would write 600
novels before he died in 1904, and is said to have completed a 35,000 word book in one
day and a night.
Western heroes continued to reign supreme. There was ‘Deadwood Dick, the Rider of
the Black Hills’, created for Beadle and Adams by Edward L.Wheeler, for the first issue of
their new Pocket Library (1884). Wheeler, a city man all his life, described Dick thus: ‘A
youth of an age somewhere between 16 and 20, trim and compactly built with a
preponderance of muscular development and animal spirits, broad and deep of chest,
with square iron-cut shoulders, limbs small yet like bars of steel’. Dick was clearly
designed to appeal to the younger reader, who might not care for Buffalo Bill and his
flowing gold moustache. Wheeler’s titles also had youth-appeal, being invariably
alliterative, such as Deadwood Dick at Danger Divide.
Another army officer, a Major Sam Hall, created another western hero in Buckskin
Sam, who starred in a dime novel with perhaps the unlikeliest title of them all: Ker-
Whoop Ker-Whoo! or the Tarantula of Taos. The Major was a specialist in colloquial
dialogue: ‘Woop-la! Shove out a bar’l o’ bug-juice afore I bu’st up yer she-bang!’
With the untamed frontiers taking up so much paper and print, dime novel publishers
looked eastward for their next heroes. They came up with the detective, a hero who first
TYPES AND GENRES 257