Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 5

# Catalog Note

The Young Wandering Jew; or, Plotting for a Legacy by Oll Coomes is a frontier adventure narrative serialized in this Beadle and Adams publication (copyright 1877). The story opens in a Fort Dodge schoolhouse where enigmatic "Vagabond Joe," a seventeen-year-old trapper boy with no known parents or surname, enrolls in school. Joe, who has accumulated savings from selling pelts and has been befriended by respectable townspeople, possesses exceptional spirits and idiosyncratic frontier dialect. He contrasts sharply with the surly, domineering office clerk Mave Conrille, who resents Joe's popularity with the pretty scholar Myrtle Gray. When Conrille and classmate Dan Powers plot to drive out the teacher (then attempt to bar him from school), Joe discovers their conspiracy and violently opposes it, defeating both boys in combat and barricading himself in the schoolhouse, taunting them to reconsider their schemes as the teacher's arrival approaches.