Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 902

# Museum Catalog Note

This issue of Beadle and Adams' Dime Library (Vol. XXXIX, No. 992, July 2, 1896) features "The Hungry Gulch Ghost," a serial adventure by Edward L. Wheeler, author of the Deadwood Dick novels. The story opens in Gold Dust, a mining town in Hungry Gulch, as advance agent Edward Murphy prepares to open a gold-cure sanitarium in the notorious Hough mansion—a haunted brick structure that has stood vacant for a decade with a standing reward of $500 to anyone who can solve its mystery. The narrative introduces colorful mining-camp characters including "Joyful Jimmie," Irish immigrant Felix Shea, and "Handsome Harry." When the sanitarium's superintendent arrives by stage, an intense stranger named Trump Finnegan—mistakenly identified by young Tom Godwin as the notorious outlaw Tiger Joe—violently demonstrates his refusal to be called a liar, nearly dropping the young man off the hotel piazza before Handsome Harry intervenes.