Dead Shot

This Beadle and Adams dime novel, issue No. 231, is Dead Shot: The White Vulture, a romance of the Yellowstone by Albert W. Aiken (1874). The narrative opens at Fort Bent, a military outpost where the Yellowstone and Powder rivers meet, a staging ground for wagon-trains heading into Montana territory. The story describes the dangerous landscape: the fertile Yellowstone valley inhabited by hostile Mandan and Sioux tribes, and further north, the Crow nation—formidable warriors known for their grizzly-bear trophy necklaces. A twenty-wagon emigrant train with sixty settlers prepares to depart. The narrative introduces the two guides: Abraham "Abe" Colt, a forty-year-old Indian-fighter who wears deerskin and swore vengeance on the Crow nation after his father's death twenty years prior, and David Reed, a nineteen-year-old half-breed found as an infant after a soldier battle with Blackfeet. A mysterious stranger wrapped in a red blanket appears near the river—apparently Indian or mixed-race in appearance. The text breaks off as the stranger turns to face the guides.