The Girl Avenger

"The Girl Avenger; or, The Beautiful Terror of the Maumee" by Capt. Chas. Howard (Beadle and Adams, 1872)

This frontier adventure serial opens in August 1794 along the Maumee River in Ohio. A sixteen-year-old girl—revealed to be Nanette Froisart—systematically hunts Ottawa warriors, tracking her vengeance with carved marks on her rifle stock. She executes an Indian named Jaguar-tail, her fortieth scalp. Joe Girty, a notorious renegade, shoots her from ambush and captures her alive, intending to deliver her to the Ottawa village for torture and execution. The narrative shifts to the village council where allied tribes—Ottawas, Shawnees, Delawares, Miamis, Wyandots—assemble under British influence to resist General "Mad Anthony" Wayne's military campaign. Girty announces his prize capture, leaving Nanette bound in his lodge under guard of a drunken squaw, her fate—burning—scheduled for the assembled warriors' entertainment.