Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 816 — page 15: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Dicks are so firm From tie New York Hvening Sun, TWO REMARKABLE HEROKS, = The Deadwood Dicks, Senior »« Junior, are the Gentlemen, There Have Already Been Ninety Volumes Published Relating to Their Astounding Courage, Coolness and Skill. In only onesense of the word can. it be regarded aS a novel statement when the fact is here recorded that literature has given many heroes to the world, and perhaps more than one reader will have to think a moment over this remark before the subtle delicacy of its genial wit strikes home, But it is most essentially a half dime novel state- ment that will be news to many when it is added that literature, if traced from the dimly distant days when Adam wasa mere child down to the present day, would show but few heroes that in the eyes of boy- hood would be even judged worthy of comparison with the two greatest heroes known to American literature, or, to promptly reveal them, Deadwood Dick and Deadwood Dick, Jr. Perhaps if everything were known of his career in bookland, Robinson Crusoe would rank above any hero ever offered to the boys of the world, fur Robinson made his appearance a long time ago and his adventures have been translated into pretty nearly all the languages that are priatable; but while Robinson is and ever will b : a worthy person- age, he is, it is to be feared, most decidedly a back number in the eyes of several millions of the boys and young men of to-day. And then, too, Robinson’s reputation was made and safely anchored to leeward at a time when com- etition in the manufacture of heroes of juvenile fiterature was so slack that it is scarcely worth men- tioning. Had he postponed his debut until to-day Robinson would have had to hiré a press agent, o the very objectionable type known asa hustler, and even with that assistance the odds are that he would have experienced a severe frost, Robinson, like many other bygone characters calculated to thrill the juvenile mind, labored under the disadvantage of having only a comparatively few adventures, and he was further very heavily handicapped by having to confine his adventures within the narrow circles of probability and com- mon sense. The modern heroes of fic.ion for youn America, who are now as countless as the sands o the sea, and of whom the Deadw>2od Dicks are much the most important, are not trimmeled by any such coofined conditions, and with the bars let down ad- mitting them to the boundless expanse of the utter- ly impossible, it is but natural that their unnatural- ness should bear away the palm of popularity, and such as Robinson be left far behind in the race. Therefore the statement 6f the surpassing promi- nence of the two Deadwood Dicks having been so emphatically made, it will be as well to justify the emphasis with some facts about their history from a bookseller’s point of view, before plunging into the seething voriex of their recorded lives, Deadwood Dick made his first epoasrance before the public in 1877, under the auspices of Beadle & Adams, the William street publishers of popular literature for the masses, and for fourteen years he or his son has been reappearing at intervals, which were at first irregular, but they have now settled down ta a basis of once in six weeks. It was in 1885 that Deadwood Dick the elder made his final appearance after thirty-three volumes of adventure, and his son, Deadwood Dick, Jr., who had been growing up in them for many years, tuok up the running, an has kept it up to the tune of very nearly fifty volumes more in the six years that have passed since his remarkable father was buried. During the fourteen years they have been on the market these stories have been sold at five cents a volume, and the circulation ree have attained throughout the length and breadth of the land, has been in the aggregate something truly vas*, for the entire series 1s kept constantly ia print, and many of the early issues are now enjoying a sale of their twen!y-seventh or thirtieth edition. It can be easily believed, therefore, that the two ly engrafted on the tree of, popular literature for boys and young men, that their posi- tion is assured so long as their author can keep it up, and that they stand to-day head and shoulders above all rivals in the eyes*of the public for which are have lived, and for which one of them has ied. American boyhood, and that is a tremendous fac- tor in the Jand, now knows Deadwood Dick, Jr., a ood ceal better than it knows its catechism, and millions of young minds absorb the thrilling: inci- dents of his career in his everlasting warfare against crime and his never-ending solving of impenetrable mysteries. : Millions of boys follow his stealthy fcotsteps as he tracks his vicious victims to their undoing, and then, when the victims are thoroughly undone, the mil- lions wait hungrily for the next volume, which on every sixth LoVe rrwnir appea's with the certainty of the ‘T2esdJay itself, and a new set of delightful thrills go thrilling away from Maine to California, Mr. Victor, the courteous editor for Beadle and .Adams, who told Te Hvening Sun what it wished to know about the history of the two Dicks, said that he had often had his attention cal.ed to what , are known as Deadwood Dick clubs, which are or- ganizations consisting of from three to a dozen boys, who take turns in buying the Deadwood Dick novels as they appear, and reading them in rotation, so that in the case, for instance, of a club of six mem- bers, each member would be kept thoroughly in- formed of his pet héro’s latest doings, at a cost of only five cents once in thirty-six weeks, while when nine of these economical young enthusiasts pool their issues in the same direction a nickel will serve the purpose for a whole year. Mr, Victor, in his curious and intervsting task of editing this phase of the literature cf the day for one of the most extensive publishing houses in the business, has weighed the question carefully, and finds that a volume once in six weeks is just about the amount of Deadwood Dick, Jr., that his count- less admirers can comfortably absorb and digest, In England, too, this extraordinary series of eighty volumes telling of the doings of father and son has been republished for years, to the infinit» | delight of the boys and youths of Great Britain and the solid satisfaction of the London publishers that bad the pleasure of thus getting square with America on the piracy question. “When I received the first Deadwood Dick story,” said Mr, Victor, ‘I was struck with the freshness of the author’s siyle, and after toning it down a little sent it to the printers. The story made a hit and I accepted another and another until we found that the character was becoming unusually popular among our patrons, ‘*] kept urging the author to make the stories less terrifically forcible in the language of his rougher characters, and gradually thé sulpburous nature of their dialozues became moderate enough to need but little editing, and at the same time the torrents of liquor that flowed like rivers through his earlier manuscripts, dwindled to rivulets under the influ- ence of my appeals for Jess rum, “The author urged the absolute truth of both the language and the amount of ere that he attributed to his characters, but I begged in the interests of morality that the flow of both one and the other be curbed, and of course the stories were none the worse for his doing so. ‘‘Deadwood Dick, himself, was also gradually re- formed and changed from the outlawed terror of the law-abiding to the deadly foe of the law break- ers, and when once that transformation was ehieved his subsequent course in the path of vir ue was an assured success. “True, the path was a’ somewhat rROhy. bloody and dangerous one; but no one who foll:ws him along its various ups and downs can doubt its virtue, an’ from that virt.:e he never deviated,” The tull and official list of the titles of tis re- markable series would fill at least a column of The Evening Sun. It contains some real gems in the way of names calculated to attract the youth in search of a thrill. For instance there is Deadwood Dick’s Device; or, The Sign of the Double Cross, A Wild, Strange Tale of the Leadviile Mines—of Men of Steel—of Toughs and Tigers—of Road-agents, Regulators, Avengers, Adventurers, and of the Thrilling Life in the New Eldorado. Can any one deny the comprehensiveness of that or his probable power of seducing nickels from the pockets of novel-reading boys? Then there are a number ¢f delightfully alliterative titles, such as Deadwood Dick’s Defiance, or, the Double Daggers, and Deadwood Dick’s Double, or, the Ghost of Gor- gon’s Gulch. Peculiarly fetching, too, in their forceful effect on the small boy’s p°cket money must be Deadwood Dick on Deck; or, Calamity Jane, the Heroine of Whoop Up; Deadwood Dick’s Dead Deal; or, Captain Crackshot, the Girl Brigand; Deadwod Dick’s Death Trail; Deadwood Dick’s Death Plant, and Deadwood Dick’s Diamonds, In the selection of localities fur his adventures Dead- wood Dick, Jr., shows far mcre desire for variety than the old man ever did, for he has volumes that relate his remarkable doings in New Yofk, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, Roches- ter, Buffalo, San Francisco, Denver, Galveston Lea‘lville, and« ven at Coney Island, The tilles of the younger hero’s volumes show that he met with and got the better of swindlers, bunco men, coun- terfeiters, bank robbers, horse thieves, smugglers, pirates, stage robbers, and, indeed, pretty nearly every sort of criminal known to the poles, while his father confined himsrlf almost exclusively to root- ing out the Weste:n type of bad men. Progress has, therefore, a worthy representative in Deadwood Dick the younger. It is surely not necessary to add that in the mod- erate compass of a newspaper article, only the merest shadow of justice can be done to the careers of any heroes that have had such an extraordina collection of stories as that written about them. If & month or so were given toa careful reader for the task, he might, with the assis.ance of a double-entry bookkeeper, tabulate the number of blood-curdling episodes that occur in the eighty volumes, together with the exact number of persons who are shot, stabbed, hanged and removed in sundry less cons ventional borderland ways, such as being tossed into guicksands, burned inthe tops of forest giants, fed to bears or made to try and walk on tight ropes across bottomless chasms, The finalsummary would be something appalli in its gory magnitude, and would form a record o slaughter that would shame tne battle of Gettys- burg, but it might prove a source of eatertainment to some idle person of a sanguinary turn of mind, anc so the ideais suggested here, The variety of duels in these stories is another sourcs of wonder to the reader, and it must be ack- nowledged that Mr. Wheeler has as prolific an imag- ination as it is possible to conceive. Every volume of the series fairly bristies with episodes of a nature that makes those related in the more ordinary 10- cent or 5-cent stories seem as mild as hotel milk, and hotel milk has been pronounced by scientists to be ths mildest object in nature. In coming face to face with the notes of a variety of episodes and adventures in the books which thc writer made as he hurriedly went through the eighty volumes, and which he hoped to utilize in this article, an CrCRPON Ses sense of havin bucked up against the impossible rears its anal front and mocks the man who dared to face the task of doing justice to the suDiesy Once or twice a flowing beaker of mcxie o> nerve food, has been tossed off, and with grim determina- tion the struggle made to sift the material on hand ate condense it into something like a reasonable shape. With a heartfelt sigh the colossal task has, however. been reluctantly abandoned. Ther are the eighty volumes each so crowded with thrills and hesrt-tugs that it were madness to hope to do quence to shem collectively and rank injustice to discriminate be- tweenthem, The three larger pictures illustrating this article have been selected at random from eighty just as interesting, and the smaller ones are por raits of Deadwood Dick, his wife, Calamity Jane, and Deadwood Dick, Jr. To abandon tue idea of giving a few extracts from their lives causes infinite pain, but if once ~ start were made in that direction, it would be crue” to The Evening Svn’s rea ers to stop, and it is there- fore better not to relate one single adventure, Suffice it to say that the stories are clean and well written, and until !he glut of gore and supernatural courage and success of the heroes becomes indci- gestible to the ordinary mind, there is much amuse- are to be found in adventures of the Deadwood icks, The small boy and his larger brother have min¢s attuned by nature to absorb the music of the con- stant flow of villains’ blood and the never-ceosing cracking of rifles and revolvers that keep the silence in a perpetual state of unrest throughout the Dead- wood Dick series, but it is not so with a more meture mind, and unless you sre a small Bey ora y uth prone toadmire tbe terrifically heroic in li erature, you are advised not to purchase the entire eighty volumes, but to try a sample here and there from the list. If you area small boy, or the other fellow you doubtless know more about it than the writer, and so don’t want any advice on the subject, As a parting tribute to Mr, Wheeler, the owner of the brain that bas evolved and continues to evolve the most pores boys’ stories of the day, {tis but fair to add, and an interesting fact as well, that he has also found time to dash off some novels about Cloven Hoof, the Buffalo Demon; Bob Woolf, the Girl Dead-Shot; Death-Face, Detective; Old Ava- lanche; Wild Edna, the Giri Biigand; Jim Bludsoe, Jr., the Boy Phoenix; Buckhorn Bill; Gold Rifle, the Sharpshooter; Rosebud Rob; Nugget Ned; Idyl, the Girl Miner; Photograph Phil; Canada Chet; Watch- Bye; Jack Hoyle, the Young gf oevte ay Gilt- Edged Dick, the Sport Detective; Cinnamon_ Chip the Girl Sport; Bonanza Bi!l; Boss Bob, the King of Bootblacks; Solid Sam, the Rad Agent; Cap- tain Ferret, the New York Detective; New York Nell, the Boy-Girl Detective; Nobby Nick of Neva- da; Wild Fiank, the Buckskin Bravo; Fritz, the Bound Boy Detective; Snoozer, Jt ties Sharp; Apollo Bill, the Trail Tornaco; Cyclone Kit, the Young Gladiator; Sierra Sam, the Frortier Ferret; Jumbo Joe, the Boy Patrol; Denver Doll the Detec- tive Queen; Turk, the Boy_Ferret; A No, 1, the Dashing Tcll-taker; "Liza Jane, the Girl Miner; Kelley, Hickey & Co., the Detectives of Philadelphia, . Little. nick Shot: garoo Kit, the Mysterious Miner: Manhattan Mike, the Bowery Blood; First- ‘class Fred; Yreka Jim, the Gold,Gatherer; Naboh Ned; Cool Kit, the King of Kids; Bicycle Ben; Wrinkles, the Night Watch Detective: High Hat Harry, the Baseball Detective; Sam_ Slabsides, the Beggar Boy Detective; Jim Beak and Pal, Private Detect.ves; and Santa Fe Sal, the Slasher, He may therefore be proncumaad We mea ler from Storytellersvil'e, and the Deadwood Dick stories will be bis towering monument, ; book COr Cc