Rocky Mountain Sam

About this issue

The Sea and Shore Series, No. 21 (July 1890), published by Street & Smith. This adventure story by Burke Brentford follows Rocky Mountain Sam, a wiry, hawk-eyed frontiersman captured by Blackfeet warriors on the Upper Missouri River. Sam is bound to a stake under guard of Rube Tenyck, a white renegade disguised in war-paint who leads the tribe. The captive Sam taunts his captors fearlessly. When the mysterious chief Firefoot arrives—revealed to be Robert Scarlet, a white man living as an Indian warrior—he offers Sam freedom in exchange for helping abduct a young woman called the Prairie Blossom from her father's home. Sam refuses indignantly. Firefoot counters that he controls the tribe and threatens Sam's execution by fire, while simultaneously revealing his obsessive search for his aged mother. Sam claims knowledge of her whereabouts through Big Horn, Firefoot's enemy, using this as leverage. As warriors grow impatient, a tomahawk is thrown near Sam's head.