Beadle's Dime Novels No. 15: The Frontier Angel

About this issue

This Beadle Dime Novel installment presents The Frontier Angel: A Romance of Kentucky Rangers' Life by Edward S. Ellis. Set in late-eighteenth-century western Pennsylvania, the story follows Marian Abbot, an eighteen-year-old whose family plans emigration to Kentucky. Marian departs the next morning by flatboat with armed neighbors while her parents remain to settle affairs; her lover Russell Mansfield stays with his parents for the same reason. The central threat is Tom McGable, a rejected suitor who has become a renegade allied with British forces and Indians, operating as a decoy along the Ohio River to lure flatboats to their destruction. McGable has sworn vengeance against both Marian and Mansfield. The narrative establishes domestic tension through family conversation and approaching storm, then shifts to reveal McGable's backstory as a dangerous, passionate man of mysterious origins now employed in frontier warfare and murder.