The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 49, July 1945 - April, 1946 Page: 331
717 p. : ill., maps, ports. ; 24 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Dime Novel Texas
found time to study medicine, his pen names were considered
quite appropriate.
Both Badger and Coomes were frontier boys and knew much
of the West. Badger used one of his pen names, A. H. Post,
to write his own life's story with the title Roving Joe: The
History of a Young "Border Ruffian," for "Beadle's Boy's Li-
brary," large series. He killed his first Indian before he was
eleven years old. Coomes outlived the Dime Novel Texas he
helped create and was killed in an auto accident in Iowa in 1920.
Captain Mayne Reid had a colorful career before becoming
a writer. His biographer (his widow) fails to mention his
close association with Beadle. It was to Reid that Beadle paid
the record price of $700 for The White Squaw, No. 12 in "Beadle
and Adams 20c Novels." Most of his stories were reissued in
cloth when Dime Novel days were done and were favorites of
boys in both England and the United States for many years.
The records say but little of Willett or Captain Frederick
Whittaker. Edmund Pearson, in his fine book Dime Novels,
records the Captain as rising to the defense of the morality
of the Dime Novels after an editorial attack by the New York
Tribune in 1884. Both Willett and Whittaker wrote some thrill-
ing Dime Novel Texas tales.
The author of the first Texas Dime Novel, Edward S. Ellis,
dedicated his life to literature on the occasion of his selling
Seth Jones, "Beadle's Dime Novels" No. 8, to Beadle for $75.
Seth Jones sales totaled over 600,000 and had much to do with
the soundness of the financial foundation of Beadle's Dime
Novel factory. Ellis was nineteen at the time. He wrote many
Dime Novels, many juveniles, and much biography and history,
finally achieving recognition by Who's Who through his literary
efforts. His contributions to Dime Novel Texas, while written
without the first-hand knowledge of a Hall, a Badger, or a Reid,
were sound.
C. Dunning Clark was a well known historian and produced
his dime novels under the pen name of W. J. Hamilton.
In fact, Dime Novel Texas was particularly fortunate in
having, as its main creators, writers with a broad general
knowledge of pioneer life and times as well as much intimate
and personal contact with the characters who populated that
fabulous Texas.
The Literature
Beadle, and rightly so as the leader in the field for nearly331
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 49, July 1945 - April, 1946, periodical, 1946; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth146056/m1/386/: accessed April 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.