SOURCE: “Clenched Teeth and Curses: Revenge and the Dime Novel Outlaw Hero,” in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. VII, No. 3, Winter, 1973, pp. 652-65.

[In the essay below, Jones explores the development of the outlaw hero in dime novels, arguing that the character emerged from the cultural context of the times.]

Among the select brotherhood of Western heroes who live eternally in the popular imagination, one figure is strangely prominent—a man clad wholly in black, seated astride a black horse. Characteristically, his fist is raised in defiance, his teeth are clenched, and from the shadow obscuring the top half of his face two black, magnetic eyes are smoldering. He is, of course, the noble outlaw, Robin Hood in New World guise, a synthesis of timeless human desires and the unique combination of forces operating upon the development of popular American fiction in the last half of the nineteenth century.

Inasmuch as the dime novel was the age's most widely read form of fiction, it is not surprising that the noble outlaw made his debut in one of these pulp thrillers. He did so on October 15, 1877, when the House of Beadle and Adams released Edward L. Wheeler's Deadwood Dick, the Prince of the Road; or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills.¹ Intelligent, handsome, and chivalrous, Deadwood Dick gunned and galloped his way into the hearts of the reading public. So popular did the black-clad road agent become, in fact, that soon no profit-minded publishing firm was without its own dashing lawbreaker. Moreover, these outlaws were not exclusively the products of imagination; in the desperate search for new material, dime novelists often turned to historical accounts of actual Western badmen, a practice which spawned countless novels sensationalizing the notorious careers of such desperadoes as Jesse and Frank James, the Younger brothers, the Daltons, Rube Burrows, Joaquin Murieta, Tiburcio Vasquez, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Nevertheless, whether purely fictional or modeled after a legendary figure, the dime novel outlaw hero exhibited extraordinary appeal; by the 1890s, one series which printed a high percentage of outlaw stories, Street & Smith's Log Cabin Library, boasted a weekly circulation of 25,000 to 30,000 copies, and other outlaw series were equally popular.²

This popularity may be explained in part by the manner in which the stereotyped outlaw hero embodied certain cultural values and satisfied, through his conventionalized role in the dime novel Western formula, the socio-psychological needs of the reading public. In one sense, of course, the outlaw was simply a reincarnated archetype, a nineteenth century American manifestation of the devil-may-care European rogue or highwayman traditionally prominent in popular fiction. In another sense, however, he was the unique product of a specific cultural context—a cultural context which, through a complex interplay of several aesthetic and cultural dynamics, fostered the development of those character types most responsive to its own social imperatives and psychological preoccupations.³

The nineteenth century, despite its expressed optimism and faith in progress, was an age preoccupied by all of the problems which inevitably accompany rapid social change. It was an age of industrialization, urbanization, class polarization, and control of society by big business and the international agricultural market. It was an age in which new values seemingly threatened established morality. Above all, it was an age in which the average individual found his freedoms severely abridged by gargantuan social and economic forces. Totally subject to these forces, powerless to effect any real change in his life, the common man could still escape into the pages of a pulp thriller and become, if only temporarily, a self-reliant Western hero eminently free in a fantasy realm where every problem had a swift and clear-cut solution. Thus, the astounding popularity of the outlaw hero may be explained in part by his capacity for resolving in fantasy the otherwise insoluble cultural conflicts of the age.

One such conflict in particular played a crucial role in the development and consequent popularity of the outlaw hero: namely, the ambivalent American attitude toward law and the legal system. While most citizens professed belief in the value of law as a positive, organic force which served to build freedom into society, they felt that the legal system was largely unresponsive to the needs of the average individual. Undoubtedly, the intricacies of the judicial process contributed to this notion. More importantly, however, the majority of Americans suspected a nefarious association between law and special privilege. In an age of increasing class polarization, of growing antagonism between labor and capital, it seemed that unscrupulous members of the upper class were exploiting the intricacies of the legal system as a means of furthering their own interests while simultaneously denying the fundamental democratic rights of the majority. By the last half of the nineteenth century such sentiments were sufficiently widespread as to constitute a general antipathy toward law and the legal system. In addition to harboring a natural distaste for artificial restraints, the average individual doubted the ethics of pettifogging lawyers, regarded courtroom procedure as mere chicanery, and looked upon law itself as a tool employed by a vast conspiracy of the rich to subjugate and exploit the poor. In sum, the average American could no longer see a connection between moral and civil law.⁴ Too often there seemed to be a wide and unsettling disparity between that ideal justice which ought to prevail in the application of law and that lesser justice which, in fact, did prevail.

This concern for the meaning and value of law had long been a central theme of the Western. “There are regions,” observes Natty Bumppo in The Prairie (1827),

where the law is so busy as to say, In this fashion shall you live, in that fashion shall you die, and in such another fashion shall you take leave of the world, to be sent before the judgment-seat of the Lord! A wicked and troublesome meddling is that, with the business of One who has not made his creatures to be herded like oxen, and driven from field to field as their stupid and selfish keepers may judge of their need and wants. A miserable land must that be, where they fetter the mind as well as the body, and where the creatures of God, being born children, are kept so by the wicked inventions of men who would take upon themselves the office of the great Governor of all!⁵

Natty speaks from bitter experience, for he had come into conflict with the law a short time before. In The Pioneers (1823), the novel commonly credited with providing the Western's characteristic setting, character, and themes, Cooper brings the anarchic world of the wilderness personified by Natty Bumppo into conflict with the ordered, law-governed society personified by Judge Marmaduke Temple. Natty, schooled in Nature but untutored in the ways of the law, lives an upstanding life regulated solely by his own personal moral code. In contrast, Judge Temple lives by the maxim that “Society cannot exist without wholesome restraints.” These opposing philosophies clash when Natty kills a deer out of season; accordingly, he is charged with a violation of the game laws and brought before the bench. But when asked whether or not he is guilty, the old trapper resolutely replies, “I may say not guilty with a clear conscience … for there’s no guilt in doing what’s right. …”⁶

These same words might have been spoken by any one of the stereotyped Western heroes who attained popularity more than forty years later in the dime novel. Whether trapper, plainsman, cowboy, or outlaw, each of these popular heroes was, like Natty, characterized by his asocial status and his intuitive recognition of the disparity between that which was merely legal and that which was morally just. But this similarity between the venerable trapper and his pulp successors should not be construed simply as a naive and unimaginative attempt by second-rate writers to follow an old trail blazed by Cooper. Instead, dime novelists recognized in the disparity between morality and legality a sure-fire method for creating popular heroes; specifically, it offered them a magic formula whereby they might synthesize in the person of a single fictional character the two ostensibly irreconcilable traits which the reading public most highly prized and most often demanded of those it would venerate: virtue and rebelliousness. On the one hand, public demand had always existed for a standard hero who, guided by his own unerring sense of right and wrong, would lead the forces of good into battle against evil. On the other hand, in an age in which socioeconomic forces suppressed individual freedoms, public demand also existed for a hero who would reject any and all forms of artificial restraint, especially law. The dime novel Western hero satisfied both of these demands; wholeheartedly engaged in fighting villainy, he sometimes found it necessary to subvert the law in the interests of a higher justice.

The introduction of heroes who occasionally acted without regard to the law touched off an ascending spiral of rebelliousness in the dime novel. Evolving through respective incarnations as trapper, plainsman, cowboy, and outlaw, the Western hero progressively abandoned traditional social and legal codes of behavior in favor of sensationalism and absolute self-reliance.⁷ In one sense the outlaw hero was merely the culmination of this trend; in another sense, however, he was a unique figure whose characterization posed a singular problem for dime novelists. While previous Western heroes had either acted in the absence of law or, on occasion, bypassed legal formalities in an attempt to exact a more nearly perfect justice than that which an imperfect legal system could ever hope to realize, never before had a Western hero openly opposed the law; never before had a Western hero reacted against societal restraint so violently as to waylay stages and rob banks. How then might this new and virulent strain of rebelliousness be reconciled with the hero's traditional virtue? And how might the outlaw hero be differentiated from that mob of ordinary badmen who, in league with the forces of evil, also opposed the law?

Dime novelists attacked the problem in two ways. First, they masked the bandit hero's questionable behavior with a thin veneer of respectability, always emphasizing his social polish, courtly manners, and chivalrous conduct toward friend and foe alike, particularly women. Second, and more importantly, they provided him with a justification for his rebelliousness. Though his heart was as true as steel, they explained, he had been unjustly persecuted and driven outside the law. Thereafter, a good but dangerously embittered man, he lived solely for revenge.

Once instituted, the theme of persecution and justifiable revenge rapidly assumed the nature of a formal plot convention in the outlaw story. Indeed, so pervasive did it become, and so familiar to readers, that authors merely needed to refer to “a thin smile” or “eyes glowing like coals” in order to supply all necessary character motivation. Of genuine significance, however, is the manner in which dime novelists tailored the timeworn theme of persecution and revenge to their own cultural context, consciously transforming it into a narrative convention which enabled them to instill in the outlaw hero that quality most responsible for his appeal—the violent but morally justifiable rejection of all forms of restraint, especially the law.

One of the more prolific writers on the staff of Beadle and Adams was a flamboyant Philadelphian who wore a Stetson hat, saluted strangers as “Pard,” and billed himself “Edward L. Wheeler. Sensational Novelist.”⁸ Acquaintances thought Wheeler somewhat odd, but no one could dispute his knowledge of the writing business, for it was his pen that produced one of the most popular fictional heroes of the age: Deadwood Dick, the Black Rider of the Black Hills. Galloping through a series of adventures in more than thirty novels, the dashing Prince of the Road embodies all of the attributes of preceding Western heroes. A deadly shot and skilled equestrian, a master in the art of disguise, he cleverly evades pursuit or tracks down villains—tasks facilitated by a guaranteed income of five thousand dollars a year from his own gold mine. Forever young, handsome, and chivalrous, Deadwood Dick brings a blush to the cheeks of the beautiful and yearning women who abound in the novels; usually he resists their awkward advances, but he does marry three times and father two children. Each time, however, his wife's unfaithfulness or death shatters his domestic bliss, banishing him once again to a rootless life roaming the hills with his two valiant sidekicks, Calamity Jane and Old Avalanche, the Indian fighter.

In the first novel of the series, Deadwood Dick, the Prince of the Road; or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills, Wheeler begins to define the outlaw hero in terms of persecution and revenge, a theme he would return to in later novels, consciously developing and refining it as a narrative convention. When first introduced to the reader, Deadwood Dick is already a road agent. Though he spends considerable time eluding those who would claim the price on his head, he is actually in hot pursuit of Alexander and Clarence Filmore, two crafty malefactors who, we are given to understand, figure prominently in the outlaw's mysterious past. As the novel nears its conclusion, Deadwood Dick captures the villains and spirits them off to his mountain stronghold. Preparations are made for a hanging, and Deadwood Dick's loyal followers only await a signal from their captain before hoisting the two Filmores into eternity. But that signal is long in coming, for the outlaw chieftain must first justify the deed to all present, including the reader. Flinging aside his black mask and addressing the crowd, Deadwood Dick reveals that his real name is Edward Harris; an orphan, he had been taken in and raised by the kindly Harris family. But this home was soon denied to him, for the scheming Filmores successfully managed the “accidental” deaths of his foster parents. Then, as executor of the Harris estate, the elder Filmore swindled Edward and his lovely sister out of their share of the family wealth. Moreover, he foully mistreated them. “Finding that this kind of life was unbearable,” the outlaw explains, “I appealed to our neighbors and even the courts for protection, but my enemy was a man of great influence, and after many vain attempts, I found that I could not obtain a hearing; that nothing remained for me to do but to fight my own way. And I did fight it.” Taking his sister with him, Deadwood Dick continues, he escaped from the Filmores, but not until he had first gone to his father's safe and “purloined a sum of money sufficient to defray our expenses.” Though the money was rightfully his, its theft branded him a criminal in the eyes of the law. As a result, the outlaw concludes, “The Hills have been my haunt ever since. … Now, I am inclined to be merciful to only those who have been merciful to me. … Boys, string ’em up!”⁹

Insofar as it is embodied in the plot of this, the first of the Deadwood Dick stories, the theme of persecution and revenge manifests itself primarily through a relationship between individuals: the Filmores persecute Deadwood Dick and he takes revenge upon them. But the theme also has an obvious social dimension in that Deadwood Dick's justification for taking the law into his own hands rests on society's refusal to take a stand against the social evil which the Filmores represent. Were it not for the unresponsiveness of the legal system and the inaction of the public, Deadwood Dick contends, he would not have been forced to act on his own. And had he not been forced to act on his own he would not have become involved in that chain of events which ultimately deprived him of his rightful place in the community. Through a kind of emotional transference, then, Deadwood Dick comes to resent not merely those villainous individuals who actually precipitated his problems but the whole of society as well.

This anti-social sentiment assumes much wider scope in subsequent Deadwood Dick novels, largely as a result of a significant refinement made by Wheeler in the manner in which he implemented conventional persecution and revenge. Whereas he had instituted the convention in the original Deadwood Dick story primarily to justify Deadwood Dick's attack upon specific individuals, he utilized it in later novels to create stock situations which would afford the outlaw an opportunity to justifiably attack society in general. Usually Wheeler employed one or the other of two situations, each of which placed society in the role of oppressor and Deadwood Dick in the role of misunderstood defender of virtue. In the first, Deadwood Dick attempts to aid a party in distress but finds himself repeatedly hampered by an ignorant populace. This, of course, provokes the outlaw's wrath. In the second situation, Deadwood Dick renounces his life on the road and strives to become a law-abiding member of the community; invariably, however, he is persecuted by an unforgiving public and driven back into the hills where he broods over his unjust treatment and swears vengeance.

By depicting Deadwood Dick's encounters with society in terms of conventional persecution and revenge, Wheeler gained two artistic advantages. First, it allowed him to employ the community as a foil against which to define in the noble outlaw an essential trait common to all Western heroes: namely that he is a man possessed of superior powers of moral perception.¹⁰ Inasmuch as the Western hero is able to detect the presence of evil when the general public is not, he takes it upon himself to protect the community by acting swiftly—even if this entails subverting those social and legal codes which the public holds most dear. Unlike other Western heroes, however, the outlaw hero does not merely subvert these codes; he violates them outright, and since the public remains unaware of the need for prompt and decisive action it inevitably misinterprets such violations. Hence, the outlaw hero incurs the animosity of the very community he is striving to protect—a bitter irony which, in turn, transforms his previously latent disdain for the credulous public into overt enmity. By depicting the outlaw's encounters with society in terms of conventional persecution and revenge, then, Wheeler dramatized that tension which exists between the alienated individual and the community, between insight and credulity, and between morality and legality. It is from this tension that the central ambivalence of the outlaw hero arises; he is at the same time a paragon of virtue and a confirmed rebel, a public servant and an expendable martyr.

A second advantage stemmed from Wheeler's use of conventional persecution and revenge. Deadwood Dick's banishment from the community affords him an opportunity to vent his righteous indignation in the form of bitter social criticism. Throughout the Deadwood Dick saga, the outlaw's attacks focus essentially upon the same three interrelated issues which he initially raised in his justification for lynching the Filmores: first, the stolidity of a citizenry that either cannot or will not distinguish between good and evil and which, through its inaction, consequently furthers the spread of evil; second, the iniquity of a social system which sanctions the exploitation of the common man by an unscrupulous ruling class; and, finally, the fundamental injustice of a legal system which, while it permits those of wealth and influence to perpetrate the most heinous crimes, at the same time severely punishes the common man for the least indiscretion.

The artistic advantages which Wheeler gained by defining the outlaw's relationship to the community in terms of conventional persecution and revenge become apparent in two consecutive stories which relate Deadwood Dick's encounters with the citizens of the bustling boom town of Leadville, Colorado. In each of these tales, Deadwood Dick is portrayed as both a misunderstood protector of the people and an outspoken social critic. In Deadwood Dick in Leadville; or, A Strange Stroke for Liberty, the outlaw holds up a stage but takes great pains to assure the passengers that he means them no harm: “These mountain districts are infested with ruffianly bands of road-agents and outlaws, who prey not only upon one another, but upon all who come within their reach, often resorting to the most fiendish torture to extort money. It does me proud to claim that Deadwood Dick and his followers are in no way allied to such gangs.” Instead, maintains the outlaw chief, he is “a protective agent for the people.” Though he waylays stages and deprives the passengers of their money, he does so only to prevent the unscrupulous Captain Hawk from getting his hands on it when he halts the stage farther down the road. After the passengers have arrived safely in Leadville, Deadwood Dick explains, he will see to it that their money is returned. In spite of this valuable service, Deadwood Dick and his men are nevertheless ostracized by a society which refuses to make a distinction between good and bad outlaws. Still, it is of little consequence, notes the outlaw proudly: “Let the world regard us as it will—we care not. We are a band, to a man, who hate the world and everything worldly. …” And as for the citizens themselves, he continues, unable to repress a bitter laugh: “The people—well! … they would smite me down, were I to do them each and every one a blessing. They have a grudge against me which only my death can appease.”¹¹

Though Deadwood Dick is persecuted by a community which fails to recognize that he is acting in its best interest, it is nevertheless apparent that such individual action is necessary. Lamentably, Leadville's legal system is clearly unresponsive to the needs of the people—so much so, in fact, that a number of citizens have, “in defiance of the law, set themselves up as adjusters of their own wrongs. … Almost to a spirit of insubordination has this thing amounted to among those who plead for justice without receiving it, and hence came the organization known as the Regulators and Adjusters, making Leadville the possessor of two laws—a law of the State and a law of the people.”¹²

In essence, the remainder of the novel contrasts the relative effectiveness of each of these forms of law. On the one hand, the law of the State is plainly inept. When Noel Farnsworth complains to the town sheriff that his sister has been abducted, the genial but incapable lawman throws up his hands in resignation. After a moment's hesitation, he feebly suggests the Farnsworth offer an ample reward in hopes that his sister will be returned unharmed. Then too, Ralph Gardner, the miscreant who has engineered the abduction, repeatedly uses his influence as “one of the richest men in Leadville” to bend the law in his favor, even invoking it in his defense when caught cheating at cards. And on still another occasion, Beautiful Bill, an inaptly named town bully who refers to himself as “a respected and law abidin’ citizen,” harasses the cowed citizenry. But the officers of the law are afraid to oppose him, so “Justice let him alone.” On the other hand, the law of the people is not without its failings either. Too many of Leadville's citizens glory “in taking human life, whether in self-defense, in justice, or cold-handed.” Blinded by mob psychology, manipulated by those “ruffianly and villainous characters … who literally ‘boss’ the town,” the enraged populace is not only ineffective but potentially dangerous as well. At last, in a revealing scene which follows the capture of the notorious road agent Captain Hawk, the two alternative forms of law come into direct conflict:

An instant trial was ordered by the people, and though the sheriff should have waited the slow motion of the law, by rights, he could not resist without running the risk of having his own life taken by the mob. … Accordingly a jury was selected, and the case was brought up, with a prominent lawyer as prosecutor. … A young pettifogger undertook the defense, but after he had spoken a few words, the crowd grew so excited, and revolvers were displayed in such profusion, that he wisely took a seat. A verdict of ‘guilty’ soon followed—the jury not leaving their seats.¹³

On the following morning, just as the sun edges up over the horizon, Captain Hawk is hanged.

Against this backdrop of confusion, coercion, and iniquity, Deadwood Dick stands out as a cool and incorruptible enforcer of true justice. Guided solely by his own infallible sense of right and wrong, unrestricted by legal impedimenta, he is the defender of unarmed virtue, the champion of the down-trodden. And yet he is not free; he is an exile, a lonely and homeless man untiringly persecuted by the very community for which he fights. Confiding to Calamity Jane his grim conviction that the “justice grabbers … will never get over their antipathy toward me, until they see me dangling in mid-air beneath a tree-limb,” Deadwood Dick resolves to surrender to the people and pay his debt to society. However, he has an ulterior motive, and therefore extracts from Calamity Jane a promise that she will cut him down immediately after he is hanged and, if possible, resuscitate him. “After that,” he explains, “I am not afraid of them, for they cannot hang a man but once, and that satisfies the law for all previous misdemeanors. I have but to hang, and then I can laugh at them all, for I shall be a free man—free to go where, or do whatsoever I choose.” Accordingly, Deadwood Dick rides into Leadville and surrenders himself to mob justice. Permitted a few last words before being hanged, the Prince of the Road defends his notorious past in such a way as to implicitly contrast the true justice he has enforced with that lesser justice exacted by the law:

Some of you may say that my life as a road-agent has been highly criminal. I don’t agree with you on that score, for where I have tapped you, I have done so in a gentlemanly manner, and have, as a rule, circulated the spoils among poor and needy families. … I have aided a few ruffianly characters in getting a grand send-off, to be sure, but they were the worst of human brutes, and feared neither God nor man, and whose lives were a curse to the country and a discredit to the name of man. … Therefore, in balancing my accounts, I have not much to regret. But the law has seen fit to regard me as a ferocious criminal, and not wishing to offend the law—the great, majestic law—I do deliver myself up to be lynched from the nearest limb of the nearest tree.¹⁴

Moments later, “in the name of the law,” Deadwood Dick makes his exit at the end of a rope.

It proved to be a brief exit, however, and when Deadwood Dick appeared in the next number of Beadle's Half Dime Library he was eminently free. As he explained in a later novel, “while I hung and paid my debt to nature and justice, I came back to life a free man whom no law in the universe could molest for past offenses.”¹⁵ Yet his days of freedom were numbered. Resurrecting his hero in Deadwood Dick's Device; or, The Sign of the Double Cross, Wheeler again constructed his story in terms of conventional persecution and revenge.

The plot involves Deadwood Dick's efforts to maintain ownership of a mine which he has inherited upon the death of a friendly miner. The Howells, the miner's avaricious family, resent Deadwood Dick's acquisition of the property and use all of their vast wealth and power to wrest it from him. It is clearly a class struggle, for Wheeler intrusively describes the Howells as “a leading family, both financially and socially—for Leadville, mind you, has its social world as well as its Eastern sister cities, formed out of that class whom fortune has smiled upon. And surrounded by a great superfluity of style, pomp and splendor, they set themselves up as the ‘superior class,’ ye gods!”¹⁶ Using their influence, the Howells prejudice the citizens against Deadwood Dick, and soon the servile sheriff makes a rash attempt to arrest him. Cornered, his vehement protest that he is “lawfully a free man” ignored, Deadwood Dick regretfully guns down the sheriff's men and effects his escape—but not before he utters a fearful proclamation: “To-night I have been forced again into crime, and am an outlaw, by the decree of the people. Let them look out, for I will not stop now, but they shall learn to fear my name as an omen of death.”¹⁷

Characteristically, Deadwood Dick's oath of vengeance is justified on the grounds that he has been unjustly persecuted by a society which, lacking his own “keen sense of perception,” too often honors its enemies and maligns its benefactors. As he declares in a rare moment of self-revelation:

I despise a man who is proud of himself, his name, or any worldly possession. No! I am not proud of the name of Deadwood Dick—I should be a contemptible sinner were I. It is not a name to be proud of, for there are many stains upon it, never to be washed out; yet, outlaw, road-agent, dare-devil though I have been, and am now, I have been driven on, step by step, by a people who have no mercy—who refuse to let me alone, after I had hanged and thus paid the penalty of crime. So that, though my future prospects may not be pleasant to reflect upon, I have the consolation of knowing that no man was ever paid nature's debt by my agency, who was not at heart a ruffian and villain, and whose death was not a relief to the community, and a favor to every honest man.¹⁸

And again, when asked if he must always live such a “wild, strange life,” the noble outlaw fiercely replies, “Always! … I am an outcast, and as such I have only to remain. Society or the public at large refuse [sic] to receive me. They are everlasting enemies. … They curse me, and drive me about, and I have no choice except between this life and death.” Reflecting upon Deadwood Dick's blighted life, Old Avalanche mutters, “He’s bin treated like as ef he war sum dishonorable coyote, an’ ef he ain’t got cause fer revenge, I don’t know myself.”¹⁹ Calamity Jane heartily agrees, and together they join Deadwood Dick in a campaign of terror against the citizens of Leadville.

Throughout the remainder of the Deadwood Dick saga, Wheeler again and again utilized conventional persecution and revenge as a means of creating stock situations which afforded the invincible Prince of the Road an opportunity to justifiably defy the law in order to defend the downtrodden and, in the process, bring swift justice to a society in which affluent evil-doers further their own ends by duping the public and manipulating the hopelessly ineffective legal system. In Deadwood Dick on Deck; or, Calamity Jane, the Heroine of Whoop-Up. A Story of Dakota, the outlaw hero comes to the aid of an honest miner who feels, “that very few men are so poor but what they can stand firm for their rights”; if there were more men in the country like him, we are told, “there would, undoubtedly, be a change for the better, when every man would, in a greater or lesser degree, have an independence, and not be ground down under the heel of the master of money.”²⁰ In Deadwood Dick of Deadwood; or, The Picked Party, the outlaw chief cooperates with a detective to topple the corrupt business empire of a “purse-proud aristocrat” who lives by the maxim that “wealth is omnipotent.” For his efforts, however, Deadwood Dick is sentenced to death by a drunken judge, and it is only because of Calamity Jane's quick thinking that he manages to escape.²¹ On another occasion, while defending the rights of a peaceful Crown Indian whose lands have been usurped in Deadwood Dick's Claim; or, The Fairy Face of Faro Flats, the noble outlaw threatens to kill Philander Pilgrim, the local attorney and editor of the town newspaper. “A man is liable to arrest, sir, for uttering a threat!” exclaims the attorney. “Good Blackstone,” the outlaw chuckles, “but it don’t answer here. If you have ever heard of me you will know that I am the man who has found it right, necessary, and convenient to defy arrest.”²² Always defiant, the prince of outlaws continues to lead the forces of good into battle against evil until, in Deadwood Dick's Dust; or, The Chained Hand. A Strange Story of the Mines, Being the 35th and Ending Number of the Great ‘Deadwood Dick’ Series, he is killed while successfully destroying a town whose citizens have appropriated his own tract of land and lynched Calamity Jane.²³ Thus, ironically, the valiant hero who has spent his life defending the rights of others in the end loses it in defense of his own.

During the eight years that Wheeler concentrated his efforts primarily on the Deadwood Dick series, he penned a number of other novels which also illustrate his awareness of the fact that the noble outlaw's source of popular appeal lay in his justifiable rebellion against society. In these tales Wheeler consistently implemented the narrative convention of persecution and revenge to explain his hero's death as a social being and rebirth as a free individual immune to law. Fred Brayton, formerly a detective, and hero of A No. 1, the Dashing Toll-Taker; or, the Schoolmarm o’ Sassafras, takes to the road as a result of a false conviction of murder.²⁴ In Solid Sam, The Boy Road-Agent; or, The Branded Brows. A Tale of Wild Wyoming, Solid Sam turns to a life of crime because a band of ruffians has appropriated his gold mine. Though he plans to waylay them individually and collect the gold which is rightfully his, he finds this impossible and instead demands that the citizens of Placer City restore his gold and pay him protection money. When they refuse, the outlaw and his men “justifiably” reduce the town to a “series of heaps of smoking ashes and charred embers, to tell of the vengeance of Solid Sam.”²⁵ One of the clearest examples of the noble outlaw's vindication occurs in Apollo Bill, the Trail Tornade; or, Rowdy Kate from Right-Bower. A Story of the Mines. Approaching the problem laterally, Wheeler explains that “circumstances have been chronicled of a brave and gallant man, with a spice of nobility in his heart, who has taken to the profession of stage robbery, more on account of some secret life trouble, than taste for the business itself.” Soon Wheeler reveals the “secret life trouble” that has caused law-abiding citizen Bill Blake to be reborn as the dashing Apollo Bill. His home and family, it seems, were destroyed by a roving gang of border ruffians. Swearing an oath of vengeance, Blake set out to track down the murderers; in the process, however, he accidentally shot and killed an innocent man. Pursued thereafter by the untiring

minions of the law … hunted down to the last resort, he rallied around him a band of fellows and took to the mountains. They were discovered in their first retreat and branded road-agents ere they had earned the right to such a calling. Assailed by despondency and anger at this injustice, Apollo Bill fled to this fastness and organized his men into what is known as Apollo Bill's road-agents.²⁶

Like so many other fictional outlaws, Apollo Bill has been falsely accused by a society ignorant of the nature of true justice; he is given no choice but to rebel.

On the basis of these tales and those in the Deadwood Dick saga, it is possible to outline the structure of persecution and revenge as a narrative convention. Essentially, it may be divided into three separate phases. In the first, a good man unjustly persecuted by one or more evil individuals discovers that the legal system can neither protect him nor punish his oppressors—a fact usually attributed to the villain's ability to use wealth and influence either to manipulate the law itself or to corrupt those involved in the slow and complex judicial process. On occasion, though, the hero simply refuses to entrust his fate to a jury composed of citizens who lack his own moral insight. In the second phase, the hero undertakes individual action to avenge his wrongs but, through a fatal misstep, breaks the law and becomes a social outcast. In some instances, the hero does not himself break the law; rather, he is framed by the villain. In the final phase, the outlaw's hatred for the evil individuals who initially persecuted him changes to hatred for society in general. This hatred invariably finds expression in violent action against the community; implicit at all times, however, is the fundamental assumption that such chastisement is merely part of the hero's paternalistic duty as protector of the people and enforcer of true justice.

Although Edward L. Wheeler was the first dime novelist to employ the timeworn theme of persecution and revenge as a means of creating a Western hero capable of responding to the social and psychological imperatives of the nineteenth century, he was by no means the last. Other dime novelists followed his lead, and conventional persecution and revenge soon became a standard device in the outlaw story. Moreover, although originally formulated as a means of fashioning fictional outlaws, conventional persecution and revenge also played a profound role in the development and popularization of legends about actual Western badmen. Seizing upon those few facts which were germane to the convention, and shamelessly altering those that were not, dime novelists portrayed famous outlaws of the West as victims of an oppressive social system—a practice which influenced the legends of men like Jesse and Frank James, Bob Ford, and Joaquin Murieta.

But whether used to create fictional outlaws or implemented as a means of transforming actual Western badmen into misunderstood rebels, the narrative convention of persecution and revenge enabled dime novelists to provide the American public with heroes who possessed a capacity for resolving in fantasy the otherwise insoluble cultural conflicts of the age. In essence, the outlaw hero served two interrelated cultural needs. On the one hand, he was a projection of the widespread American preoccupation with the meaning and value of law. As a good man victimized by the unsettling disparity between that which was morally just and that which was strictly legal, the outlaw hero won a kind of immunity from restraint. Thereafter, guided solely by his own infallible sense of right and wrong, he could resolve that disparity between moral and civil law by taking swift and decisive individual action which insured the execution of true justice. On the other hand, the outlaw hero was a projection of the average American's growing alienation in a modern society characterized by industrialism, materialism, class polarization, and the suppression of individual freedoms by a rigid socioeconomic structure. Eminently free, the invincible outlaw hero was a man who would not, in Edward L. Wheeler's words, “be ground down under the heel of the master of money.” Neither would he stand idly by in an age of apparent moral decline; inevitably, he punished the wicked and triumphed over evil. And if, like an angel of wrath from Revelation, he sometimes found it necessary to purify an entire society with thunder and pillars of fire, then this too was just.

Notes

1. Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 1 (Oct. 15, 1877).

2. William A. Settle, Jr., Jesse James Was His Name: or, Fact and Fiction Concerning the Careers of the Notorious James Brothers of Missouri (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1966), p. 189, and Quentin Reynolds, The Fiction Factory; or, From Pulp Row to Quality Street (New York: Random House, 1955), pp. 115-16.

3. For an invaluable discussion of popular art forms and their relationship to the cultural context, see John G. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Univ. Popular Press, 1971).

4. The growing disparity between civil and moral law culminated formally in the Supreme Court's momentous decision in the Girard Will Case of 1844. For a fuller discussion of this and other aspects of the popular attitude toward law in the nineteenth century, see “The Legal Mentality,” Book Two of Perry Miller's indispensable study, The Life of the Mind in America, from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1965).

5. James Fenimore Cooper, The Prairie (1827; rpt. New York: Rinehart, 1950), pp. 402-03.

6. Cooper, The Pioneers (1823; rpt. New York: Washington Square, 1962), pp. 352, 334.

7. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950; rpt. New York: Vintage-Knopf, n.d.), p. 134.

8. Albert Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1950), II, 296.

9. Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 1 (Oct. 15, 1877), p. 13.

10. For an interesting discussion of the Western hero's superior moral perception, see James K. Folsom, The American Western Novel (New Haven, Conn.: College & University Press, 1966), pp. 136-37.

11. Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 100 (June 24, 1879; rpt. Deadwood Dick Library, No. 23, Mar. 15, 1899), pp. 5, 16.

12. p. 7.

13. p. 26.

14. pp. 30-31.

15. Deadwood Dick's Dream; or, The Rivals of the Road. A Mining Tale of Tombstone, Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 195 (Apr. 19, 1881), p. 8.

16. Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 104 (July 22, 1879; rpt. Deadwood Dick Library, No. 21, Mar. 15, 1899), p. 5.

17. p. 8.

18. p. 23.

19. pp. 23, 25.

20. Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 73 (Dec. 17, 1878; rpt. Deadwood Dick Library, No. 15, Mar. 15, 1899), p. 9.

21. Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 156 (July 20, 1880; rpt. Deadwood Dick Library, No. 17, Mar. 15, 1899), pp. 9, 12, 30-31.

22. Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 362 (July 1, 1884) p. 3.

23. Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 430 (Oct. 20, 1885), p. 14.

24. Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 299 (Apr. 17, 1883; rpt. The Detective Road-Agent; or, The Miners of Sassafras City, Deadwood Dick Library, No. 63, Mar. 15, 1899).

25. Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 141 (Apr. 6, 1880; rpt. Deadwood Dick Library, No. 32, Mar. 15, 1899), p. 31.

26. Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 236 (Jan. 31, 1882; rpt. Dick Drew, the Miner's Son; or, Apollo Bill, the Road-Agent, Deadwood Dick Library, No. 48, Mar. 15, 1899), pp. 4-5, 17.