The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana
by Jess Nevins
The Deadwood Dick Adventures (1877-1885)
copyright © Jess Nevins 2022
The Deadwood Dick Adventures were written by Edward L. Wheeler and appeared in thirty-four stories in Beadle's Half Dime Library from 1877 to 1885, beginning with “Deadwood Dick, the Prince of the Road; or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills” (Beadle’s Half Dime Library, Oct 15, 1877). Edward L. Wheeler (1854/5-1885/6) was short-lived and only wrote for eight years, but during that time he produced around 100 dime novels, and introduced the cowgirl heroine character.
Deadwood Dick is an outlaw. His real name is Edward “Ned” Harris. Originally from the East, he and his sister Anita were driven West through the connivance of an evil banker, Alexander Filmore. Filmore and his son Clarence arranged for the “accidental” deaths of Ned’s foster parents and then swindled Ned and his sister out of their share of the family wealth. Left with no other alternative except starvation, Ned is forced to lead the life of a highwayman. He gathers around him a gang of bandits and becomes the infamous “Deadwood Dick.” He leads an exciting and violent life of adventure, but he longs to leave behind outlawry and become a settled man with a wife, children, and home. He is never successful in this, however, for events conspire against him, he is often betrayed by his friends, and the women who accept his marriage proposals usually die. He usually operates in the Black Hills of South Dakota, aided by his friend, the guide Alva Lanch “Old Avalanche” Hogg, and by his sometime-lover, sometime-enemy Calamity Jane (see: Calamity Jane Adventures). In the last story of the series, “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” (Beadle’s Half-Dime Library no. 430, Oct 20, 1885), Dick and Jane are hanged and buried side-by-side.
Continuity was not a major concern for Wheeler, and the stories do not form a coherent whole. Dick is killed in some stories, returning in the next issue without any explanation provided. Similarly, Calamity Jane’s relationship with Dick changes from story to story and is entirely dependent on what the plot requires her to be. In this the Dick series is not unlike much popular fiction and was driven by the marketplace and the demands of the publisher rather than by any attempt on Wheeler’s part to create Art. Nonetheless, the Dick series is interesting and even significant.
Deadwood Dick was the first masked outlaw of frontier fiction. Wheeler named him “Deadwood” after the town of Deadwood, South Dakota, which was founded in 1875 after General George Custer’s 1874 expedition to the Black Hills gave fuel to rumors that gold could be found in the Hills. By 1877 Deadwood was the largest town in the Black Hills and had already become famous, and infamous, as the epitome of the wild and lawless Western frontier. So Dick, from the beginning, had an element of topicality about him: where better for a masked outlaw cowboy to operate than in the notorious frontier town of Deadwood? This was most likely a marketing ploy on the part of Edward L. Wheeler or Beadle & Adams, Wheeler’s publishers. But Wheeler, consciously or unconsciously, proceeded to make Dick not just topical but symbolically representative of pressing social issues.
During the nineteenth century, American stories about the Western frontier went through distinct historical stages. Before the 1840s the stories were usually about the creation of a white community through the defeat of the natives (see: The Last of the Mohicans, Nick of the Woods). Between the 1840s and the 1870s stories set on the frontier were about the defense of white community. However, those threatening the community included not just natives or Mexicans, but also corrupt and wicked bankers and businessmen. Both the authors and readers of these stories were urbanites, and frontier stories which featured evil financiers and merciless businessmen, both negative aspects of the contemporary urban experience, can be seen as the displacement of city problems into a frontier setting in which the problems can be fictionally resolved in a way the audience will find satisfactory. The heroes of such stories were defenders of the status quo, defeating evil businessmen but allowing other, presumably good businessmen to take their place. The implicit message of these stories was that problems like heartless bankers were anomalies which were easily solved, and that the status quo ante was The Way Things Should Be—that the problem was not the system, but the lone individual. This pattern can also be seen in popular fiction crime stories set in the city.
This changed in the mid-1870s. The 1870s saw the national conflict between workers and management turn vicious, with strikes by Pennsylvania coal miners in 1873 and 1874 and by railway workers in 1877 both leading to violent and bloody repressions by management. Labor conflicts in the Reconstruction South were even more charged, tied in as they were with ongoing racial and political conflicts. Relations between labor and capital were extremely bitter. Conservative defenders of the establishment used newspapers to claim that criminals like Frank and Jesse James (see: The James Brothers Adventures) were caused by labor unrest, while liberal newspapers portrayed criminals as heroes of folklore, with the James brothers specifically compared to Robin Hood’s men.
This was the backdrop set for the rise of the outlaw hero in popular American fiction in the mid-1870s. Characters like Deadwood Dick and the James brothers remained outlaws, but they were made into versions of the räuberroman hero. The cause of their outlawry was corrupt businessmen who had the support of the law. The outlaw heroes no longer preyed on the average inhabitant of the frontier. The victims of their robberies were members of the upper classes, usually Eastern, and when communities were threatened, the identity of the community was defined as working class, and the enemies of the community were exploitive capitalists like stockbrokers and financiers who were evil not through what they did but through what they were. Officials who represented business and the financial establishment were automatically corrupt and automatically the enemy of the outlaw hero, who fought them but defended the poor and the working class.
Deadwood Dick and the James brothers were the two most popular outlaw characters to appear in the dime novels in the 1870s and 1880s. Led by these two, the outlaw hero character became so successful so quickly that the dominant narrative model for the dime novel Western changed after 1875, from James Fenimore Cooper-like stories to those of the outlaw hero. Deadwood Dick began as a version of the traditional frontier hero, similar to Kit Carson or Hawkeye. At this stage he is often pursued by “regulators” (see: The Regulators of Arkansas) who, knowingly or not, do the bidding of a wealthy villain. But in later stories Dick becomes a vigilante himself, defending the community against outsiders who represented the evil Eastern moneyed interests.
The enemies of Deadwood Dick during these years were representatives of capital: business managers, bankers, stockbrokers, industrial capitalists, and financiers. They are almost uniformly Eastern, well-dressed, corrupt, and effete. Indians and Mexicans, when they appear, are not the primary villain and are often allies of Dick and his friends. Dick’s allies are the workers, farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers. In one story Dick helps striking miners defy a large corporation which is trying to crush them. The miners explicitly link themselves with the striking Pennsylvania coal miners. In another story Dick leads a miners’ union, helps win fair wages for the workers and defeats a “communistic” labor organization. The communities he defends are agrarian, rural, and opposed to the sort of modernization that earlier frontier heroes like Hawkeye and Nick of the Woods had promoted.
This story pattern continued in both the Deadwood Dick and James brothers stories until 1883. The popularity of the outlaw hero stories led to what has been called a “moral panic” on the part of the establishment, including numerous alarmist articles in the Eastern press, and so in 1883 the Postmaster General, Walter Gresham, ordered the cancellation of the Wide Awake Library, which published the Frank and Jesse James stories. This action caused the dime novel publishers to change the content of the outlaw stories. Deadwood Dick became a more conventional detective, pardoned and reconciled with society. His enemies were still often members of the upper class, but Dick became solidly entrenched in the middle class, and labor issues and his sympathies for the producing classes (as opposed to the profiting classes) vanished from the series.
Recommended Edition
Print: Edward L. Wheeler, The Deadwood Dick Library Collection, volumes 1-12. Self-published, 2017-2018.
Online: https://dimenovels.lib.niu.edu/islandora/search/%22deadwood%20dick%22?type=dismax
For Further Research
Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.