The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

The Dick Talbot Adventures (1871-1889)

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

The sixteen Dick Talbot Adventures were written by Albert W. Aiken, beginning with “Overland Kit; or, the Idyl of White Pine” (Saturday Journal 68, July 1, 1871). Aiken (1846-1894) was a dime novelist by day, churning out stories about detectives and cowboys by the thousands of pages, and a respected playwright and actor by night.

Dick Talbot is a highwayman in the American Old West. Once he was Patrick Gwyne, an Easterner, but when he moved to the West in search of adventure he assumed a number of pseudonyms, including “Gentleman Dick,” “Injun Dick,” and “the Ranch King.” But it was as “Dick Talbot” that he is most known. On the frontier he tries a variety of careers, including that of gambler, miner, rancher, and road agent/highwayman. During these years he meets and falls in love with a number of women, almost all of whom die when he decides to settle down with them. In his wandering, road agent days Talbot is assisted by his two best friends, O-wa-he, the Indian known as “Mud Turtle,” and the scout Joe Bowers. Talbot soon tires of being an outlaw and tries to clear his name, but that is a long and mostly unsuccessful struggle. On more than one occasion he is hunted by private detective Joe Phenix, another of Aiken’s creations. In his final stories Talbot buys and operates a ranch in Arizona along the Mexican border. He is ultimately successful in wiping out his enemies and retires to live in peace.

Talbot is a snappy dresser and cool customer. He is

cool as a bank of snow melting under the shadows of the pines in a mountain canon [sic], wily as a panther, cunning as a fox, a man who knew not what fear was, who never turned his back on a foe, or hesitated to back a friend in a fair fight: quick as lightning on the trigger, spry as a cat with the bowie knife; the best two handed sparrer that ever set foot in the Reese river valley, and the finest poker player that ever handled a deck of cards.1 

The Dick Talbot stories are unusual by the standards of dime novel Westerns of the 1870s and 1880s in that they are consistently fast-moving, colorful, and exciting; Aiken was among the best and most popular authors that the dime novel publishers Beadle and Adams employed, and the Dick Talbot stories were his best work.

As J. Randolph Cox notes, the “earliest Dick Talbot stories preceded Edward L. Wheeler’s Deadwood Dick stories [see: The Deadwood Dick Adventures] by six years and may have influenced the development of the more famous series.”2 Talbot is a transitional figure between the traditional frontier hero and the heroic masked outlaw that Deadwood Dick would embody: Talbot is not masked and goes about wearing “’store-clothes’ (meaning a clean, white shirt, polished boots and kid gloves)”3 rather than an outlaw’s outfit or a working cowboy’s clothes, but—though still heroic—he is, in his own words, “a human wolf—a panther—that preys upon honest men, robs them of their hard-eared gold-dust, and takes in five minutes what cost days of toil, maybe, to win.”4 Traditional frontier heroes were not gamblers, as “Injun Dick” was, nor did they engage in highway robbery, as “Injun Dick” and “Gentleman Dick” did. The stories do not highlight Talbot’s illegal activities the way the Deadwood Dick stories do, and for most of the stories Talbot is working to clear his name rather than commit robberies, but the stories do not allow the reader to forget that Talbot is an outlaw. However, the stories lack the political commentary and themes (they are too obvious to be subtexts) of the Deadwood Dick stories—that innovation would be Edward L. Wheeler’s rather than Albert W. Aiken’s.

The use of “Mud Turtle,” a.k.a. “O-wa-he,” an Indian scout, as Talbot’s sidekick is worth examining. The frontier hero/native sidekick pairing goes back at least to Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, although it can be argued that the implicit pairing is of “civilized” man/”wild” sidekick, in which case the pairing can be traced to “The Epic of Gilgamesh” (circa 2100 B.C.E.). However, the modern pairing of the “civilized” man/”wild” sidekick begins with Cooper and was a recurring trope throughout nineteenth century popular frontier fiction. O-wa-he’s fate, however, is different from Chingachgook’s and Uncas’ in The Last of the Mohicans, and is different from the majority of the native sidekicks in the finales of dime novel frontier serials preceding the Dick Talbot stories. Uncas dies and Chingachgook, an aging warrior, is destined to die as the last of his people, the Mohicans, symbolically confirming the supposed passing of the native peoples as they give way to their successors, the white Americans. This particular racist and imperialist trope was played out repeatedly in frontier fiction.

Aiken, however, lets O-wa-he go back to his (unnamed) people after Dick Talbot eliminates his enemies (with O-wa-he’s help, naturally). Cooper killed off Uncas and emphasized Chingachgook’s status as the last of the Mohicans in 1826, a time when the western half of the United States was for the most part untouched by white settlers. The death of Uncas and emphasized foreseen death of Chingachgook were a hopeful forecast of genocide—the settling of the frontier was by no means a settled affair, in 1826, with numerous “wars” against the native peoples yet to come. Conversely, Aiken letting O-wa-he return to his people in 1889 was a kind of magnanimous gesture to the defeated. The official closing of the Western frontier was in 1890, a year after the Oklahoma land rush (when fifty thousand white settlers claimed two million acres in what had been “Indian territory”) and the year in which the government census declared that the frontier line—the line beyond which the population density was less than two people per square mile—had vanished. Allowing O-wa-he to go back to his people, alive and well, was not progressive on Aiken’s part; it was implicitly understood by all of the (white) readers of the Dick Talbot stories that O-wa-he and his people, like all native peoples, were definitively doomed to extinction—the closing of the frontier and the sequestering of native peoples on to reservations proved that—so why not make a symbolically magnanimous gesture and allow them to live at the end of the story? The genocide of the natives was inevitable, in the eyes of Aiken and similar writers, so what harm could it do to allow one native to live?

Finally, there is the matter of Aiken bringing the detective character Joe Phenix, who had his own series in Saturday Journal, Banner Weekly, and Beadle’s Dime Library—the same dime novels in which Dick Talbot appeared—into the Dick Talbot stories. This sort of inter-universe crossover, in which one author was responsible for having characters from two discrete series meet, was not new. French writers like Honoré de Balzac (see: Father Goriot), Jules Verne (see: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea), and Paul Féval (see: The Black Coats Adventures), had done it in years and decades past. But it had not been seen in the dime novels, and the American reading public who had only seen it in the ten years’ of Verne translations that were available in 1886, when Aiken had Phenix and Talbot meet. Aiken, as mentioned one of Beadle & Adams’ most popular authors, did not write any further crossovers, but another crossover of this sort took place in 1893 when Luis Senarens had Frank Reade, Jr. (see: The Frank Reade Adventures) and Jack Wright (see: The Jack Wright Adventures) meet up. This crossover attracted some attention, involving as it did two of the most popular dime novel characters of the time, and was influential, at some remove, on the single-author crossovers in the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, which were themselves influential on the first crossovers in comic books in the 1940s.

The Dick Talbot Adventures are dated, but still entertaining.

Recommended Edition

Online: https://dimenovels.lib.niu.edu/islandora/object/dimenovels%3A153217#page/1/mode/1up

 

1 Albert W. Aiken, “Overland Kit; or, The Idyl of White Pine,” Beadle’s New York Dime Library 33 (Apr. 2, 1878): 3.

2 Cox, Dime Novel Companion, 259.

3 Cox, Dime Novel Companion, 258.

4 Aiken, “Overland Kit,” 8.