“The Huge Hunter; or, The Steam Man of the Prairies” was written by Edward S. Ellis and first appeared in Irwin P. Beadle’s American Novels 45 (Aug 1868). Ellis (1840-1916) was a teacher and principal in New Jersey, but his career as a writer was so successful that he left education to become a full-time writer in the early 1870s. Although the preponderance of his work was histories and historical biographies—his Thomas Jefferson (1898) was well-regarded—it is his dime novel work which is most significant. In “Seth Jones, or, The Captive of the Frontier” (Beadle’s Dime Novels 8, Oct. 2, 1860) Ellis essentially created the modern dime novel. “The Huge Hunter” was turned into a novel and reprinted many times over, and its influence was felt for decades. “The Huge Hunter” was the first Edisonade and it, and the character type of Johnny Brainerd, the protagonist of “The Huge Hunter,” would be imitated many times over.

Johnny Brainerd is a native of St. Louis. He is a small, hunchbacked dwarf, the teenaged son of a widow whose only means of support are the patents that Johnny’s father, an ingenious mechanic, had secured. Brainerd is generally a nice boy:

When he went to school, he was a general favorite with teachers and pupils. The former loved him for his sweetness and disposition and his remarkable proficiency in all studies, while the latter based their affection chiefly upon the fact that he never refused to assist any of them at their tasks, while with the pocket knife which be carried he constructed toys, which were their delight.¹

Brainerd’s hobby is inventing things: wonderful toys, miniature steamboats and locomotives that are perfect and operational in every way, a clock that keeps perfect time, a working telegraph, and so on. All of these he creates using only a jackknife, hammer and chisel. But eventually he runs out of things to invent, and complains to his mother, who suggested that he build “a man that shall go by steam.”² This idea grips Johnny, and he spends “several weeks in thought”³ before beginning to construct it. After a series of false starts he managed to create the Steam Man, a steam engine in the shape of a man, and then designs a wagon for the Steam Man to tow behind it.

Johnny befriends the “strong, hardy, bronzed trapper”⁴ Baldy Bicknell, the “Huge Hunter” of the story's title, and the pair head west to hunt gold. They use the Steam Man to frighten off and escape from the “red skins,” who are too primitive to know what the Steam Man is and so are frightened of it in a superstitious way. Brainerd’s encounter with the fauna of the frontier is equally negative; a buffalo charges and hits the Steam Man, and Brainerd takes great pleasure in killing a bear. Brainerd and Bicknell find a rich lode of gold and eventually return to St. Louis with it, although the Steam Man has been destroyed—Johnny blows up the Steam Man’s boiler to kill a group of attacking Indians.

Ellis’ immediate inspiration for “The Huge Hunter” was probably a historical man-shaped steam engine.

He allegedly based his story on a real steam engine, the Newark Steam Man, designed to look like a seven-foot-tall human with a smoke stack shaped like a top hat on its head and a torso that encased an engine and boiler. Reports of the steam man were made in local papers around Newark.⁵

But the larger influence on Ellis in the creation of “The Huge Hunter” was the combination of the frontier dime novel—something he had made famous in 1860 with “Seth Jones” and which by 1868 was a flourishing dime novel genre—and the tradition of the artificial being. The first such in popular culture was Talos, from Greek myths, and for centuries afterward there were automata in both real life (the throne of Solomon in Constantinople) and in folktales and romance (automata tomb guardians, mechanical knights).⁶ During the nineteenth century artificial beings appeared in a variety of forms: as golems, as female androids (in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” 1817), as clockwork judges and lawyers (in Jane Loudon’s The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, 1827), as animated scarecrows wearing human flesh (in Ludwig Tieck’s The Scarecrow [original: Die Vogelscheuche], 1835), and—this may be the most likely influence on Ellis—as metal bell-ringers (in Melville’s “The Bell-Tower,” 1855).

Of course, the idea of combining these genres and traditions and telling a story of invention, exploration, and exploitation was Ellis’ own, and for that he deserves both credit and blame. “The Huge Hunter” did not inspire immediate imitators, and later Edisonades took much more from The Frank Reade Adventures then they did from “The Huge Hunter,” but Ellis set the particulars of the Edisonade in place and created the general format of the stories, including its negative aspects—racism, violence, exploitive ideology, and hostility toward the wilderness—and he must be credited as the father of the genre.

One additional aspect of note is Ellis’ use of the inventor as a fictional adventurer. The scientist, in the nineteenth century, could be many things: a mad genius, an evil chemist (see: Fanny White), a misanthropic rebel against the British Empire (see: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea), a grave-robbing experimenter (see: Frankenstein), etc.⁷ But pure inventors, as opposed to experimental scientists, were rare until the 1860s. It’s important to keep in mind, of course, that

the rigorous boundaries that came into existence in the twentieth century, say, between the “inventor” and the “scientist,” were not in place at all in the nineteenth century. Indeed, such differentiations would have been entirely alien to a community that did not even use the word “scientist” until the 1830s. The technological object— commonly a machine— came to represent, especially for the Victorians, the material value of science. The machine was an embodiment of the scientific ideal of nature tamed by human knowledge, physical evidence of the power of scientific discovery.⁸

Yet in the great majority of the popular fiction of the Victorian era post-“Huge Hunter,” for example in the Edisonades, there is a division between the two, with the experimental scientist continuing to be seen in a poor light and the pure inventor being seen in a positive light. (See, for example, The Ferrers Lord Adventures). One can trace this to the Edisonades, but it originates with Ellis and the “Huge Hunter.”

In quality “The Huge Hunter” is only an average dime novel. It is full of ethnic stereotyping, charmless narration, and perfunctory characterization. But it deserves remembering for its influence.

¹ Edward S. Ellis, “The Huge Hunter; or, The Steam Man of the Prairies,” Beadle’s Half Dime Library 11, no. 271 (Oct. 3, 1882): 3.

² Ellis, “The Huge Hunter,” 3.

³ Ellis, “The Huge Hunter,” 3.

⁴ Ellis, “The Huge Hunter,” 4.

⁵ Nathaniel Williams, Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain’s America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 2018), 39.

⁶ See Nevins, Evolution of the Costumed Avenger, 73-75 for more on this.

⁷ Nevins, “Organ Theft and the Insanity of Geniuses.”

⁸ Martin Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction & the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006), 5.