“Lady Jaguar, the Robber Queen. A Romance of the Black Chaparral” was written by “Captain Mark Wilton” and first appeared in Beadle’s New York Dime Library 14, no. 176 (Mar 8 1882). “Captain Mark Wilton” was the pseudonym of William H. Manning (1852-1929), a Bostonian author of frontier stories and dime novels.

Doña Luisa Villena, a Mexican noblewoman, is drugged and forced to marry Don Manuel, the leader of a local group of bandits. The marriage is a fraud and the “priest” is one of the Don Manuel’s bandits dressed up in ministerial garb, but Doña Luisa does not know that, and she flees in shame and anger when she recovers from the drugs. (The marriage is never consummated, but just the idea of the marriage is bad enough). She goes for help to her beloved uncle, Juan Villena. Juan already bears a grudge against Don Manuel, because through his schemes Juan’s brother Leon, Doña Luisa’s father, was killed. So Doña Luisa and Juan become “Lady Jaguar” and “El Alacran” (“the scorpion”), the leaders of a gang of bandits whose headquarters is the tall, thick, unbroken mesquite that makes up the “black chaparral” of northern Mexico. Together they prey on travelers while searching for the means by which they can avenge themselves on Don Manuel. Juan maintains his alternate identity as a wealthy Mexican landowner, and a local crazy woman, Barbara, moves herself into Juan’s villa and claims to be Doña Luisa. Juan tolerates her presence there because it helps support the alibi of the real Doña Luisa.

Into this situation stumbles Edgar Lewis, an American who is robbed by El Alacran’s bandits while he is traveling around Mexico. The usual hijinks ensue, including a mistaken identity love triangle (Edgar mistakes Barbara for Doña Luisa and falls in love with her, while Doña Luisa falls for Edgar) and the appearance of someone claiming to be the Wandering Jew, with Sue’s novel, The Wandering Jew mentioned by name. All is made well in the end; Juan finds evidence that Doña Luisa’s marriage wasn’t legal, Edgar and Doña Luisa marry, and Juan avenges himself on Don Manuel.

“Lady Jaguar” is a more entertaining version of the standard dime novel lady heroine story. The plot of “Lady Jaguar” is surprisingly complicated. There are several mysteries and plot twists, and the final revelations do not appear until the story’s end. “Lady Jaguar” makes use of the independent cross-dressing Mexican heroine theme of an earlier generation of dime novels, such as Charles Averill’s The Mexican Ranchero. But the story portrays a more modern (and less politically topical) cowboy heroine and, as with Harlan P. Halsey’s Kate Goelet (see: “The Lady Detective”), among others, allows her limited freedom and rebellion against social restrictions, only to strip them from her through the use of the marriage plot at the story’s end. Lady Jaguar is the “queen” of the bandit gang and is supposedly the most merciless of the group, but she turns out to be rather nice, “the friend of all in trouble,”¹ just as El Alacran is really just a gentleman bandit, a dime novel version of the heroes of the räuberroman.

Lady Jaguar is an interesting example of how the idea of the disguised vigilante, a.k.a. the “Costumed Avenger,” spread across genres during the 1870s and 1880s. From The Rocambole Adventures and The Spring-Heeled Jack Adventures of the 1860s to the masked heroic cowboy outlaws of the 1870s (see: The Deadwood Dick Adventures), the concept of the vigilante active in disguise or in some sort of recognizable costume spread quickly. “Lady Jaguar”

provided readers and future writers with a Costumed Avenger who is a heroic highwaywoman—Lady Jaguar’s gang robs from the rich and gives to the poor—while wearing an actual bodysuit costume and mask, in proper superheroine form, and is a woman. Lady Jaguar anticipates the superheroines to come and provided a model for them.²

The interracial romance aspect of “Lady Jaguar” is notable. A recurring trope in the mid-century novelettes and the dime novels of the 1860s and 1870s was the Anglo male marrying the Mexican female after besting a Mexican male suitor for her hand, in stories “whose martial and marital plots affirm the raced and gendered aspects of Manifest Destiny.”³ In this the dime novels hearkened back two centuries and more, to the creation of the Pocahontas myth, in which the capture of Amonute (c. 1596-1617), the daughter of the paramount chief Powhatan, and her forced conversion to Christianity, becomes a story of her saving the life of an Englishman, John Smith, and falling in love with a white colonist. “Following the legend of her heroic, romantic rescue of colonist John Smith, Pocahontas, and by default all women of color, function as cultural brokers, uniting former enemies through a scripted deployment of their bodies.”⁴ In terms of the dime novels–and more mainstream venues like Godey’s Lady’s Book–the Mexican version of Pocahontas’ “eroticized racial betrayal reverberates strongly with the myth of La Malinche/Malintzín/Doña Marina/La Chingada, Hernán Cortés’s translator/concubine/lover/rape victim who is symbolically cast as traitor to the Aztecs and key to the Spanish conquest.”⁵

Intriguingly, despite widespread anti-miscegenation laws in the United States, both the U.S. and Mexico used interracial marriages as a lure to draw Anglo men into areas, such as Texas, which were sparsely populated or that might be subject to invasion by foreign powers. For the Mexican government, the passage of the 1824 colonization law, meant to draw Mexicans into Texas, instead drew thousands of American immigrants there. One effect of this, codified by Mexico’s naturalization law, was that marriages between Anglo men and Mexican women led to the Anglo men being considered Mexican citizens and not being subject to crushing tax laws applied to “foreign” businessmen.

Dime novelists...recast territorial expansion and its romantic gloss, marriage, through the lens of Enlightenment ideology and American romanticism so that the Anglo suitor did not appear an opportunist or a “foreigner”...but rather as a savior, fulfilling the moral imperative dominating the captivity narrative by taking a Mexican bride.⁶

Print: William H. Manning, “Lady Jaguar, the Robber Queen. A Romance of the Black Chaparral.” Beadle’s New York Dime Library 14, no. 176 (Mar. 8, 1882).

¹ Captain Mark Wilton, “Lady Jaguar, or the Robber Queen. A Romance of the Black Chaparral,” Beadle’s New York Dime Library 14, no. 176 (Mar. 8, 1882): 10.

² Nevins, The Evolution of the Costumed Avenger, 117.

³ Andrea Tinnemeyer, Identity Politics of the Captivity Narrative After 1848 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 2006), 19.

⁴ Tinnemeyer, Identity Politics, 20.

⁵ Tinnemeyer, Identity Politics, 20.

⁶ Tinnemeyer, Identity Politics, 22-23.