Cover in Three Colors
Type B
As a boy, Erastus Beadle worked on a farm, and as apprentice to a miller. It was while he was a miller’s apprentice that he laid the foundation of his future career as a printer. Need arose in the mill one day for some letters to be used in labeling the bags of grain. Erastus cut the letters from blocks of hardwood, just as the old block-letters had been made in the days before Gutenberg. He then left the mill, and, with an alphabet of his home-made wooden type, he traveled about the region stamping bags in various mills and similarly marking lap robes, wagons, and other things. On reaching Cooperstown he came to the attention of Elihu Phinney, the pioneer printer of that town, who offered him work. In Phinney’s establishment Erastus learned to be a type-setter, stereotyper, printer, and binder, and with these abilities as his only capital he moved to the village of Buffalo in 1847. By 1852 he had a printing shop of his own, and in that year he issued his first publication, entitled “The Youth’s Casket.” In 1856 he began to issue the excellent magazine called “The Home Monthly” (shown in the exhibition), and two years later he removed to New York City to test his great idea.
This plan was to issue “Dime” publications, and possibly had its immediate origin in the unusual success in Buffalo, of a “Dime Song Book” in which he had assembled a number of the penny lyrics of the period. These had been earlier issued in separate broadsides, by various publishers.
The New York issues of the song books also made an immediate hit, and were swiftly followed by a number of the miscellaneous hand-books shown in the present exhibition. Then, in the summer of 1860, came the first of the original “Dime Novels” in their orange covers. Success was assured from the start, and the publishing activities of Beadle and Company speedily grew to vast proportions.
Many of the best writers of the period, who possessed intimate knowledge of American pioneer life, were asked to put the conditions and events of earlier generations into attractive form. Among those whose help was thus enlisted were Judge Jared Hall, Francis Fuller Barritt, John Neal, Mayne Reid, Mrs. Victor, Colonel A. J. H. Duganne, Edward S. Ellis, William Eyster, Ann Stephens, Judge William Busteed, N. C. Iron, Herrick Johnstone, James L. Bowen, Mary Denison, John Warner, Charles Dunning Clark, and various others.
The little books they wrote were inspired by Erastus Beadle, and his influence is seen in the fact that every phase of pioneer life, and every historic event in which his own ancestors had taken part, is treated in the series of Beadle books. The editorship of the house was entrusted to Orville J. Victor, one of the most remarkable figures in the history of American literature. For thirty years, Victor personally studied, passed upon, and edited the thousands of publications of the House of Beadle. He insisted, first of all, that the narratives must be true and accurate portrayals, in spirit, of the pioneer times and people with which they dealt. They had to reveal wilderness life and struggle as it was, and depict the conditions amid which the pioneers did their work. These tales were not history in the literal or text-book sense, since they often incorporated incidents for which there was no authentic or contemporary proof. But such material, if used, had to be consistent with known conditions of the period portrayed.
Doubtless it was the mass-realization of these facts, on the part of the public, that brought about such recognition of the so-called “Dime Novels.” The people were absorbingly interested in the earlier life of the pioneers, and when it was presented to them in the form inspired by Beadle and directed by Victor, they—as the slang phrase now goes—“ate it up.” “Here at last”—they doubtless intuitively felt—“is the real thing, not set before us as a dull task to memorize, but as a vital picture to be studied and enjoyed, and from which we may learn.”
Then came the Civil War, and the soldiers literally absorbed the convenient little books by the million. The volumes were exchanged, passed from hand to hand, read to tatters, and then thrown away. Throughout the thirty or more years in which the Beadle books held ascendancy they were so cheap, and so common, that they were almost never saved. In that respect they suffered the fate of all common things. It is almost always the case that the commonest objects of one generation become the rarest objects of two generations afterward. Their very commonness is the quality that keeps them from being treasured by their original possessors. Hence they disappear. Beadle books, in their day, were as countless as the bison of the plains or the passenger pigeon of the air. Yet to-day only a few hundred bison are alive, and are carefully protected, while not one passenger pigeon is known to exist.
After the Civil War—to a much greater extent than before that struggle—Beadle and Victor turned their attention to the Far West and enlisted the aid of numerous western explorers, Indian fighters and plainsmen in portraying that part of the country. Erastus Beadle, himself, made a trip across the plains in order to study, at first hand, the life in those regions. Among those whose knowledge of the West was thus embodied in the Beadle books were Dr. Frank Powell, Captain “Bruin” Adams, Buffalo Bill, Major Sam Hall (known as Buckskin Sam), Major St. Vrain, Joseph Badger, Prentiss Ingraham, Captain Alfred Taylor, T. C. Harbaugh, Lieutenant Hazeltine, Captain Monstery, Captain Frederick Whittaker, Lieutenant J. H. Randolph, Major Henry B. Stoddard, Lieutenant Alfred Thorne, Captain Jack Crawford (the Poet Scout), Ensign Charles Dudley Warren, Dr. Carver, Henry Inman, Albert D. Richardson, Dr. J. H. Robinson, Lieutenant James Magoon, Professor William R. Eyster, Oll Coomes, Captain T. B. Shields, J. B. Omohundro (who was “Texas Jack”), and dozens of others whose years of personal knowledge and actual adventure were incorporated in their writings.
For a long time a considerable part of the reading public in the East looked upon these tales from the Far West as unadulterated fiction, entirely harmful in its effect. Uncounted armies of boys who lived between the Mississippi and the Atlantic were taken to the woodsheds by their fathers, and there subjected to severe physical and mental anguish as a result of the parental discovery that they were reading such “impossible trash.” But the intuition of the boys was a truer guide—in this matter at least—than the opinions of those parents who did not read the books, and it has finally come to be realized that the pictures of pioneer life in the Far West, as presented by the Beadle books, are substantially accurate portrayals of the strange era and characters therein depicted. As a matter of fact, the men and women who wrote those narratives for the House of Beadle succeeded much better in their task than hearsay chroniclers who also undertook it. The Beadle books present a more accurate and vivid picture of the appearance, manner, speech, habits and methods of the pioneer western characters than do the more formal historians. The reason for that circumstance lies in the fact that writers chosen by Beadle and Victor were ones who had lived the life of which they told, and were familiar with its fundamental, day-by-day qualities. That advantage enabled them to get closer to real conditions than the distant commentators and hearsay chroniclers whose methods of narration were in a considerable degree hampered by existing conventionalities of historical writing, whose viewpoint of western life had not been shaped by long or intimate contact with it. Much of the biographical material relating to famous western characters, which is embodied in various Beadle books, is not to be found elsewhere. And, since the lives of the men thus treated are an integral and essential part of western history, the importance now placed on such biographical and regional material is easily seen.