Job Dean, the Trapper

Job Dean, the Trapper This Beadle dime novel (No. 168, 1888) opens with soldiers at a Kansas-Nebraska frontier fort discussing the monotony of garrison life. Captain and Lieutenant Harmer Dorlon observe a man fleeing across the plains, carrying an unconscious young woman. The man reports a massacre: his emigrant party of ten men and several women, camped near the fort, was ambushed by Indians. Only he and the girl Polly survived; the rest were killed, scalped, and stripped of weapons and supplies. The captain dispatches twenty soldiers to reconnoiter, discovering the massacre site—eight mutilated corpses scattered across blood-soaked ground. As the party prepares to return to the fort, a sentinel fires a warning shot, spotting what appears to be a large force of Indians massing on the northwestern horizon. The narrative concerns frontier warfare, massacre, and the threat of sustained Indian attack.