Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 105

This installment of "Old Rube, the Hunter: The Crow Captive," by Captain Hamilton Holmes, follows three Eastern sportsmen—the narrator, Willie Mason, and Rudolf "Dolf" Strong—as they venture onto the Great Plains in early summer seeking buffalo. Equipped with rifles, pistols, and hunting knives, they depart from Leavenworth toward the Black Hills. After encountering a weathered trapper named Rube and his Black companion Jake while hunting prairie chicken, the three men gain a guide. Rube recounts his history: five years prior, while hunting buffalo near this location, he and fellow trappers observed a settler party—three men and three women, including a beautiful dark-haired woman—traveling westward. Among them rode Meton, a Crow scout whom Rube blamed for an earlier ambush that killed two companions. Rube begins relating the subsequent events, the narrative breaking off mid-story as he dozed while keeping watch over the sleeping camp.