Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 156

Deadwood Dick of Deadwood: Or, The Picked Party This 1880 Beadle and Adams dime novel by Edward L. Wheeler features the adventures of Deadwood Dick set around Billy-Goat Gulch and Skeleton Bend. The narrative opens with Edwin Booth Snowbank, a Black character portrayed as an aspiring Shakespearean tragedian, playing banjo in the wilderness while rehearsing passages from *Hamlet*. He is en route to meet Colonel Yankee Doodle Yuba at Skeleton Bend, where the Colonel plans to establish a church. Snowbank encounters a masked road agent, Captain Cutthroat, who interrogates him about Yuba's whereabouts before departing to commit robbery. The narrative then follows Cutthroat to a hidden camp in the Cat-Gut ravine, where he meets with masked confederates awaiting reports from operations in the Bend. The story combines Western frontier action with comedic characterization and robbery plots.