Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 299

The Dashing Toll-Taker: Or, The Schoolmarm o' Sassafras This installment, by Edward L. Wheeler (author of the Deadwood Dick and Denver Doll series), opens with frontier violence in Sassafras City. The brutal bullwhacker Tiger Tooth assaults a Chinese laundry owner named Rats in a bar, seeking information about a rumored secret mine. When tenderfoot Edward Temple intervenes on moral grounds, Tiger Tooth threatens him, revealing that Temple is courting Jessie Shields, daughter of wealthy mine-owner Simon Shields, despite Tiger Tooth's plans for his grotesque dwarf son Claudie to marry her. Their fight is interrupted by "A No. 1," a charming, well-armed road agent who forces the assembled men to contribute fifty dollars at gunpoint before departing. The narrative establishes a Western adventure plot involving wealth, romance, violence, and outlaw activity in a remote mining camp.