Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 4

Wild-Horse Hunters by Captain Mayne Reid and Frederick Whittaker This serial adventure in Beadle's Half-Dime Library (No. 98, 1877) opens with a detailed account of wild mustang herding on a Texas prairie. Three professional mustangers pursue over a hundred wild horses through exhaustion tactics, driving them across a prairie toward the Trinity River and into an elaborate corral trap—a snake-fence enclosure cunningly designed with a funnel entrance. The second chapter shifts to a colonizing party led by Colonel William Magoffin, a former Southern gentleman, scouting settlement locations. His group includes his daughter Tennessee, niece Louisiana Dupre, nephew Eugene, retainer Strother, enslaved workers, and cattle. The party debates establishing a plantation in the Texas frontier, discussing cotton, corn, and venison farming as they reconnoiter a flower-filled prairie site near timber stands outside the Cross Timbers region.