The Black Spy

This Beadle and Adams dime novel, No. 441, titled "The Black Spy; or, The Yellowstone Trail" by Captain J. F. C. Adams, is a Western adventure story set in the Upper Missouri territory. Two companions—Long Ike, a weathered trapper, and Cuff Tompkins, a Black man attached to a party of tourists—investigate a Sioux attack that killed a guide and left a couple, George Parham and Rosalie Blackwood, missing. Despite Long Ike's warnings about the danger, Cuff insists on reconnoitering the hostile Sioux camp alone. He fashions a makeshift flag of truce from a handkerchief and ramrod, then paddles a canoe across the river toward the Indian encampment while Long Ike watches from a cliff using a telescope. The narrative combines frontier peril with the peculiar mix of bravery and comic characterization typical of the period's adventure fiction.