Beadle's New York Dime Library, No. 49

This issue of Beadle's Dime Library contains "The Wolf Demon; Or, The Queen of the Kanawha" by Albert W. Aiken. The frontier adventure opens in 1780 with a supernatural horror prologue: a Shawnee warrior hunting a deer is himself hunted and killed by a grotesque creature—a humanoid wolf with a man's face that scalps its victim with ritual knife-slashes. The narrative then shifts to two frontier hunters who shoot a buck near Point Pleasant, Ohio. The younger, scarred hunter claims it by his name "Abe Lark" carved on a nearby oak tree. The older proves to be the historical Daniel Boone, who befriends Lark. They discuss an imminent Shawnee and Wyandot uprising led by Chief Ke-ne-ha-ha and guided by renegade Simon Girty, stirred by British bounties for white scalps. The narrative establishes the dual threat: human enemies and the mysterious wolf-demon stalking the frontier.