Beadle's Dime Library No. 960

This issue of *Beadle and Adams* from March 17, 1897 (No. 960) features the opening installment of "Buffalo Bill's Blue Belt Brigade," a frontier serial by Colonel Prentiss Ingraham. The story opens with Buffalo Bill encountering twelve mutilated men in a mountain canyon during a severe blizzard. These outcasts from Yellow Dust City—driven into the wilderness weeks earlier—have been systematically maimed by masked assailants: hands, feet, and limbs severed, leaving them crippled and starving. One man is already dead. Buffalo Bill, initially sent to pursue them, instead shelters the group, constructs a protective camp, hunts deer for provisions, and tends their wounds. He vows to return with supplies and a surgeon. The narrative emphasizes themes of frontier justice, redemption, and Buffalo Bill's heroic intervention against brutal persecution.