Beadle's Pocket Novels: Maid of the Mountain

Maid of the Mountain; or, The Brothers of the League This 1868 Beadle and Adams publication presents a romance of the California Sierras by W. J. Hamilton. The narrative concerns a band of Regulators—frontier lawmen—encamped in the mountains to hunt organized robbers responsible for murdering miners and prospectors. Captain Adam Lane, a Maine muscleman, and young Lieutenant Thomas Elliot, a New Yorker seeking his fortune, lead the operation. The story opens with discussion of a murdered friend, Garry Burnet, bound homeward to marry. The Rangers capture a Mexican spy, Manuel de Castro, sneaking around their camp. When De Castro refuses to disclose his mission, Elliot orders torture by strappado—suspending the prisoner by his bound thumbs from a tree limb—until he breaks and begins confessing he was sent as a scout. The text emphasizes frontier justice, mining-era California lawlessness, and ethnic tensions between American miners and Mexican inhabitants.