pulps
Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 243
The Disguised Guide; or, Wild Raven, the Ranger of the North By Oll Coomes, this serial western appeared in the March 21, 1882 issue of Beadle and Adams' weekly (Vol. XX, No. 243). The narrative follows Arthur St. Ledger's emigrant party crossing the South Platte River in 1849, guided by the suspicious Jake Darle. When Teddy Muldoon, an Irish member of the group, observes Darle signaling with torchlight to figures on the prairie, his suspicions prove warranted—Darle has betrayed them. A Pawnee attack follows; Teddy kills one attacker with his rifle used as a club. A mysterious frontiersman calling himself Wild Raven intervenes, slaughtering the remaining savages and revealing Darle as a known renegade traitor. The story combines frontier adventure with frontier scout heroics and emigrant peril.