Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 749

1891 · 16 pages

Catalog Entry: The Kentucky Tenderfoot's First Trail This serialized adventure story by Colonel Prentiss Ingraham follows thirteen-year-old Charlie Emmett from Kentucky as he runs away to join his adventurous uncle in the Wild West. After the schoolteacher brutally whips him for defending a crippled classmate, Charlie sabotages the teacher's footbridge and then flees westward by horseback. Traveling covertly for two weeks, he reaches St. Louis only to discover his uncle has already departed upriver. Rather than face being sent home, Charlie adopts a frontier outfit, sells his saddle horse to a sympathetic tavern keeper for two hundred dollars, and boards a steamboat for Omaha with supplies including rifles, revolvers, buckskins, and camp equipment. The narrative combines coming-of-age elements with frontier adventure, depicting the young protagonist's resourcefulness and determination to forge an independent life in the western wilderness.

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