Beadle's Dime Library No. 98

"The Rock Rider; The Spirit of the Sierra" is a serial tale by Captain Frederick Whittaker set in the Colorado Rocky Mountains during the post–Civil War era, when the Pacific Railroad faced financial difficulties and Native American tribes grew restless following troop withdrawals. The narrative follows three young ex-soldiers—Union and Confederate veterans now reconciled—camping in South Park: Frank Buford, Jack Somers, and Carl Brinkerhoff, a stolid German hunter. They await their companion Gustave Belcour, an unsuccessful sportsman dressed as a fashionable Paris cavalier in velvet coat and silver-mounted arms, who finally arrives after pursuing a bighorn sheep through a treacherous canyon. Having succeeded in shooting the animal, Belcour pursues it downstream. Discovering an impossibly steep descent, he prepares to dismount when a mysterious figure appears: a snow-white girl wearing a mountain-sheep-skin tunic and the creature's curved horns as a headdress, bearing a bugle and spear, gazing from a high pinnacle above him.