Col. Prentiss Ingraham (1843-1904) Part II

See Part I by E. M. Sanchez-Saavedra HERE

Col. Prentiss Ingraham (1843-1904)

COL. PRENTISS INGRAHAM, ADVENTURER, NOVELIST AND BUFFALO BILL’S PUBLICITY MAN

by E. M. Sanchez-Saavedra

Prentiss Ingraham, the only son of the clergyman and novelist Joseph Holt Ingraham (1809-1860) and his wife Mary Brooks, was born December 28, 1843, near Natchez, Mississippi. First educated by private tutors, he later attended St. Timothy's Military Academy, Maryland, and was a classmate of John Wilkes Booth. He enrolled first at Jefferson College, Mississippi, and later studied at Mobile Medical College, but left to enter the Confederate Army. He enlisted as a private in Co. D, Withers' First Mississippi Light Artillery, April 1861, attaining the rank of Ordnance Sergeant by 1863. (Mississippi Confederate graves registration records also list him as a member of Co. K.) He was wounded in the foot and taken prisoner during the siege of Port Hudson, Louisiana, and was sent north. Although he later recounted how he escaped with the aid of a friend in the Union army, he seems to have been regularly paroled and exchanged. He also claimed to have served as commander of scouts in Lawrence Sullivan Ross' Brigade, Texas Cavalry. Brigade muster rolls of the Whitfield/Ross Texas Cavalry Brigade list him as Ordnance Sergeant and later staff officer in the 9th Texas Cavalry. The unit participated in the Vicksburg siege, the battles around Atlanta and the Tennessee campaigns. All we know with certainty is that Ingraham was on “detached duty” from his Mississippi Artillery regiment during 1864-5.

After the war, he became a wandering soldier of fortune. (Nowadays he would be called a "contractor.") Like other Confederate veterans, he went to Mexico and fought with Juarez against the French. He next turns up in Europe, serving on General Leopold Hofmann's staff in the costly Austrian defeat at Sadowa (Koniggratz), Bohemia, in 1866, during the brief Austro-Prussian War. In Crete, he fought with the Greek army against the Turks during the Cretan uprisings of 1866-1868. Switching sides, he allegedly served in the Khedive's army in Egypt. (The "Khedive," or "Viceroy" was first authorized by the Ottoman Empire in 1867, although an unofficial khedive had ruled de facto since 1805. The Khedivate lasted until 1914.) 

In 1869 he went to London, supporting himself as a writer for several periodicals, but soon came back to the United States. Ever restless, he joined the Cuban rebels against Spain in the "Ten Years' War," running the blockade in the "Hornet" several times before it was surrendered to the U. S. Navy. He was a colonel in the Cuban revolutionary army as well as a captain in their navy, and was captured, tried as a filibuster and condemned to death by the Spaniards, but escaped with the assistance of the British consul. He thus escaped the fate of Capt. Joseph Fry and 52 passengers and crew of the "Virginius" who would be executed for similar activities in 1873. His Cuban rank was the basis of the “Col.” which he invariably attached to his name. He traveled to the American West and met William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody, with whom his career would forever become entwined.

In 1875 he was married to Rose Langley, an author, artist, and composer in New York City. They lived in New York and Ingraham began writing for Beadle and Adams. In 1881, with David Adams, he made a trip west and met the three Powell brothers, Frank George and Will. Dr. Frank Powell (aka. "White Beaver, Medicine Chief of the Winnebagoes") of LaCrosse, Wisconsin, was an ex-plainsman, physician and seller of patent medicines. In addition to stories featuring the Powells, Prentiss Ingraham later penned novels under Frank Powell's byline. In 1876, he wrote some or all of a Street and Smith New York Weekly serial about Buffalo Bill: The Crimson Trail; or, on Custer's Last Warpath. In 1879 he wrote a play for the Buffalo Bill Combination and became a "pard" of William F. Cody. In1884 he worked for a time as advance agent for Buffalo Bill's show. In 1893, he "edited" (read "ghostwrote") the memoirs of Cody's old friend and mentor Alexander Majors, founder of the Pony Express. Cody probably underwrote the publishing costs. Between 1897 and 1902 the Ingrahams lived in Easton, Maryland, and from 1902 to 1904 in Chicago. They had a son and two daughters.

Although his novels covered many areas of the action/adventure genre: westerns, pirates, detectives and exotic costume pieces, his Buffalo Bill stories were best sellers for half a century. They were hawked at all performances of the Wild West show and publicized not only Cody, but also his associates, living and dead: Buck Taylor, “King of the Cowboys,” Texas Jack Omohundro, Wild Bill Hickok, Pawnee Bill Lillie and others. “Ned Buntline” (E.Z.C. Judson) may have discovered Bill Cody and written the first few stories about the scout with the alliterative nickname, but Prentiss Ingraham deepened and expanded the legend until “Buffalo Bill” became an internationally recognized brand name. His dime and half-dime thrillers were translated into half a dozen languages. (A photo on p. 399 of the October 1936 issue of The National Geographic Magazine depicts a Madrid news stand with a display of Buffalo Bill novels in Spanish.)

Bowling Green State University, Ohio, has digitized nearly thirty of Prentiss Ingraham's novels. They are available HERE

Ingraham had suffered off and on from the old wound in his foot, but this was not to prove fatal, despite his belief that it would. He was diagnosed with Bright’s disease in 1903 and died August 16, 1904, at the Beauvoir Confederate Home, Biloxi, Mississippi. Beauvoir had been Jefferson Davis' retirement home from 1877 to 1889. It grew to include a museum, a presidential library and other buildings. The complex was severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Ingraham is buried in the Confederate cemetery on the grounds. (His first name is misspelled on his headstone.)

In The House of Beadle and Adams, Albert Johannsen summed up Ingraham’s career as a dime novelist:

Some of his first work was done for Beadle and Adams, and he remained one of their most productive authors until the firm went out of business. He had short stories in the Saturday Journal as early as November, 1870, and a serial in 1872. His first dime novel, "The Masked Spy," appeared as No. 97, Starr's American Novels, in 1872, and after that novel after novel flowed from his pen in a ceaseless stream for nearly thirty-four years. Ingraham was unable to use the typewriter and so, in longhand, he turned out a couple of 35,000- or 70,000-word novels per month. He once wrote a Half-Dime Library in a day and a night, and a Dime Library in five days. It has been said that he had nearly a thousand novels to his credit; he himself claimed over 600 in 1900. Most of his stories were written for Beadle and Adams, but he wrote also for other publishers. In the late 1870's he wrote serials for the Family Story Paper and Saturday Night, and also wrote a number of Nickel Libraries. In the Saturday Evening Post, Vol. LV, No. 16, November 13, 1875, appeared the first installment of "The Boy Wrecker; or, The Waif of the Wave," and in one issue of Vickery's Fireside Visitor, in 1882, he had short stories under four different pseudonyms! After Beadle and Adams went out of existence, he became a contributor to Golden Hours, and also was responsible for a number of cloth-bound books. Among his non-fiction books was "Land of Legendary Lore: Sketches of Romance and Reality on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake," published in Easton, Maryland, in 1898.

Besides writing under his own name, Ingraham used the pseudonyms Dr. Noel Dunbar, Dangerfield Burr, Major Henry B. Stoddard, Colonel Leon Lafitte, Frank Powell, Harry Dennies Perry, Midshipman Tom W. Hall, Lieut. Preston Graham, and several more. Two novels with the byline "Capt. Alfred B. Taylor," were reprinted as by Ingraham.

Ingraham is said to have written some of the novels credited to Buffalo Bill, after Cody himself got tired of writing. One novel was written for Beadle over the name of J. B. Omohundro, and Ingraham told [Gilbert] Patten that he was the author of that story. His innumerable stories about Buffalo Bill, written for Beadle, were often reprinted. Many of them were published by Street & Smith in their Far West Library (1918 catalogue) as by "Howard W. Erwin," but later (1926 catalogue) they appeared among other Ingraham tales. 

Ingraham was among the few Beadle authors to star in a dime novel about his adventurous life. In 1883, William R. Eyster’s A Rolling Stone: Incidents in the Career on Sea and Land, as Boy and Man, of Colonel Prentiss Ingraham, Soldier, Sailor and Wanderer, appeared as No. 13 of Beadle’s Boy’s Library of Sport, Story and Adventure. It is a largely fictional account, concentrating on his boyhood adventures, that provides only the sketchiest of details about his adult life in the last four pages of a 15-page narrative. Eyster’s novel may be read HERE:

Prentiss Ingraham’s writing style can be described as “workmanlike,” in contrast to his father’s florid prose. When he revised several of J.H. Ingraham’s novels for Beadle, Prentiss eliminated reams of unnecessary description and purple passages. Edgar Allan Poe had excoriated the elder Ingraham in a review of Lafitte, the Pirate of the Gulf (1835):

We are surfeited with unnecessary detail…[Not a character appears] without eliciting from the author a vos plaudite, with an extended explanation of the character of his personal appearance – of his length, depth and breadth – and, more particularly, of the length, depth and breadth of his shirt-collar, shoe-buckles and hat-band.

For modern readers, the chief flaw in Prentiss Ingraham's fiction is the convoluted frontier dialect used by his western characters. Perhaps as a reaction to his father's overblown style, his stories tend to skip the atmospheric descriptive passages and plunge straightaway into the action, a trait he shares with many of today's screenwriters.

Prentiss Ingraham’s account of the pursuit and capture of his old schoolfellow, John Wilkes Booth in the January 1890 Century Magazine may be read HERE:

Enraged with Street and Smith after Francis Smith gave him "a dirty deal" over his first serial, Ingraham had refused to deal with the firm for the next twenty years. His friend, Gil Patten, author of the Frank Merriwell stories, persuaded him to mend fences after Beadle and Adams went out of business in 1898. By this time, Francis Smith's son Ormond had inherited the publishing house, and pragmatically resolved to patch up his father's quarrel and secure a valuable literary resource at the same time.

 In The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill (1960) Don Russell observed that

No author was ever treated more handsomely than was Colonel Ingraham by Street and Smith. Not only did they give him full credit for all the Buffalo Bill stories he had written for rival publishers, but they also put his name on most of those anyone else had written, including their own writers.

Shortly before his death, the Street and Smith Corporation had acquired the rights to his Buffalo Bill novels for Beadle and began rewriting them as The Buffalo Bill Stories (1901-1912), later The New Buffalo Bill Weekly (1912-1919). These were credited to “The Author of Buffalo Bill,” and included tales penned by William Wallace Cook, W. Bert Foster, St.George Rathborne, Eugene T. Sawyer, John H. Whitson, Ernest A. Young and others. These were gathered into “thick books” in The Far West Library (1907-1916), Buffalo Bill Border Stories (1917-1925) and the Great Western Library (1927-1932). The earlier "Far West" series credited authorship to “Howard W. Erwin,” but the final reprints placed the “Col. Prentiss Ingraham” byline on all the Buffalo Bill books, including those written by Cook, Foster, et al.


Continue to Part II HERE

Ned Buntline (c.1823-1886)

In 1844 Frederick Gleason, of Boston, Mass., started the United States Publishing House. With distribution in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, Cincinnati and San Francisco, and taking advantage of the new steam presses, Gleason and his partner, Maturin Murray Ballou, of Boston, drowned the U.S. and Canada in a sea of sensational reading material. Ballou wrote melodramatic novels of piracy and adventure under the name “Lieutenant Murray.” He wrote Fanny Campbell; or, The Female Pirate Captain, and Red Rupert; or, The American Buccaneer. Gleason published Joseph Holt Ingraham, father of dime novel author Colonel Prentiss Ingraham, and author of Lafitte, or, The Pirate of the Gulf (1836.)

Gleason’s Flag of our Union story paper published Ned Buntline’s The Red Revenger; or, the Pirate King of the Floridas in 1844. The cover of The Red Revenger; or, The Pirate King of the Floridas showed a man in an iron suit, his flag said “War With The Whole World-- Rinard the Red Revenger” Buntline’s The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main; or, The Fiend of Blood was written in 1847 and mentioned in Tom Sawyer;

“Who goes there?”

“Tom Sawyer, the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main. Name your names.”

“Huck Finn, the Red-Handed, and Joe Harper, the Terror of the Seas.”

Much like a later western hero, Tom Mix, Buntline (real name Edward Zane Carroll Judson) suffered a lot of physical pain in his life.

“Ned Buntline probably carried more wounds in his body than any other living American. He had in his right knee a bullet received in Virginia and had twelve other wounds inflicted by sword, shell and gun, seven of which were got in battle.”

According to one writer a Dr. Marable related to him how Buntline was hung three times in the forties (“Hung Three Times,” Fulton Times 6 Sept 1882).

“Buntline, the sensational writer, you know, whose real name is Judson, or some such name, had a row with a prominent man named Porterfield, about the latter’s’ wife. Porterfield shot at Judson three times and was about to fire again when Judson said “If you do that again I’ll put a bullet through your head.” Porterfield paid no attention to his remark, but fired the fourth time, the last bullet like the others going wide of the mark. Judson raised his elbow to a level with his face, and resting his pistol upon it, took good aim and fired. The ball penetrated Porterfield’s brain and he fell dead to the ground.

Then somebody found Porterfield’s brother, put a pistol in his hand, and told him to avenge the murder. He shot at Judson twenty times while the latter was running up the capitol steps and missed every shot. The mob finally caught Judson and resolved to hang him. Taking him to a house close by, which was in process of construction, they threw a rope over one of the rafters and strung him up. Thrice he was strung up in succession and cut down under the impression that he was dead. His leg was broken by the last fall and he was unconscious. The mob left him for dead, and kind friends took him and succeeded in restoring life. I saw him afterward at Louisville, Kentucky, sometime in 1849, and had a long talk with him about the affair.

He told me that the few moments he hung each time were among the most deliriously delightful of his whole life. Beautiful lights danced before his eyes, of all hues and shades, many of them like those produced by chemical burning of watch-springs. The most gorgeous panoramas passed in review before him, each more entrancingly beautiful and distinct than the last. Exquisite landscapes, snow-capped mountains, green-clad valleys and spouting springs of sparkling water filled him with ecstasy. His whole soul was enthralled with rapture by the beauties he had spread out before his gaze. So wrapped up was he in contemplating these scenes that he hated the moment when the rope was severed and the sweet delusion dispelled. The pain came afterward when his throat purpled from the effects of the rope and he was unable to swallow.”

Newspaperman Leon Mead, whose father was a friend of the famous writer, wrote in the Binghampton Press in 1929:

“In 1853 Judson organized the “Know Nothing” or “Native American” cult, in reality a secret political order which rapidly grew into a formidable political party. It was the prototype, without the hooded mask and disguise, of the present day Ku Klux Klan, the founders of which must have borrowed many of their ideas from the Know Nothing organization, whose secret name is said to have been “Sons of ’76,” and the prescribed reply of whose members “I don’t know,” was given to all inquiries regarding their political movements.

After some notable successes at the polls the Know Nothing party went to pieces, having first split into “North Americans” and “South Americans” over the slavery question, and entirely disappeared from national politics in 1860.”

During his early career Buntline was often referred to as the successor to James Fenimore Cooper. On 23 December 1869 Buntline wrote the first Buffalo Bill dime novel, Buffalo Bill: the King of Bordermen, for Street and Smith’s New York Weekly. The Buffalo Bill stories made Cody a household name and Buntline became a rich man, reportedly making $20,000 a year from Street & Smith. Buntline and Cody became equal partners in a stage play but the venture ended in San Francisco in a violent disagreement which led to a parting of the ways between author and star.

Leon Mead met Buffalo Bill Cody many times, usually at the Hoffman House in New York.

“One afternoon I visited him while the Wild West Show was exhibiting in South Brooklyn -- and again had a meal with him in the mess tent. During the substantial repast I asked him if he did not feel at all grateful to Ned Buntline for what the latter had done with his pen in making him (Cody) a popular hero. His answer was derogatory to Buntline, against whom, it was apparent; he still carried a rather bitter brand of grudge. So far from showing that he had any sense of obligation to the dead fictioneer, Cody contended that Buntline had done him more harm than good, had placed him in a false light as a ruthless wholesale murderer of Indians which was crassly untrue, and had made many other wild statements about him that were misleading and injurious to his reputation.”

Buffalo Bill later made many early silent film westerns using real Native Americans, some of whom had been in the battle of the Little Big Horn, as actors.

Ned Buntline penned “Scouts of the Prairie,” and on 2 April 1873 during a country-wide tour, the show opened at Niblo’s Theatre on Wall Street. The play featured Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack Omohundro, and “five Injuns from Utah and five Injuns from Houston Street,” after which Ned Buntline “preached a twenty minutes’ temperance lecture and then died to slow music.”

“On examining the stage after the play, we find four hundred and eighty-two shots were fired, and that thirty-nine Houston street and Utah Injuns and four men in the orchestra have been killed. There is a great deal of talk about scal-loping, but only seven men are actually scal-loped. The play excels any play I ever saw -- excels them in stupidity. It draws well. Last night several hundred people left the house, and they said that rather than listen to the play again they would leave the city.

Texas Jack later claimed that during one touring performance, Buffalo Bill, instead of using a folding knife, stabbed him with a real knife on stage and then deserted him out west. It seems Bill Cody had been jealous of his acting abilities. The Spirit of the Times had “A Chat with Texas Jack,” accompanied by his wife Signora Morlacchi in 1877. Texas Jack was born to the name John B. Omohundro, of a French mother and a Powhattan Indian father. The legendary heroine Pocahontas was also a Powhattan.

Leon Mead described Buntline’s method of writing.

“His favorite posture while writing was on his stomach, with a rug or animal skin under him, leaning his head in one hand, and with the other, clutching a stub of lead pencil, he would dash off his fast running thoughts all day long and often far into the night. When out of any better stationary he would use light-brown wrapping paper from the grocers, his lines taking a sharp slant to the right as he wrote. He seldom revised his copy or read it over. His fecund fancy was equal to all occasions. A finer extempore speaker never walked the earth. He was so congenial a companion that the present scribe cherishes pleasant memories of numerous chats with him in different places.”

The New York World added:

“His first story, “The Captain’s Pig,” was published in the Knickerbocker Magazine under the pseudonym Ned Buntline, in 1838, when in his fifteenth year. This sketch brought notoriety to the young writer and fighter, who subsequently received as high as $60,000 a year for the product of his brain and pen. For many years his income as a story-writer brought him in $20,000 annually. He once earned $12,500 in six weeks, and at another time, under pressure, wrote a book of 610 pages in sixty-two hours, scarcely eating or sleeping in that time. He usually received $3000 for a story running through twelve weeks in the Ledger and other story papers for which he wrote. He did not know exactly how many stories he had written but estimated them at between three and four hundred, each long enough for a book.”

Buntline spent his last days on his farm at Stamford, New York where he lived with his fourth wife and family. He died there 16 July 1886. Buntline had kept a cabin on Blue Mountain Lake, in the Andironacks, which he christened “Eagle’s Nest,” where he turned out serials for the Weekly and others. After his death a stone monument to his memory was erected on the spot of his old cabin. In 1906 the spot was buried under a large club and golf-course. One of his last productions was a poem, “My Home,” written for the Journal and Republican in the summer of 1885 at Blue Mountain Lake. The last verse was

Where no step intrudes in the dense north woods,

Where no song is heard but the breeze and bird,

Where the world’s foul scum never can come,

Where friends are so few that they all are true,

There is my home --

My wildwood home!

*”The accompanying portrait of Ned Buntline, hitherto unpublished, was taken at Fredericks’ Knickerbocker Family Portrait Gallery, New York, and bears a strong resemblance to him. It is from the only photograph I have ever seen of him. He presented it to me long, long ago, and it has been in my possession ever since.” -- Leon Mead, Binghampton Press, 25^th Anniversary edition, 1929.

* Thanks to Joe Rainone for the image of the New York Weekly's first Buffalo Bill serial, Buffalo Bill: the King of Bordermen, 1869.

*See also The Know-Nothing Press HERE

Robert Prowse Junior

This photograph of Robert Prowse, junior, and his grand-daughter Dorothia was taken in May 1931. It was sent to me by his great grandson, Lawrence Brennan, and is much appreciated. Robert Prowse was very popular in his time and was famous for the brilliant colored paintings he did for the last of the penny dreadful publishers, the Aldine Publishing Company. Steve Holland compiled a brief biography, A Tale of Two Roberts, which you can read HERE.

The Aldine Kit Carson is an original watercolor (actually probably done in gouache), one of a number which are for sale at NW Pony Express. The Spring-Heeled Jack covers are courtesy Joe Rainone.

William F. Cody (Buffalo Bill) 1846-1917.

“It is now some generations since Josh Billings, Ned Buntline, and Colonel Prentiss Ingraham, intimate friends of Colonel William F. Cody, used to foregather in the office of Francis S. Smith, then proprietor of the New York Weekly. It was a dingy little office on Rose Street, in New York, but the breath of the great outdoors stirred there when these old-timers got together. As a result of these conversations, Colonel Ingraham and Ned Buntline began to write of the adventures of Buffalo Bill for Street & Smith.” - Foreward to Buffalo Bill Border Stories No. 44, copyright 1907.

Ned Buntline wrote the first Buffalo Bill serial, Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men, for Street & Smith’s New York Weekly story paper beginning December 23, 1869. He followed up with two more serials, Buffalo Bill’s Best Shot; or, the Heart of Spotted Tail, and Buffalo Bill’s Last Victory; or, Dove Eye, the Lodge Queen. Street & Smith’s Log Cabin Library reprinted the last two titles. Buntline also wrote Texas Jack; or, Buffalo Bill’s Brother for De Witt’s Ten Cent Romances.

Colonel Prentiss Ingraham’s father was Joseph Holt Ingraham, author of the 1836 romance Lafitte, or The Pirate of the Gulf. Ingraham the younger, who also wrote as Major Dangerfield Burr, began writing Buffalo Bill serials for the story papers of Beadle & Adams. In 1882 Beadle's Boy's Library of Sport, Story and Adventure Volume 1 # 1 published Adventures of Buffalo Bill, From Boyhood to Manhood. Beadle story paper serials were then reprinted in Beadle’s New York Dime Library and Beadle’s Half-Dime Library. 

Contrary to the reminiscence above Ingraham did not join Street & Smith until 1901, and then quite reluctantly, it took the urging of Gilbert Patten and a meeting with Ormond G. Smith to convince him to write for the firm. His first story for Smith was Buffalo Bill, the Border King: A Story of Daring Deeds, which appeared in Buffalo Bill Stories No. 1 on May 18, 1901. To add some confusion Smith reprinted Beadle & Adams serials in the Log Cabin Library as well as new Ingraham stories. The Colonel passed away in 1904 and the Buffalo Bill Stories were taken over by St. George Rathborne and lady novelist Laurana W. Sheldon (Nos. 160 through 170). Other authors included William Wallace Cook, W. Bert Foster, and John H. Whitson.

Buffalo Bill Stories ceased publication on September 4, 1912 and New Buffalo Bill Weekly began publishing reprints with number 1 of that issue. Following these were a series of paperback reprints in Far West Library, Buffalo Bill Border Stories, and Great Western Library. In 1919 Buffalo Bill Weekly became Western Story.

Five issues of Beadle’s Half-Dime Library were given as “by Buffalo Bill (William F. Cody),” No. 8, Kansas King; or, the Red Right Hand, No. 19, The Phantom Spy; or, the Pilot of the Prairie, No. 55, Deadly-Eye, the Unknown Scout, No. 68, Border Robin Hood; or, the Prairie Rover, and no. 158, Fancy Frank of Colorado; or, the Trapper’s Trust and four Buffalo Bill titles were published in Frank Tousey’s Wide Awake Library. In 1894 appeared a sixth Buffalo Bill authored work, Wild Bill, the Wild West Duelist : or, The Girl Mascot of Moonlight Mine. 

In England in 1886 Ralph Rollington published Buffalo Bill, by Captain M. Hunter, in The New Boys’ Paper. Reprints of Ned Buntline’s Buffalo Bill’s Best Shot and Buffalo Bill’s Last Victory appeared in William Emmett Laurence’s Young Briton about 1871.

In 1887 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show opened at Earls Court Exhibition in London and George Purkess Jr. issued 74 penny numbers of Buffalo Bill to capitalize on his popularity. General Publishing Company issued a Buffalo Bill Wild West Series at the same time. Also that year James Henderson’s Weekly Budget published Buffalo Bill’s Secret Service Trail, by Major Dangerfield Burr, (Colonel Ingraham) 5th Regt. Cavalry, U.S. Army, Red Renard, the Indian Detective; or the Gold Buzzards of Colorado, by Buffalo Bill (Hon. W. F. Cody), The Personal Recollections of Buffalo Bill, by Col. Paul B. Sutcliffe, late U. S. Army, and The White King of the Pawnees, by Ned Buntline. Buffalo Bill’s First Trail; or, Will Cody the Pony Express Rider, was adapted for James Henderson’s Young Folks by Captain W. D. L’Estrange.

In 1907 James Henderson and Sons Nugget Library featured Buffalo Bill’s Chum; or, Little Grit the Wild Rider. Amalgamated published a Nugget Library in 1920. Aldine’s Buffalo Bill Library began in 1916 and in 1926  Buffalo Bill and Janver’s Treasure appeared in no. 27 of George Newnes New Redskin Library.