About the Novel

In 1868, when Beadle and Adams first published Edward S. Ellis’s The Steam Man of the Prairies, the book’s approach to traditional frontier adventure was unique. Only a few US-based writers (Edgar Allan Poe, Fitz-James O’Brien, and others) had written short stories, or “sketches,” that used modern technology’s influence on individuals for their plot. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was 50 years old, but Jules Verne was just starting his career and still untranslated into English. In this context, scholars such as Bill Brown and Everett Bleiler have recognized Ellis’s book as the earliest American novel-length piece of science fiction. At just under 30,000 words, it’s technically a novella, but it was printed as a standalone, multi-chaptered story with a plot that relies completely on the invention of a machine that transforms several people’s lives, some for good, some for ill. The Steam Man of the Prairies deserves its “first U.S. science fiction novel” label.

Like many prolific dime novelists who had to write multiple tales in a short span of time, Edward S. Ellis looked to newspaper articles for story ideas. The Steam Man of the Prairies was initially inspired by a New Jersey newspaper report that inventor Zadoc P. Dederick had created a steam-powered machine shaped like a seven-foot-tall human (Bleiler From the Steam Man 101-102.) While Dederick’s invention may not have actually worked and certainly didn’t make any tangible, long-term changes in transportation culture, Ellis took the concept and ran with it. The Steam Man of the Prairies tells the story of a young genius who overcomes physical disability and makes his fortune on the American frontier by inventing an enormous, anthropomorphic machine. Johnny Brainerd participates in violent adventures despite being “deformed’ or “hunchbacked” because his steam man provides him speed (up to 60 mph, we’re told) and imposing prowess (his appearance shocks natives and frontiersmen alike). It begins in media res, with the shocking appearance of the Steam Man to Ethan Hopkins and Mickey McSquizzle on the prairie, before going back to tell us Johnny’s origins—his mother’s encouragement, his determined work constructing the steam man, and his meeting Baldy Bicknell. It then becomes a mostly episodic affair, with unrelated action including a buffalo hunt, encounter with a grizzly bear, and the near-theft of Brainerd’s machine. It culminates with a final encounter with the Indians as the successful miners attempt to return to civilization. The Indians’ presence is, of course, felt throughout the book—both in overt encounters and in repeated assertions by white settlers that they are a constant threat. For characterization, the book relies on stereotypes. While some, like Ethan Hopkins’ “Yankee” hard-headedness, are fairly benign, the portrayal of indigenous people is simplistic and demeaning. Even in the time period when it was written, the book’s portrayal of Native Americans would have offended many readers across many backgrounds, although contemporary protests against dime novels were usually more about their portrayal of violence in youth-oriented stories rather than who that narrative violence was directed towards (Pfitzer 44-45). In grafting the concept of Dederick’s invention to a somewhat clichéd Western tale, Ellis’s novel evokes a cornucopia of American themes: expansion, travel, technophilia, violence, and “rags-to-riches” capital aquisition.

The Steam Man of the Prairies was first released as number 45 in Beadle's American Novel series. Like many popular dime novels, it was reprinted multiple times—at least seven publications between 1868 and 1904, with three different titles. In 1876, Beadle's Half Dime Library 271 called it The Huge Hunter; or, The Steam Man of the Prairies, a title that stuck for a few printings; Pocket Library’s 1888 reprint was titled Baldy’s Boy Partner. Beadle's retitling of the novel as The Huge Hunter in 1876 is puzzling, given that the Huge Hunter is the name given to a character—a villain—who appears in only a single chapter. The decision is likely more indicative of the dime novel publishing strategy of making old material seem new rather than an actual comment on the story's content.

The 1876 reprinting (the one titled The Huge Hunter and accessible here) is important for two reasons. First, it reached readers during the American centennial celebration, when many U.S. citizens wanted optimistic entertainment and their memories of the Civil War’s horror were receding. The year’s events included the Chicago World’s Fair, a showcase for U.S. ingenuity on an international stage (Evans 556). Second, its influence on publishing was enormous. As E.F. Bleiler has charted, the 1876 reprint led Beadle and Adams’s competitor, Frank Tousey, to publish an imitation featuring an inventor named Frank Reade that then became a series. Tousey’s tales of inventor Frank Reade, Jr. led to a weekly series, The Frank Reade Library, resulting in over 180 stories. The concept of a youthful inventor, first suggested by Ellis’s Johnny Brainerd, became so common that three dime novel series (Tousey’s Frank Reade, Jr. and Jack Wright, and Street and Smith publishing’s Tom Edison Jr.) ran simultaneously during the 1890s. Their success inspired the later hardbound-novel series of boy inventor Tom Swift, begun in 1910 and featuring 40 original novels, which were still popular with juvenile readers in the mid-twentieth-century and continue to be periodically rebooted  like other literary franchises (Bleiler “From the Steam Man” 112). For a book filled with flatly drawn caricatures, The Steam Man of the Prairies’ true legacy is likely its promotion of a then-new, now-famous character type: the “boy genius.”