THE ROMANCE of the immediate school of Cooper did not
die without a struggle, though it had fallen into disuse among
most writers of capacity at the time of his death and was
rapidly descending into the hands of fertile hacks who for
fifty years were to hold an immense audience without deserv-
ing more than the barest history. In that very year ( 1851)
Robert Bonner bought the New York Ledger and began to
make it the congenial home and the hospitable patron of a
sensationalism which had been growing upon native romance
as its earlier energy had gradually departed from it. Hitherto
most nearly anticipated by such a son of blood-and-thunder
as Joseph Holt Ingraham, author of Lafitte: The Pirate of the
Gulf ( 1836), or by the swashbuckling Ned Buntline, duelist,
sportsman, and perfervid patriot, this sensationalism reached
unsurpassable dimensions with the prolific Sylvanus Cobb, Jr.,
who besides The Gunmaker of Moscow ( 1856) counted his
successes in this department of literature by scores. From the
Ledger no step in advance had to be taken by the inventors
of the dime novel, which was started upon its long career
by the publishing firm of Beadle and Adams of New York
in 1860. Edward S. Ellis Seth Jones, or the Captives of the
Frontier ( 1860), one of the earliest of the sort, its hero for-
merly a scout under Ethan Allen but now adventuring in west-
ern New York, is said to have sold over 600,000 copies in half
a dozen languages. The type prospered, depending almost
exclusively upon native authors and native material: first the
old frontier of Cooper and then the trans-Mississippi region,
with its Mexicans, its bandits, its troopers, and its Indians,

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