1 Slade, Edgar P., Dashing Dick! or the Terror of the Camanches (Jasper, IN: Benjamin Doane, 1876)Google Scholar, in the American Antiquarian Society amateur stories collection. The American Antiquarian Society (AAS) holds a very large number of amateur novels; novels cited here from the AAS collection are so noted.

2 Overviews of the dime novel phenomenon include Casper, Scott E. et al., eds., The Industrial Book, 1840–1880, vol. 3 of A History of the Book in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Cox, J. Randolph, “Dime Novels,” in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, ed. Christine Bold, vol. 6, U.S. Popular Print Culture, 1860–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 63–80 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Streeby, Shelley, “Dime Novels and the Rise of the Mass-Market Genres,” in Cambridge History of the American Dime Novel, ed. Leonard Cassuto et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1987). On key developments concerning masculinity, especially in regard to politics and race, see Murphy, Kevin P., Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hoganson, Kristin L., Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Bederman, Gail, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rotundo, E. Anthony, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993)Google Scholar.

3 “Amateur Journalism,” Illustrated American, Sept. 26, 1892, 261. “The Amateur Casuals in Journalism,” New York Times, Oct. 9, 1871. The historical literature on Amateurdom is sparse, but see Petrik, Paula, “The Youngest Fourth Estate: The Novelty Toy Printing Press and Adolescence, 1870–1886,” in Small Worlds: Children and Adolescence, 1850–1950, ed. Elliott West and Paula Petrik (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 125–42Google Scholar and note 4 for circulation figures; Lara Langer Cohen, “‘The Emancipation of Boyhood’: Postbellum Teenage Subculture and the Amateur Press,” Common-Place 14 (Fall 2013); Fabian, Ann, “Amateur Authors,” in A History of the Book in America, ed. Scott E. Casper, et al., vol. 3, The Industrial Book, 1840–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 407–15Google Scholar; Jessica Isaac, “Compliant Circulation: Children’s Writing, American Periodicals, and Public Culture, 1839–1882,” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2015); Isaac, Jessica, “Youthful Enterprises: Amateur Newspapers and the Pre-History of Adolescence, 1867–1883,” American Periodicals 22: 2 (2012): 158–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dawn Michelle Smith, “Print Networks and Youth Information Culture: Young People, Amateur Publishing, and Children’s Periodicals, 1867–1890” (PhD diss., University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2017) and quoted (“Ben Franklin”) at 138. An intriguing look at the demographic composition of Amateurdom can be found in Isaac, Jessica, “Graphing the Archives of Nineteenth-Century Amateur Newspapers,” Book History 19 (2016): 317–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the technology of the toy press itself, see Elizabeth M. Harris, Personal Impressions: The Small Printing Press in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: David R. Godine, 2004). The major collections of amateur newspapers (from which this essay’s evidence is drawn) are held at in the Amateur Newspapers Collection at the American Antiquarian Society (hereafter AAS) and the University of Wisconsin Library’s Edwin Hadley Smith Collection of Amateur Newspapers (hereafter EHS). The AAS collection is organized onsite by publication title. Many of the amateur newspapers are now part of the Gale Amateur Newspapers from the American Antiquarian Society digital collection. The Edwin Hadley Smith Collection consists of clippings from amateur newspapers pasted into numbered volumes. The numbered volumes are given here. There are smaller repositories of amateur newspapers the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the New-York Historical Society, the New York Public Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the University of Iowa, and a few other places. The most complete overview of these resources can be found at https://thefossils.org/collections.html (accessed Dec. 26, 2023).

4 Harrison, Thomas G., The Career and Reminiscences of an Amateur Journalist and a History of Amateur Journalism (Indianapolis: Thos. G. Harrison, 1883)Google Scholar, 16; Edgar P. Slade, A Close Call: A Story of the Plains (Washington, DC, 1876), ASS.

5 On the West and imperial themes in dime novels (as well as literature more generally), see Rowe, John Carlos, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kaplan, Amy, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Streeby, Shelley, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar. “Imperial” children’s literature is discussed in Martin Woodside, Frontiers of Boyhood: Imagining America Past and Future (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and Rouleau, Brian, Empire’s Nursery: Children’s Literature and the Origins of the American Century (New York: New York University Press, 2021)Google Scholar. This article includes material from Empire’s Nursery, but it seeks to expand upon the book’s conclusions by positioning youth-authored literature as an important subset of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era’s narrative fiction.

6 Thomas H. Kerr, Border Jack; or Perils on the Frontier (Rockland, ME: W.O. Fuller, 1872), AAS. On age-grading, see Howard P. Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). Amateurdom was a transcontinental phenomenon (while also extending into Canada and across the Atlantic), but the largest proportion of its participants lived east of the Mississippi River. Westerners certainly participated, and there was even an Amateur Press Association that organized publications throughout the region. But with their higher population densities and more substantial railroad networks, the East, Midwest, and South predominated.

7 Yankey Sam, Jack Johnson, or, The Wild Man of the Prairie (Vienna, NJ: Zander Snyder, 1876), AAS; Expert Marksman, Scalping Sam, the Silent Slayer (New York: B.T. Alvord, 1876), AAS; Cornelius Shea, Frank and Hal; or, The Magicians of the Plains (Tottenville, NY: C. Shea Publishers, 1879), AAS; “Pete Lewis’ Story,” The Eagle, Mar. 1877, ESH, vol. 32. For other such characters, see “Sandy Mike, The Border Spy,” The Boys’ Messenger, Aug. 1873, AAS; “Squint-Eye, the Squatter,” The Meteor, July 1874, AAS; and “A Sketch of Western Life,” Connecticut Amateur Monthly, Apr. 1878, AAS.

8 “An Evening Scene,” The Criterion, May 1883, AAS; “Wisconsin and Minnesota,” Home Diary, Aug. 1867, AAS; “Civilization,” The Patriot, Sept. 1886, EHA, vol. 82; “The Red Man,” Forest City Spark, Oct. 1885, EHS, vol. 76; Xystos, “Bert Barton, or a Boy’s Adventures in Arazona” and “The Indians,” The Young Idea, May 1873, AAS.

9 “The Indian Problem,” The Idler, Aug. 1882, AAS; “Lo! The Poor Indian,” Scratches and Sketches 1 (Oct. 1873), AAS; “The Making of America,” New Century 2 (May 1885), AAS.

10 “Letter from Carlisle,” Amateur Journal, May 1886, AAS; Hand quoted in Emery, Jacqueline, “Writing Against Erasure: Native American Students at Hampton Institute and the Periodical Press,” American Periodicals 22 (2012): 189 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Zitkala-Ša’s writings have been collected and published in American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings (New York: Penguin, 2003). Some interesting research has been done on a few surviving editions of amateur newspapers circulated by students at American Indian boarding schools. See Neuman, Lisa K., “Indian Play: Students, Wordplay, and the Ideologies of Indianness at a School for Native Americans,” American Indian Quarterly 32 (Spring 2008): 178–203 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Katanski, Amelia V., Learning to Write “Indian”: The Boarding School Experience and American Indian Literature (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Frederick E. Hoxie, Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the Progressive Era (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001). More generally, American Indian involvement in Amateurdom reinforces the conclusions of scholars who depict boarding schools as sites of resistance. See Child, Brenda J., Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

11 By no means was all of the amateur fiction penned by girls set in the West. They often drafted poetry and fiction more “domestic” or “romantic” in its orientation. See, for example, Bessie Murray, “Millie Lee, or, Three Christmas Eves,” Youth’s Journal, Jan. 1875, EHS, vol. 21. The comparative rarity of girls’ voices among amateur writers is mentioned in Isaac, “Graphing the Archives of Nineteenth-Century Amateur Newspapers,” 346. On female amateurs, see Myers, Elissa, “‘Something More than Visible’: Care as Agency in Girls’ Amateur Periodicals,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 45 (Summer 2020): 103–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On popular fiction as an important feminist outlet, see Enstad, Nan, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999)Google Scholar. On the appearance of dime romance fiction meant for girls (and a simultaneous “masculinization” of the frontier), see Streeby, “Dime Novels and the Rise of Mass-Market Genres,” 586–87, 594–95. Much of this is drawn from Rouleau, Empire’s Nursery, 44–47. Janet Dean observes that while the genre was eventually written by and for men, “the first dime novel Western was written by a woman and about a woman.” See Dean, “Calamities of Convention in a Dime Novel Western,” in Lydia Cushman Schurman and Deidre Johnson, eds., Scorned Literature: Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 36–50 (quotation on 37). Of course, the case of popular characters like “Calamity Jane” points to important exceptions within this overall tendency toward the masculinization of frontier-themed dime literature.

12 “Fred’s Adventure,” Badger News Boy, Oct. 1875, EHS, vol. 19; T. E. LeGraph, “Mad Betsy, the Scourge of the Apaches,” Western Shore, Aug. 1875, EHS, vol. 21; Thomas Kerr, “The White Chief,” Western Shore, Aug. 1875, EHS, vol. 21; “Patty the Girl Rifle Shot,” Buffalo Bill’s Rifle Rangers, June 8, 1901. See Rouleau, Empire’s Nursery, 44–47. At least some of these girls’ amateur writing may have been inspired by the later-nineteenth-century enshrinement of certain exceptionally violent frontier females such as Hannah Duston. See Barbara Cutter, “The Female Indian Killer Memorialized: Hannah Duston and the Nineteenth-Century Feminization of Violence,” Journal of Women’s History 20 (Summer 2008): 10–33.

13 Rouleau, Empire’s Nursery, 44–47; W. H. Bishop, “Story-Paper Literature,” The Atlantic, Sept. 1879, 385; Zelda Arlington quoted in Myers, “‘Something More than Invisible,’” 103.

14 Rouleau, Empire’s Nursery, 44–47. On “New Girls” and their refusal to act as Victorian-era “parlor ornaments,” see Hunter, Jane H., How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 4–6 Google Scholar, and, on girls’ reading and writing more broadly, 38–90. Female characters and frontier-themed pulps are discussed in Renée M. Sentilles, American Tomboys, 1850–1915 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018), 73–94. By the turn of the twentieth century, some girls’ organizations focused on outdoor activity were more willing to embrace the role female pioneers had played in American history. See Miller, Susan A., Growing Girls: The Natural Origins of Girls’ Organizations in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. On white feminism and the individuals it excludes, see Beck, Koa, White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind (New York: Atria, 2021)Google Scholar.

15 “Editorial,” Amateur Press, Nov. 1898, AAS. The so-called “Civil Rights War” over the admission of Black writers into Amateurdom is discussed in Thomas G. Harrison, Career and Reminiscences of an Amateur Journalist (Indianapolis: Thos. G. Harrison, 1883), 66 and Petrik, “The Youngest Fourth Estate,” 131–34.

16 “Dime Novels,” Literary Companion, Mar. 1884, AAS. The crusade against “trash literature” is discussed by Margaret Cassidy, Children, Media, and American History: Printed Poison, Pernicious Stuff, and Other Terrible Temptations (London: Routledge, 2018).

17 Unknown author, “Plots,” Boys of Gotham, Sept. 1878, AAS; “The Three Stumbling Blocks to the Advancement of Amateurdom,” Young American’s Monthly, Jan. 1873, AAS.

18 On thematic shifts within the era’s children’s literature, see Rouleau, Empire’s Nursery.

19 Harlan H. Ballard, “Amateur Newspapers,” St. Nicholas (July 1882): 723.

20 Ballard, “Amateur Newspapers,” 725–26. On American empire and the era’s public spectacles, see Warren, Louis, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (New York: Knopf, 2005)Google Scholar; Rydell, Robert, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

21 The scholarly literature on this process is voluminous. The most accessible overviews are Marten, James, Childhood and Child Welfare in the Progressive Era: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004)Google Scholar; Mintz, Steven, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; and Zelizer, Viviana A., Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985)Google Scholar.

22 “Compulsory Education,” Boys of Atlanta, Feb. 1875, EHS, vol. 19. The rise of “adolescence” as a social and analytical category has sparked much debate. Scholars disagree on its origins and periodization. Baxter, Kent, The Modern Age: Turn of the Century American Culture and the Invention of Adolescence (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008)Google Scholar and Kett, Joseph, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977)Google Scholar emphasize the turn of the century, the middle class, and high schools. Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1996) places more emphasis on the Great Depression in fomenting adolescent culture. Chinn, Sarah E., Inventing Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009)Google Scholar traces the origins of adolescence to the largely working-class culture of young immigrants. But rather than pinpoint the definitive origins of adolescence, it may be more useful to think of it as a polygenetic affect, something the coalesced out of disparate social stimuli. Such is the implicit contention of Thomas Hine in The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager: A New History of the Adolescent Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 2000). Youth depoliticization and their exclusion from public spaces discussed in Grinspan, Jon, The Virgin Vote: How Young People Made Democracy Social, Politics Personal, and Voting Popular in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 129–51. Something similar occurred as new age of consent and minimum marital age laws sorted the population into more clearly demarcated “adult” and “child” camps. See Syrett, Nicholas L., American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Age-segmentation discussed more generally in Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Some girls, however, saw classrooms as spaces of liberation. See Hunter, How Young Ladies Became Girls.

23 “Editorial,” Illinois Amateur, AAS; “Editorial,” Idyllic Hours, AAS; Cohen, “Emancipation of Boyhood”; “Fourth of July and the Boys,” Dawn, July 1876, EHS, vol. 24; “Young Men in Politics,” Amateur Journal, Sept. 1882, AAS. In commenting on the “systematic suppression” of boys, these young authors echo their adult contemporaries’ concerns about a so-called masculinity crisis afflicting industrial America. See Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization.

24 For the Alger-like aspirations of some young editors, see Isaac, “Graphing the Archives of Nineteenth-Century Amateur Newspapers,” 341.

25 “Anthony Comstock Lecture,” New York Tribune, Mar. 5, 1884, quoted in Murray, Gail Schmunk, American Children’s Literature and the Construction of Childhood (New York: Twayne, 1998), 80 Google Scholar. On U.S. imperial habits (or “ways of life”) during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era see Lears, T. J. Jackson, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 276–326 Google Scholar and Nugent, Walter, Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008)Google Scholar. Imperialism as a “regenerative” phenomenon is not necessarily a new idea. See Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood; Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000)Google Scholar.

26 “A Tale of the Frontier,” Youth’s Ledger, Feb. 1887, AAS. On the longevity of these ideals, see Stephanson, Anders, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995)Google Scholar.

27 Children and the replication of power structures are analyzed in Block, James E., Crucible of Consent: American Child Rearing and the Forging of Liberal Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012)Google Scholar, and Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), xv–xvii Google Scholar, who urges us not to see young people merely as “passive receptors of culture.” “Compliance” discussed in Isaac, “Compliant Circulation,” passim. See also Susan A. Miller, “Assent as Agency in the Early Years of the Children of the American Revolution,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 9 (Winter 2016): 446–59; Marah Gubar, “The Hermeneutics of Recuperation: What a Kinship-Model Approach to Children’s Agency Could Do for Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies,” Jeumesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8 (Summer 2016): 291–310. Paul B. Ringel, meanwhile, calls kids “participatory consumers” of their literature in Commercializing Childhood: Children’s Magazines, Urban Gentility, and the Ideal of the Child Consumer in the United States, 1823–1918 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015). For a more skeptical take on children’s agency, however, see Maza, Sarah, “The Kids Aren’t All Right: Historians and the Problem of Childhood,” American Historical Review 125 (Oct. 2020): 1261–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Severance, Frank H., “The Periodical Press of Buffalo, 1811–1915,” Publications of the Buffalo Historical Society (Buffalo, NY: Buffalo Historical Society, 1915), 192 Google Scholar. Note, however, that much of the technology and spirit of Amateurdom would be replicated during the twentieth century with the widespread appearance of the high school newspaper.

29 Marah Gubar discusses the need for scholars of children’s literature to address the writing of young people themselves in “On Not Defining Children’s Literature,” PMLA 126 (Jan. 2011): 209–16.