After the Civil War--to a much greater extent than before that struggle--Beadle and Victor turned their attention to the Far West and enlisted the aid of numerous western explorers, Indian fighters and plainsmen in portraying that part of the country. Erastus Beadle, himself, made a trip across the plains in order to study, at first hand, the life in those regions. Among those whose knowledge of the West was thus embodied in the Beadle books were Dr. Frank Powell, Captain “Bruin” Adams, Buffalo Bill, Major Sam Hall (known as Buckskin Sam), Major St. Vrain, Joseph Badger, Prentiss Ingraham, Captain Alfred Taylor, T. C. Harbaugh, Lieutenant Hazeltine, Captain Monstery, Captain Frederick Whittaker, Lieutenant J. H. Randolph, Major Henry B. Stoddard, Lieutenant Alfred Thorne, Captain Jack Crawford (the Poet Scout), Ensign Charles Dudley Warren, Dr. Carver, Henry Inman, Albert D. Richardson, Dr. J. H. Robinson, Lieutenant James Magoon, Professor William R. Eyster, Oll Coomes, Captain T. B. Shields, J. B. Omohundro (who was “Texas Jack”), and dozens of others whose years of personal knowledge and actual adventure were incorporated in their writings. For a long time a considerable part of the reading public in the East looked upon these tales from the Far West as unadulterated fiction, entirely harmful in its effect. Uncounted armies of boys who lived between the Mississippi and the Atlantic were taken to the woodsheds by their fathers, and there subjected to severe physical and mental anguish as a result of the parental discovery that they were reading such “impossible trash.” But the intuition of the boys was a truer guide--in this matter at least--than the opinions of those parents who did not read the books, and it has finally come to be realized that the pictures of pioneer life in the Far West, as presented by the Beadle books, are substantially accurate portrayals of the strange era and characters therein depicted. As a matter of fact, the men and women who wrote those narratives for the House of Beadle succeeded much better in their task than hearsay chroniclers who also undertook it. The Beadle books present a more accurate and vivid picture of the appearance, manner, speech, habits and methods of the pioneer western characters than do the more formal historians. The reason for that circumstance lies in the fact that writers chosen by Beadle and Victor were ones who had lived the life of which they told, and were familiar with its fundamental, day-by-day qualities. That advantage enabled them to get closer to real conditions than the distant commentators and hearsay chroniclers whose methods of narration were in a considerable degree hampered by existing conventionalities of historical writing, whose viewpoint of western life had not been shaped by long or intimate contact with it. Much of the biographical material relating to famous western characters, which is embodied in various Beadle books, is not to be found elsewhere.