The Red Modocs

A novella-sized work of historical fiction originally published in the 1870s as a dime novel and then re-published in 1908 as a nickel weekly, The Red Modocs is number 7 of the beloved Beadle’s Frontier Series which featured better writing and character development than most nickel weeklies.  Pretty much a sequel to number 6 of the series, The War Tiger of the Modocs, with many of the same characters—including Duck Duckles, the Hamertons, and Modoc chief Captain Jack—this particular issue with remarkable accuracy tells the story of the Modoc War of 1872–73, in which fewer than seventy five Modoc warriors held off nearly a thousand U. S. Army soldiers for six months.  Classified as historical fiction here, when re-published as a digital book, it was neither historical nor fiction when it was originally written.  In fact, in the final chapter, the novel changes from past to present tense when describing Captain Jack’s conclusion, suggesting how current the events were to the author.

At more than 32,000 words, this work of fiction, besides being an interesting and fun read, gives the reader a taste of what the masses were reading in the late 19th and early 20th century time period.

Preparing old books (or, as in this case, weekly magazines) for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.