Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 211

# Crooked Cale, the Caliban of Celestial City

This 1881 Beadle and Adams serial, authored by Joseph E. Badger Jr., is a tale of the California placers combining melodrama with frontier adventure. The opening prologue depicts a devastating fire in a tenement district where a heroic stranger rescues a beautiful young girl from certain death, leaping across a narrow alley while carrying her. Severely burned and broken, the dying man marries the girl—Miranda, daughter of Señor Remirez—on his deathbed and bequeaths her his entire fortune.

The narrative then shifts to a moonlit California mountain valley, where Miranda and a young man sit motionless for hours beside a makeshift crucifix and Bible, their joined hands resting on the holy text. The coals of their campfire reveal the man's face streaked with blood—he is dead.

The story continues in Celestial City, a mining town in a valley, where a stage driver recommends the Spread Eagle inn to a young passenger, praising the establishment's pretty landlady, ugly landlord, and quality whiskey.