The Squaw Spy

# Catalog Note

This 1872 dime novel by Captain Charles Howard presents The Squaw Spy: Or, The Rangers of the Lava-Beds, a frontier narrative set on Christmas Eve along Minnesota's Red River. The protagonist, lost in the snow, discovers an injured dog with hatchet wounds and carries it to a remote log cabin. Inside, a young Sioux woman named Waunona—wife of the Ojibwah chief Zach-o-kana (the Red-ax)—seeks shelter with her child. The narrator recognizes her as the dog's attacker and warns her to flee before the cabin's owner returns. When the owner, an educated and evidently wealthy recluse named Reeves, arrives and discovers his beloved dog wounded, he becomes enraged, identifying the weapon as an Ojibwah woman's tool. The story concludes with Reeves and the narrator tracking the squaw's footprints in the moonlit snow, implying pursuit and danger ahead.