Giant Pete and His Pards

# Trapper Tom, the Wood Imp

This frontier adventure serial by T. C. Harbaugh, published in Beadle and Adams's weekly (1891), follows a boy trapper living alone in a remote Wyoming cabin near the Yellowstone. Discovering his beaver traps repeatedly robbed, the small but resolute Trapper Tom stakes out the location and confronts the thief—expecting an Indian but finding Old Tomahawk, a disreputable white vagabond and scalp-hunter. Tomahawk claims he killed the Sioux stealing Tom's pelts and warns of greater danger ahead, though he cryptically inquires about a wooden stake in the cabin's corner. The narrative combines wilderness survival, property disputes, and frontier violence, establishing tension around Tom's accumulated pelts and his safety in Sioux territory under the leadership of Sitting Bull.