ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the Western dime novel The Huge Hunter; or, the Steam Man of the Prairies by Edward Sylvester Ellis. The novel is inspired by a steam man built by Zadoc P. Dederick. The steam man of the novel’s title is a locomotive, humanoid figure that the protagonist, a hunchbacked boy named Johnny Brainerd, manufactures out of metal and rides across the American West. The Steam Man teaches its young adult readers to embrace and not fear the power of technology. Ellis’ real-life inspiration for the steam man and its description in the text associate it with caricatures of the black body. Johnny and his white traveling companions wield the steam man as a weapon against the native inhabitants of the West. The Steam Man can be read as a narrative that equates mastery over technology with white dominance over people of color. This story teaches young readers—many of whom come of age under Jim Crow—to view non-European bodies as disposable tools in the pursuit of expanding the American West. This chapter offers ways of interpreting The Steam Man in the context of gynecology (J. Marion Sims), the enslaved family, and origin stories of the United States by examining the intersections of race and technology. Comparisons are made to Poe’s The Man That Was Used Up and Shelley’s Frankenstein. The conclusion reflects on other the texts discussed in Part 3 of this book: Villiers’s Tomorrow’s Eve, Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, and Melville’s The Bell-Tower.
