Joseph E. Badger, Jr

Joseph Edward Badger, Jr., was born October 10, 1848, in Payson, Illinois. His father, Joseph E. Badger, Sr., came from a Massachusetts family of seafaring people, and his mother, Rachel Sarah Van Vorhees, from a Dutch family living in Pennsylvania. When Joseph, Jr., was a year old his parents moved to Quincy, Illinois, and in 1858 removed to Kansas, settling in Bellemont, Doniphan County, on November 10. This village was about six miles up the Missouri River from St. Joseph, and it was here that Joseph learned to swim and skate. As a boy he nearly lost his life by skating backwards and breaking through a hole in the ice, made by ice cutters. He was swept under but luckily came up beneath another hole and was rescued. Bellemont was a favourite starting point for freight outfits crossing the plains. Among the first to make the overland trip to California, after the discovery of gold there, were his father and two uncles, one of whom disappeared in that state. Joe's father originally ran a stove and hardware store in Bellemont, and the family lived upstairs. During the Pike's Peak excitement in 1859 Joe ran away from home, taking his pony, his dog, and a muzzle-loading shot gun, and joined a freight outfit going to Denver. Although only eleven years of age, he acted as hunter for the train. It is said that one day, surrounded by five Indians, and slightly wounded by two shots in the leg, he himself shot his first Indian.

Upon his return to Bellemont, some six months later, Joe went back to school part time, but he preferred hunting and camping, going away on his horse (a present from his brother-in-law, Captain Weston) for weeks at a time.

In the spring of 1864 Joe's father, now Chief Clerk in the Quartermaster's Department at Jefferson City, Missouri, and away from home most of the time, sold the Bellemont property, and the family moved to Jefferson City, where Joe was taken into the Quartermaster's office as a clerk without pay. In 1867, almost six feet tall although only 19 years of age, he was a student in Bryant's Business College in St. Joseph, Missouri, and very shortly thereafter began contributing sketches to the New York Weekly. His first long story for Beadle was Dime Novel No. 203, "The Masked Guide," published May 10, 1870; and thereafter, for a long time, he furnished them with a story every month or so. He also, about this time, established a reputation as a puzzler and puzzle solver, signing his contributions "Beau K."

On May 1, 1878, he was married to Miss Lotta Webb, of Frankfort, Kansas, and for a time thereafter worked in a wholesale house in St. Joseph. Later he lived in Frankfort, and when Beadle and Adams ceased buying stories, he started a cigar store and factory. After a few years, in the autumn of 1901, he moved his shop to Blue Rapids, Kansas. He ran his factory there only a few years; then his health failed after he had sustained a bad head injury from a fall which caused him to have severe headaches, and he bought an interest and later complete control of a billiard hall. The efforts of uplifters to ban billiard halls and bowling alleys from the town caused a falling off in business, and this, added to poor health, caused him to commit suicide in his pool hall in Blue Rapids by shooting himself through the heart with his double barreled shotgun, January 30, 1909. He left a widow, two daughters, and one son.

Badger was one of the best of Beadle and Adams' authors and was among their last contributors, having written serials, short stories, and "libraries" for them for over twenty-five years. He once told Grissom that he never cared to write for any other publishers, although he did write some stories for the New York Ledger, Frank Leslie's Boys' and Girls' Weekly, the New York Weekly, and Saturday Night, and later published several cloth-bound books. Whitson wrote of him:

Badger's writing methods were peculiar. He carefully plotted even his long Dime Libraries, chapter by chapter, before writing a word. Then he shut himself up in his house, denied himself to everyone, divided his time into "watches," wrote six hours and slept two, six hours more and slept two, six hours more and slept two, and completed a Dime Library of 80,000 words in a week; writing it ready for the printer. Then he took a rest, and perhaps went fishing or hunting, until he felt the call to write his next. He wrote his serials for the Banner Weekly in the same way. When Beadle & Adams failed and the Libraries ended, he was not able to change his style. He tried. I had his picture showing him seated at his typewriter (an old-fashioned Caligraph, to which he was wedded) with a big pipe in his mouth. He said a picture without the pipe would not be natural, and he had it (the pipe) in his mouth about all the time. Failing in his attempts to write, he naturally drifted to running a tobacco shop.