First appearing in Beadle's Half-Dime Library in 1877, Wheeler wrote thirty-three Deadwood Dick novels. Wheeler's work, while not the first to serialize the new genre of the Western Frontier, was easily the most popular. Part of that popularity might be attributed to the regular appearance of Calamity Jane, the hard-drinking, straight-shooting female protagonist and to Wheeler's fictionalized vision of the American West, a place that the author never actually visited.