Chicanonautica: Steam Man-ing Through Central America

by Ernest Hogan

Yeah, I know I just reviewed a Frank Reade Jr. Adventure a short time ago, but times being what they are, I need some diversion, so when I found out about Luis Senarens’ Frank Reade Jr. with his New Steam Man in Central America, I jumped on it.

It’s an earlier entry in the series, featuring a steam man, which for those of you not familiar with dime novel proto sci-fi, is one of Frank Reade Jr.’s earliest inventions, a self-propelled vehicle consisting of an armed and armored wagon pulled by a steam engine in the shape of a man. The steam comes out of his top hat.

The original steam man was damaged in an expedition into the Wild West. Frank had since made it new and improved.

The  father of an old college chum shows up. The chum has disappeared in Central America, the “inaccessible table lands of Peten” while searching for the lost city of Mazendla (nothing Mayan is mentioned, by the way). He was hoping to appropriate vast treasures of gold, silver, and jewels. 

Now it is feared that he is in the clutches of some blood-thirsty Indian tribe.

Luckily, his dad is rich and can afford to hire Frank, and the steam man, and Pomp and Barney, who don’t get to say much, so they come off more as competent, if uninteresting assistants rather than ethnic comedy relief.

Soon they are in a strange version of Central America. The steam man has difficulties in the expected jungles. There are also giant snakes described as  “python or boa-constrictor” and anacondas. A “monstrous puma or panther” attacks, providing the scene used on the cover, but then the drawing may have come first, and the novelette written around it.

They do find the chum, and a lost city carved of marble, but first they encounter “pigmies”  who live in underground chambers and never come out in daylight. The first one they meet wears “ a curious-looking suit of some queerly-woven cloth, a composite between the garb of a Turk and a native Mexican.” He also has a “long lance steel tipped” and three trained jaguars.

We don’t find out any more about the “pigmies.” They are merely an obstacle to the recuse and the finding of Mazendla, which is described as being carved out of a single chunk of marble. The builders/inhabitants are long gone, "One day a powerful race had here flourished, enlightened, civilized, and certainly intellectual."  

And they find a treasure.

When the chum asks what they should do with it, Frank suggests, “Let us take it to New York, convert it into greenbacks and disperse it in charities.”

The chum agrees.

Unfortunately, an earthquake brings the city crashing down. Thanks to the steam man, they manage to get out with their lives.

But why do the “pigmies” only come out at night? How did they learn to train jaguars? And what about the intellectual builders of Mazendla?

What would the present day inhabitants of Central America think of all this?

Uh-oh, don’t get me started . . .

Ernest Hogan’s first story collection, Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus & Other Fictions is coming. Get ready.