Eventually Mrs. Squier would marry not only Frank Leslie but his publishing domain, becoming a grande dame and a forcible power as head of the House of Leslie before going on to other conquests marital and extramarital.

            In A. M. Barnard’s heyday, during the early 1860’s, this was the colorful trio who managed the Leslie publications. With the new year of 1863 Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper announced that, after deliberating over the moral tendency and artistic merit of over two hundred manuscripts, the editor had decided to award the first prize to “a lady of Massachusetts” for “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment.” In the next number, the first half of a story of “exceeding power, brilliant description, thrilling incident and unexceptionable moral” was anonymously published, with appropriate illustrations of “Manuel reading Gilbert’s Letter” and “Gilbert’s Despair at Pauline’s Final Rejection.” “Received $100 from F.L.,” Louisa commented in her journal, “for a tale which won the prize last January; paid debts, and was glad that my winter bore visible fruit.”

            Other seasons also bore visible fruit that ripened in the Leslie periodicals. “A Whisper in the Dark,” a tale too mild for A. M. Barnard but too lurid for L. M. Alcott, and “Enigmas,” a mystery about Italian refugees, a spy and a woman disguised as a man, made their bows in the Illustrated Newspaper. In 1866 Miriam Squier reminded Louisa May Alcott that Frank Leslie would be glad to receive a sensational story from her every month at fifty dollars each.

            By that time the tireless author was receiving between two and three dollars a column for thrillers produced for a Boston publishing firm headed by yet another remarkable trio. In the ears of those three gentlemen the call of the wild still echoed, for one had edited tales that embodied it, a second had yielded to it by sailing to New Granada aboard the Crescent City, and a third had been the hero of a sensational novel which, if written, would have included chapters on the conquest of California, gold digging, a jaunt to the Sandwich and Fiji islands, China, and Australia. If A. M. Barnard was ever at a loss for a plot she needed merely to hearken to the lives of Messrs. Elliott, Thornes, and Talbot of Boston. William Henry Thornes, who had succumbed to gold fever, had also encountered Indians, coyotes, and grizzlies, had sailed aboard an opium smuggler that plied between China and California, and was himself a mine of suggestions for authors whose thrilling romances he would publish. As publisher of the True Flag, James R. Elliott had edited the type of story William Thornes had lived. The two formed a publishing partnership in 1861, a year after the New York firm of Beadle had introduced their dime- novel series to an avid American reading public. Joined by Newton Talbot, who had listed to the call of the wild by sailing to New Granada, the trio set out their shingle on Boston s Washington Street and, like the House of Leslie in New York, proceeded to issue a chain of periodicals and novelettes that would bring adventure and romance to a nation at war.

            The mainstay of their business was The Flag of Our Union, a miscellaneous weekly designed for the home circle. Though, according to its publishers, it contained “not one vulgar word or line,” it did seem to specialize in violent narratives peopled with convicts and opium addicts. It was for that periodical that Louisa May Alcott under the pseudonym of A. M. Barnard produced her bloodiest and most thunderous thrillers.

            A series of five letters from James R. Elliott to Louisa M. Alcott written between 1865 and 1866 reveals her relations with the Boston trio, their terms, and their reactions to her effusions:

 

            Jan. 5. 1865.

            I forward you this evening the 3 first copies of the "Flag" in its new form.

            I think it is now a literary paper that none need to bush for, and a credit to contribute to its columns, rather than otherwise.

            Now I have a proposition to make you. I want to publish your story 'V.V' in it, in place of publishing it as a Novelette in cheap style, as I had intended, and will give you $25. more for the story provided I can publish it under your own name.

            Please look the “Flag" over & let me know as early as Saturday. . .