From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater in the American West

By Carolyn Grattan Eichin

Finalist for the 2021 Willa Literary Award in Scholarly Non-Fiction

Finalist for the 2021 Will Rogers Medallion Award in Western Non-Fiction


Carolyn Grattan Eichin’s From San Francisco Eastward explores the dynamics and influence of theater in the West during the Victorian era. San Francisco, Eichin argues, served as the nucleus of the western theatrical world, having attained prominence behind only New York and Boston as the nation’s most important theatrical center by 1870. By focusing on the West’s hinterland communities, theater as a capitalist venture driven by the sale of cultural forms is illuminated against the backdrop of urbanization.

Using the vagaries of the West’s notorious boom-bust economic cycles, Eichin traces the fiscal, demographic, and geographic influences that shaped western theater. With an emphasis on the 1860s and 70s, this thoroughly researched work uses distinct notions of ethnicity, class, and gender to examine a cultural institution driven by a market economy. From San Francisco Eastward is a thorough analysis of the ever-changing theatrical personalities and strategies that shaped Victorian theater in the West, and the ways in which theater as a business transformed the values of a region.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Release date: Feb 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781948908375

Book preview

From San Francisco Eastward

Victorian Theater in the American West

Carolyn Grattan Eichin

UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA PRESS

Reno & Las Vegas

University of Nevada Press | Reno, Nevada 89557 USA

www.unpress.nevada.edu

Copyright © 2020 by University of Nevada Press

All rights reserved

Cover art courtesy of Deadwood History, Inc and Carolyn Grattan Eichin.

Cover design by Iris Saltus

All photos are by the author unless otherwise indicated.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Eichin, Carolyn Grattan, 1951- author.

Title: From San Francisco eastward : Victorian theater in the American West / Carolyn Grattan Eichin.

Description: Reno; Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: This is a study of theater in the hinterlands of the American West. In clear prose the author takes the reader through the ups and downs of an economic rollercoaster of theatrical strategies and personalities ever changing to meet the unique challenges of the region--Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019048365 (print) | LCCN 2019048366 (ebook) | ISBN 9781948908382 (cloth) | ISBN 9781948908375 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Theater--West (U.S.)--History--19th century. | Theater and society--West (U.S.)--History--19th century.

Classification: LCC PN2273.W4 E37 2020 (print) | LCC PN2273.W4 (ebook) | DDC 792.0978/09034--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048365

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048366

Manufactured in the United States of America

To Mom and Dad.

Contents

Introduction

1. The Western Setting: Reciprocity with the Hinterland

2. Deconstructing Western Audiences: Class, Ethnicity, Gender, and The Necessary Evil

3. Earliest Entertainment Venues—Sexualized Genres

4. Theater’s Social Setting—Transition to Respectability

5. Moving the Cultural Frontier with Combination Companies

6. The Fluid World of Variety Theater

7. Sculptors in Snow: Legitimate Theater Successes

8. Minority Voices in the Theater—a Productive Dissonance

9. Conclusion

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Introduction

Reflecting on a nineteenth-century theatrical performance on the East Coast, an American theater historian recently wrote: Their close-to capacity audiences were as unsophisticated as anything encountered by actors out West during the Gold Rush and Silver Fever years.¹ This characterization of unsophisticated hooting, hollering, hand-clapping, and foot-stomping westerners has long prevailed. Out of this boisterous vitality, theater in the West acquired a persona that would, correctly, mark it as distinctive. This distinctiveness makes us ask: How did the theater as a social institution affect its patrons in this way? Who were these patrons, these performers, the theatricalities? Why was their need for entertainment manifested in these unsophisticated ways? What was the importance of entertainment in the lives of ordinary people coming to grips with the realities of life in nineteenth-century western towns?

The story of Victorian theater is multifaceted, supported by colorful personalities and challenging environments. Victorian theater was ultimately a capitalist endeavor focused on selling cultural forms; thus economics ruled the theater, while culture shaped its importance. Just like today, people of the Victorian era shared a complex set of social behaviors, customs, values, and beliefs used to cope with their everyday realities. Our current beliefs differ from those of the past, of course, but the ways in which these shared values shaped the Victorian theatrical experience—from variety theaters to Shakespeare—informs our understanding of the forces that shaped the West.²

Although it may seem surprising, Victorian-era melodrama remains relevant for modern audiences. Bombastic, archaic overacting may come to mind; however, certain plays of the era bare strikingly timeless messages. Dion Boucicault’s classic The Shaughraun opened in San Francisco in 1875, and at the Sydney Opera House, Australia, in 1995; the message of overcoming social class limitations continues to be a strong missive in the modern world.³ More recently, Augustin Daly’s 1862 classic Leah the Forsaken, appeared before Manhattan audiences in Spring 2017, its message of the restrictive paradigms of anti-Semitism and resistance toward immigrants resounding with modern American images and challenges.⁴

The Berkeley California Repertory Theater recently extended a sold-out engagement of a play based on Dion Boucicault’s 1859 classic, The Octoroon. The award-winning adaptation, dubbed An Octoroon, provides perhaps the most important contemporary theatrical insight on race in America.⁵ The play, with African-American actors in whiteface and Caucasian actors in blackface, cleverly distorts reality onstage to remind us that we can easily be manipulated by theatrical constructs. Stereotypes, it suggests, can be transcended.

Less a component of popular culture today than during the Victorian era, the professional theater now draws primarily from college-educated Americans. Yet, the theater of the Victorian West, heavily supported by working classes, more closely mirrors modern television. Shows such as Blackish, Fresh Off the Boat, and Modern Family, speak to the ability of entertainment to mitigate cultural differences, as did the Victorian theater. Popular culture, through its ability to normalize, individualize, and humanize, not only facilitates adjustments to societal change,⁶ but establishes a function of the melting pot through its ability to reduce the sharp edges of cultural difference.⁷ In the twenty-first century, to watch television is to discover America, but in the Victorian age, the theater reflected American life.

In the American West, Victorians were challenged to rethink their perceptions through imagined ideas. The theater sold cultural forms that changed perceptions of what people could and should do. As a manifestation of the melting pot, people of different backgrounds mingled at these social institutions. Attendees viewed diverse theatricalities against a cultural framework acquired from previous lives and nationalities. Patrons were furthermore asked to suspend disbelief in the theatrical product. Each patron, performer, and backstage professional brought a unique cultural filter through which they created and perceived theatricality, shaping life in the region.⁸ The stage provided numerous options for local and personal interpretations, and the power of a market economy influenced the sale of cultural forms.

Cultural venues, typically found in the urban areas of the West—theaters included—were places where people met and conferred in face-to-face interactions. They followed social rules and created social geographies based on the cultural norms they had internalized as members of the larger culture. The cultural concepts of—manliness, the role of women, ethnic and racial identities, and ideals of respectability that theatergoers shared as members of a larger cultural order would structure and delimit the theatrical experience. The theater building’s architecture—its seating patterns, saloons, and separate entrances—as well as the theatricality presented onstage were subject to definition by the larger culture. Through the faux reality of the stage these customs were enforced, challenged, satirized through humor, or otherwise reinterpreted in some way and offered to audiences.

Cultural values, capitalism, society, and urbanization triggered the tensions that created the fantasy of the stage. Diverse audiences were spread thinly over a wide landscape of isolated settlements, necessitating travel between locations for mobile thespians ever anxious to make a living with their chosen passion. San Francisco dominated the West’s theatrical life and tied hinterland urban centers together in reciprocal exchanges. Larger towns exported theatricalities to smaller towns challenged by a lack of theater professionals. An examination of the Victorian theater includes the ways that it reflected, and also how it was shaped by, the exigencies of the western region, including the larger forces of American culture. In turn each western settlement followed a pattern of theatrical development based on demographics. And as these populations changed, the theater adapted to supply and demand. When young men dominated the population, a woman’s sexuality became a commercialized theatrical commodity. Women who exchanged sex for money attended theatricalities both as patrons of the arts and as meeting grounds for potential clients. Although at times restricted to certain areas of the theater, their patronage sustained the business financially and influenced theater programming. As demographic gender imbalances decreased and towns developed a middle class, respectable women’s needs pushed entertainment toward greater gentility.

Variety entertainments based on solo or small family troupes, a long list that included singers, dancers, magicians, musicians, tight-rope walkers, contortionists, child prodigies, trained animals, and lecturers, dominated Western theaters as practical and adaptable. Minstrelsy ruled the variety stage as its most common and popular form and eased adjustment to urbanization through humor. Minstrelsy elevated working-class conceit and challenged power structures for the dispossessed—particularly the immigrant Irish—facilitating assimilation for some, at the expense of marginalizing others.

In responding to the challenges of the West, theater businesses demonstrated innovation and creativity. Some attempted to be all things to all people, rotating risqué entertainment with respectable legitimate theater—Shakespeare, melodrama, and classic plays—while others split along class lines and made no attempt at respectability. Poor economic times found the theater resorting to cost-cutting strategies and sensationalized theatricalities that would find support among working men and women. Only during good economic times did respectable patrons support legitimate presentations to the degree necessary for sustained success. Many of the greatest achievements on the Western dramatic stage resulted from the talents of those from Irish backgrounds who became role models for Irish immigrants struggling with discrimination. Borrowing plays and players from the Eastern states spread a common set of Victorian cultural norms, tempered by the challenges inherent in the region. Trouping performers demonstrated a self-reliance often attributable to the Western ethos.

The story of Western theater is not one of crisp beginnings or ends. It is a story of transitions and adaptations to changing social and economic circumstances. The variety and legitimate theaters of the 1860s and 70s anchored the theatricalities of a cacophony of immigrant and native-born experiences. Acting styles became more realistic, while the celebrity status of stars increasingly captivated Victorian sensibilities. Stock company actors—the back-up players at each discrete theater, generally employees—developed extensive repertoires of musical and comedic talents. A typical night of entertainment meant a four or five-act melodrama followed by an afterpiece, a short farce. Entr’acte interest did not wane as the cast transformed an interlude into a song and dance opportunity before the curtain. The protean talents of stock company actors gave way to traveling combination road shows, complete with cast, backstage crew, and star personalities. Touring companies went on to dominate the 1880s into the early twentieth century. Theater—both a social and economic institution—operated through times of economic uncertainty and societal distress. Ultimately, the institution was both shaped by that reality, and reciprocally shaped the observers, while ever-changing to meet the demands of a dynamic and diverse population.

What can the study of Victorian theater tell us about the West? An examination of any aspect of American experience from any time period faces complexities in interpretation. Without an appreciation of Victorian theater, historians have the potential to misread primary documentation and diminish the influence of popular culture in the lives of Westerners.⁹ This study attempts to help isolate the theater’s importance as an agent of cultural change and regional identity. The presentation at any Western theater spread American culture to the patrons—the local was the universal.¹⁰ Disparate hinterlands were knit together through commercial and cultural exchange, as a hierarchy of urban centers compelled a differential impact upon the recipients of culture. The business of theater worked toward the re-ranking of class and privilege in the West, both with women as an economic force supporting theater that met their needs and reinforced certain performance genres, and as a cultural force progressing toward the reshaping of traditional race, ethnicity and class patterns. The theater served a function of the melting pot—helping to create homogeneity from a heterogeneous culture—and at the same time, acting as a democratizing influence upon the West.

CHAPTER ONE

The Western Setting: Reciprocity with the Hinterland

From the beginning of the Gold Rush, San Francisco centered the Western theater world, while theaters in the peripheral towns of the West—far removed from Eastern venues in both geography and artistry—were constrained by the advancement of each specific town location. New York theater critic William Winter deprecated an early Western theater by implying its use for community events and prize fighting reduced the theater from its intended purpose: It was utilized for all kinds of public meetings, social and political as well as for theatrical performances, and judging from the history of Nevada, was, in the early days, most noted as the scene of prize pugilistic combats.¹ His sentiment, if not the specific details, applied to any number of theaters. The quintessential critic, Winter believed the theater should be more than entertainment. It should strive toward artistry, with a duty to cultivate and prevent social disorder.² The realities of the theatrical landscape in the American West pale in comparison to Winter’s beliefs, being driven much more by the exigencies of the market economy than artistry.

The geography of the West meant that towns developed around localized industries in such a way that urban centers were isolated islands of civilization, and thereby served as central and centralizing points.³ To the trouping actor, this meant long, tiring hours of travel between locations. One actor noted forty-three waking hours between stops during a western tour.⁴ The geography alone challenged artistic expression, making refined, finished theatrical products difficult. But the isolation of settlements also gave theaters an expanded utility within the life of the individual community. The physical theater became a community center where citizens could meet in buildings designed to house large crowds used for meetings, amateur theatricals, and local events that demanded little more than a roof that would protect a group of people.⁵ Correspondingly, the theater became a cultural frontier wherein the social realities of race, ethnicity, class, and gender met and were forged into social hierarchies in fluid settlements characterized by heterogeneity, gender imbalance, and social stress. To one auditor, to attend the theater meant to enjoy unmitigated fun:

It is the place of all others to go and be free and easy, to drink, smoke, chew tobacco and spit all over your neighbor (and take the chance of getting whaled), laugh, watch frailty in every style and form, from a very high-toned, modest, voluptuous, hard to approach reluctancy [sic], to a very bold and fully advertised article of perfect adaptability. You can talk spiritualism, gas with pretty waiter girls, listen to latter day saint expositions, hear a political clique argue for or against negro [sic] suffrage, learn how to put an engine to work, ascertain the whole scandal of the separation of Mr. and Mrs. B., and how C. did it.

In all, the theater was a gay and festive place and to abstain from attending was to miss a vast offering of diversions.⁶

In arguing for the concept of frontier as important to empire-building and nation-making, Frederick Jackson Turner issued what became the most important essay driving the theoretical underpinnings of the history of the American West.⁷ To Turner, the frontier was an edge, a place of interaction between groups, but also a crucible central to making America American, applicable when discussing both the nation and the people. The frontier was also a process used by Euro-Americans to conquer the American West, moving east to west in what Turner viewed as a line of progression. To study the frontier, Turner believed, was to study the truly American aspect of the country’s history. The open frontier encouraged democracy and individualism . . . and helped bring about . . . a melting pot.⁸ Turner still supplies western historians with the most useful plot line for narrating the story of American history: a series of contacts between European invaders and new lands and peoples melded into a society and a culture different from the invaders’ countries of origin.⁹ Some historians modified Turner by adding more nuanced interpretations to the Western experience, as both a process and a place. Stressing process, and how the past illuminated and guided the present, Frederic Logan Paxson believed Western history needed to show how the West shaped American society, while Walter Prescott Webb defined the West as a region, arguing that regional identity came from a mix of environmental and cultural forces. The West was a region of cultural identity resulting from environmental factors, clearly different from other American regions.¹⁰ With greater population and urbanization in the West came the greater ability to influence the nation.¹¹

Historian Richard Wade revised Turner’s thesis by arguing for the importance of cities in creating the first frontier encounter, the spearhead of settlement of the West. Cities were crucial to Euro-American settlement as places on the community’s forefront, charged with creating control over the environment through urban space.¹² Cities afforded opportunities for myriad social contacts between groups and provided for its citizens’ needs. Diverse occupants shared institutions and physical space. Cities provided the essentials of social and economic life; indeed, society moved up and down a hierarchy of stratification, and urban allegiance became an important distinction for people with a strong sense of status.¹³ Moreover, cities were places where people earned a living. Thus capitalism was a factor in urbanization,¹⁴ but also a factor in an analysis of the theater as a business.

Capital was a key to urban growth as Eastern financing drove the development of western cities.¹⁵ Cities vied with each other for control of the urban network linked politically, socially, or in a set of commercial dependencies. Urban centers developed, eventually rebalanced, and grew up or faded away, sometimes leading to the end of their economic life and influence on surrounding communities.¹⁶ Urbanism was a dynamic force that drove settlement; arguably, the foundation for American civilization and culture.¹⁷ Urban centers anchored the regional economy, and enjoyed power over other cities through their network of interdependencies and inter-exchanges.¹⁸

Western theater followed these processes of urbanization. Little professional theater was realized in agricultural and rural communities. Rather, rural areas developed a sense of community through churches and other social institutions.¹⁹ In rural areas, residents received emotional support from family, and free time was occupied in maintaining relationships. Transience in the cities hindered the growth of community, creating institutions, such as theater, that provided a meeting place of shared experience. To some degree, theater attendance ameliorated a lack of community in the transient West.

Metropolitan centers—San Francisco being the most important—created networks and associations, zones of contact, and reciprocal exchanges. In such a way, the metropolis conquered its hinterland.²⁰ Each city, positioned on a hierarchical scale of importance within that hinterland held a varying degree of influence as a purveyor or recipient of culture. Western theaters were sources of both economic and cultural exchange, and the capitalistic drive for profit underscored the nature of the cultural give-and-take.

The modern city arose in the nineteenth century from encounters between immigrants and native-born Americans.²¹ People arrived in western cities with deeply held notions of appropriate behavior on both large and small-scale encounters. Important to the history of professional theater was the observation, In this professedly egalitarian society the modern city accepted a hierarchy in which money was the badge of distinction.²² As not everyone in a town attended the theater, a substantial population was needed to be able to provide a theater-going group as an audience base for the professional theater. Theater owners made money from advertising with drop curtains, programs, and theater newspapers, as well as the activity of prostitutes in the theater and admission charges; all things dependent upon a significant population in a specific location. The larger the urban setting, the greater the diversity in entertainment venues, generally, and the greater the influence of that city in providing theater to the communities of the hinterland. Towns of significant population could support various variety saloon theaters as well as a legitimate theater—one devoted to showing dramatic plays of substantial length.

Applying the anthropological perspective of culture, it is arguable that cultural forms, as well as the concept of region, drive analysis of the western theater as an element of the American melting pot. As historian Barbara Berglund argues, in San Francisco, the temperament of the social order that stood at the heart of the nation-making process on the city’s cultural frontiers was much more important than Turner’s placement of democracy and individualism at the nation’s core. Cultural frontiers hosted interactions between diverse citizens and were not neutral meeting grounds. Interpersonal relationships on the West’s cultural frontiers ultimately served as a democratizing force. The building of the American nation came not only from the establishment of laws and politics, but also from this intersection of culture with the power of markets. There is a utility in adopting Berglund’s concept of cultural frontiers for the study of the western theater. She argues that viewing cultural processes from the East Coast did not equate unilaterally to the processes in the West, and the interrelationship of cultural spaces and social hierarchies demands attention.²³ As commercial cultural spaces, theaters witnessed, created, and enforced social hierarchies. The theater-going population self-selected into or out of theater attendance based on several aspects of culture worthy of investigation.

In response to the 1848 discovery of gold, San Francisco led California’s growth at twice the national average. Growing to meet the support service needs of miners, the city tripled in population during the 1860s, an astounding process that condensed the normally protracted growth from wilderness to city into the experience of a single generation.²⁴ By 1870, San Francisco reached an estimated 170,250 people in forty-three-square miles, the ninth largest city in America at the time. It retained that ranking into the 1880s, remaining the largest city in the American West well into the 1890s.²⁵ Cosmopolitan San Francisco, where one-third of all Californians lived in the 1870s, was distinguished by a gender imbalance with men in the majority.²⁶ Its exceptional diversity, social fluidity, and mobility meant that three out of four residents left within eight years of their arrival.²⁷ Personal stress ran high as San Francisco’s residents shaped their environment, creating mechanisms for financial and cultural exchange. Theater was one such cultural institution offering entertainment and a sense of community to theater-goers. By 1853, the main settlements in the state were San Francisco, Sacramento, San Jose, and Marysville; places that demonstrated reciprocity in terms of the theatrical exchange.

Despite its frenetic beginnings, the Gold Rush excitement ended mid-decade. San Francisco might still have retained much of its rustic small-town ambiance, had silver not been discovered on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada, further facilitating the rapid growth of The City by the Bay. San Francisco supported the silver rush with a stock market dedicated to mining stocks; as such it was the financial and distributive headquarters of the American West. Los Angeles, in contrast, housed only twelve thousand residents in the 1880s, only after which its elaborate legitimate theaters, presenting Shakespeare, melodramas, and the classics, were built. By 1880, San Francisco dominated California’s political, cultural, and financial growth, with half of California’s population living in the Bay Area.²⁸

From 1859 to 1869 at least nine major theater venues operated in San Francisco, along with a score of small halls, beer cellars, and theater saloons. The city’s theatrical influence was felt throughout the Pacific West.²⁹ San Francisco became the hub of the West’s dramatic theater world with more than six thousand performances of over seven hundred different plays, operatic pieces, and related theatricals during the 1860s.³⁰ San Francisco’s theater business grew rapidly during the 1860s; by the last three years of the decade, the Bay City was the third largest theater venue in the nation, behind only Boston and New York. Though San Francisco was the ninth largest American city by population, it was the third largest theater nucleus. Why?

The interdependency of San Francisco with the outlying western cities helps explain the region’s growth and its leading place in the theater industry, as well as the character of Western theater more generally. First, the West’s dynamic urban community provided the context for professional theater to play a prominent role in the creation and distribution of American culture. As western cities became marketplaces directing land use and hierarchical relationships, the western regional economy likewise expanded.³¹ Understanding these affiliations between San Francisco and her tributary settlements is crucial to explaining the region’s growth, as well as the nature of the Western theater.³² Similarly, the development of hinterland towns aided San Francisco, giving it a wider influence both economically and culturally.³³ San Francisco controlled and organized rural and urban space for hundreds of miles beyond its city limits. Within the western theatrical world, influences traveled from San Francisco eastward, and also to the north and south.

San Francisco’s geography, its position as a coastal port,³⁴ and the nature of urbanization in the West—specifically the tributary relationships of cities and towns within San Francisco’s influence—fashioned the city’s theatrical importance. The interior, or the expanded network that San Francisco influenced, stretched as far north as British Columbia, as far south as Los Angeles and Tombstone, Arizona, and as far inland as Salt Lake City, Utah. By 1882, the New York Dramatic Mirror commented on a theatrical pattern in the West, perpetuated throughout the 1870s and driven by the transcontinental railroad:

After leaving Omaha, there is no place of consequence to stop and play except Salt Lake City and Virginia City and both are over 15 miles from the main road. Carson City is a pretty good one for one or two nights, but after leaving there, few paying places present themselves until Sacramento is reached.³⁵

Arguably, there were other towns along this corridor, but the paying towns were few and far between.

In 1879 actor Lawrence Barrett outlined a Western circuit from Omaha to Virginia City for a two-week run, followed by one week in Sacramento, prior to an opening in San Francisco. Barrett commented that the old version of a play authored by William Dean Howells, Yorick’s Love, would suffice in Virginia City, and he could play the revised version in Sacramento, but he intended to OPEN with the finished play in San Francisco.³⁶ Working his way west to perfect the performance, Barrett’s comments provide insight into the relative importance of the other two urban centers; both Virginia City and Sacramento clearly lacking San Francisco’s importance. A complicated pecking order of theatrical reciprocity developed between San Francisco and New York, and additionally between San Francisco and the other towns of the West.

After the San Francisco region, the second largest western urban concentration was the Mormon stronghold near the Great Salt Lake.³⁷ The Salt Lake City theater developed shortly after the first Mormon settlement under Brigham Young in 1848. In contrast to the dominant protestant religions, Mormonism championed the theater as an artistic outlet for its followers, bringing continuing income to the theater owner, Brigham Young.³⁸ Its location on the transcontinental route made it an important stop for actors going to or leaving San Francisco. Salt Lake City’s strong post–Civil War theatrical scene supported the retention of a resident company of actors for over ten years, noteworthy among the fluid and transient theaters in the West.

Initially the principal population center for western Nevada, the mining town of Virginia City was about halfway between Salt Lake City and San Francisco. Between Virginia City and San Francisco lay Sacramento. Due to its proximity to the Bay City and its location along the path eastward, Sacramento probably most closely mirrored San Francisco’s legitimate theatrical world. From San Francisco, actors journeyed north, usually by ship, to the ports along the coast—Portland, Seattle, and Victoria, British Columbia. From these population centers, a network of interior towns developed where actors presented their usual repertoire, albeit altered to fit the specific circumstances of each town. Population size and demographics dictated the length of an actor’s run in a particular town, as larger towns provided the opportunity for presenting more shows before the theater-going fraternity tired. Actors from the East Coast on tour might expect to play Salt Lake City on their way West, then journey to Virginia City and Sacramento, adding any number of smaller population centers to that tour. To an East Coast performer, the circuit enhanced the trip and secured the actor’s services in a promise of a lucrative exposure to Westerners in any number of locations. The use of a circuit of cities where a traveling company played in all available locations in the region maximized a star performer’s visit, thereby increasing bargaining power through exposure to distant audiences. Considered the first significant development in American theater business, geographically-proximate theaters could operate as a single unit to attract and book nationally-known talent.³⁹ The nature of the urban environment was formative in developing these symbiotic bonds between neighboring towns. Thus, a system of reciprocity developed with San Francisco theater owners depending on outlying communities to offer additional audiences for a visiting star, or offer appreciative audiences for an actor in training. At the same time, such a peripheral town might have sought to present recognized performers to please a populace that desired sophistication and participation in the wider cultural world. The reciprocal exchange was mutually beneficial.

As soon as towns mushroomed in the Sierra Nevada, troupes spread out from San Francisco; however, the circuit of towns changed as populations in the region shifted. The European Ravel Martinetti variety performers, as an example, completed a circuit in 1855–1856 as an addendum to their appearance in San Francisco. The circuit included two stops in Sacramento, for a total of approximately four weeks there, and included the Gold Rush towns of Marysville, Nevada City, and Sonora for additional performances.⁴⁰

Sacramento, strategically located at the confluence of two major navigable rivers, quickly grew as the leading supplier of Gold Rush miners, attracting a large population at an early date. In 1849, just a year following gold discovery, nearly one hundred thousand new settlers claimed residency in California. Tens of thousands of that number passed through Sacramento, encouraged by safe river passage. Sacramento became a settlement of mid-level merchants and a major supplier of goods and services—which included theatrical entertainment—to the Gold Rush camps.⁴¹ The Martinetti’s return trip to America in 1869 achieved a two-week run of gymnastic, trapeze, pantomime, and ballet acts in Virginia City, followed by short runs in nearby Gold Hill, Carson City, and Reno, Nevada.⁴² The theatrical circuit had undergone a complete change in focus between these two engagements as a result of the 1859 discovery of the Comstock Lode of silver ore in Nevada and the subsequent shifts in population centers. The mid-1850s found mercantile Sacramento as San Francisco’s most important theatrical outlier, while fourteen years later, the silver rush in Nevada shifted theatrical attention eastward.

The Comstock urban network was but an extension of urbanized California. San Francisco performed numerous urban functions that Sacramento, Virginia City, and other centers could not.⁴³ The demand for entertainment, so great among the fluid settlers in the mining camps of both California and Nevada, became another need met by San Francisco entrepreneurs. Even without well-established railroad networks, theatrical trouping brought the greater world to the camps.

Nineteenth-century San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle were gateway cities, ports of entry for money, labor, and cultural exchanges. The San Francisco theater world influenced the larger cities of the Pacific Northwest. In turn, these cities facilitated circuits in the outlying urban communities near each location. The ports of Portland, Seattle, and Victoria began hosting troupes that had first journeyed to San Francisco for the Gold Rush excitement. The hinterland of tributary cities located within a day’s travel of the major urban areas supported circuits of troupers, and thus contributed to the overall character of the theatrical product through their support—or lack thereof—for professional theater.

Portland grew in the 1860s as a regional distributor of products that came to it by way of San Francisco, branching out in the 1870s to become the Northwest’s regional industrial and shipping center; it was the first city to seriously challenge San Francisco’s sphere of influence.⁴⁴ The first legitimate theater in Portland, offering up the classics and melodrama, opened in 1858 with seating for six hundred, challenging the competition from smaller theater saloons offering imported pretty waiter girls. These early provincial theaters were small and limited, relying more on the ability to sell space, often the largest in the town, for any manner of community events, dances, or festivals. The Chapman family, which came west in 1851 for San Francisco’s Gold Rush, anchored Portland’s entertainment scene from 1857 to 1860, giving way to the J. B. Robinson family, and child star Sue Robinson, in the early 1860s. These West Coast performers appeared on the program of many theaters, some staying in one place for a year or two and becoming local favorites, but all their Western careers had been sparked by San Francisco’s ascendancy.⁴⁵ As late as 1874, one actress recalled the Portland outlier circuit as primitive. The troupe was required to bring their piano with them on a dray, as the tiny, un-heard of towns of the interior could not even boast of a piano, and the audiences could not appreciate finer music.⁴⁶ Other northwest towns similarly reflect a dependence upon San Francisco.

Seattle enjoyed a symbiotic affiliation with San Francisco in the commerce of the lumber industry,⁴⁷ eventually receiving some attention from professional performers. The Seattle theater developed slowly during the 1850s, when the only theater was a mess hall at a logging mill—utilized because it was the only building that could hold a substantial number of people. The first dedicated stage was built in 1868 with a proscenium arch added two years later. Of Seattle’s outlying centers, Port Townsend used a public Masonic Hall as a theater, while in Olympia, a hotel dining room became a temporary theater. Squire’s Opera House, the first Seattle building to be used exclusively as a theater, was not completed until 1879.⁴⁸

In Washington a few professional performers appeared each year, with variety shows and minstrelsy dominating. In 1870, only twenty-two performances were held in Seattle and Olympia, and in 1880 only sixty-three were held in the entire state, a third of those given by local amateurs.⁴⁹ The out-of-area troupes came from San Francisco, but the distance needed to travel by ship limited the Pacific Northwest from rapid theatrical development. Local amateurs sustained a need for entertainment when professionals were absent throughout the American West. These early northwestern coastal cities, although suffering from limited transportation routes to San Francisco, nonetheless depended on San Francisco for professional performers and in turn helped give San Francisco its status as a nationally important theatrical headquarters.

Gold, discovered near Victoria in 1858, encouraged settlement and population growth so extensively; that by 1859, the visiting Chapman family troupe stayed for two weeks; the first dramatic performances in British Columbia. Their touring circuit took them to Vancouver where they created the first legitimate theater on the mainland coast in 1860. The Chapman family also brought some of the first performances to the mining towns of California, Washington, and Oregon. By the mid-1860s, more than one troupe per year journeyed from their San Francisco base to Victoria. Theatricals ended for a two-year period during which the 360-seat theater was completely refitted to open in 1868 with the Harry and Amy Stone and F. M. Bates family troupes, again, both having attained success in the San Francisco region. These 1860s troupes featured some of the best from San Francisco including men who had managed theaters there, Frank Bates and Charles Wheatleigh. Because of its early development, Victoria was Canada’s West Coast theatrical center, and a circuit of interior Canadian towns originated from Victoria’s theater business. Victoria’s dependence upon the San Francisco stage for professional performers ended with the completion of the Trans-Canadian railroad in the 1880s, which facilitated the transportation of Eastern stars.⁵⁰

The importance of San Francisco’s theatrical world was likewise felt in the towns of the southern interior. The first professional legitimate theatrical in Southern California didn’t appear until 1860, when actor James Stark and troupe journeyed south from San Francisco.⁵¹ Stark had been the first East Coast actor to take the California market seriously, making the trek with other Gold Rush adventurers to first perform in San Francisco in 1850.⁵² By January 1861, Stark also brought the dramatic theatrical world to Victoria, BC, as well as Nevada’s mining frontiers, in performances at Carson City and Virginia City. In southern Arizona, the settlement of Tombstone, located near major transportation routes, boomed following the 1877 discovery of silver ore. Troupers traveling to or from San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, or El Paso on the southern route, stopped in Tombstone. Tombstone grew as the Comstock Lode at Virginia City dwindled; the two towns captive to their silver mining economy. Mining towns suffered from boom and bust; the size of the town reflecting the vitality of the ore lode and the viability of the technology employed to retrieve the metal. By 1880 Tombstone’s population attained three thousand, burgeoning to roughly fifteen thousand by the mid-1880s and then witnessing a steep decline to scarcely two thousand ten years later. In one year of the boom period 110 liquor licenses were held in Tombstone, comparable to the earliest years of Virginia City, which boasted over one hundred saloons. Both were good show towns with a population heavily weighted in favor of working men who spent money freely.⁵³ Although the theatrical world was driven simply by the attainment of a population base of likely theater-goers, tensions existed within the town’s inhabitants over the nature and appropriate function of the theater within the community.

The ports of the Pacific Northwest grew in a more consistent trajectory without suffering the extremes of the boom-and-bust economy of the mining camps. Mining-based towns existed for a finite period; cities based on commerce could survive with a broader economic base. As these larger towns forged economic networks with their surrounding cities for the movement of products to markets, so did they also stimulate the theatrical world. Transportation networks favored some locations over others, but even in the absence of rail lines, entrepreneurial troupers found other transportation options. Portland topped eight thousand souls by 1870, drawing interest from the theatrical world. One actress recalled an arduous five-day boat trip from San Francisco to Portland because there were no railroads between the two places.⁵⁴ People wanted to be entertained, actors needed to find new audiences, and a symbiotic relationship developed even when transportation was difficult between settlements. The urban centers of the West were linked by commercial transactions and cultural exchange.

The larger population bases hosted circuits of performers who spread out from these central locations. In some instances, a stock company, the resident group of actors attached to a theater, would travel the hinterlands bringing shows to small towns, while in other cases, the touring troupers from San Francisco would traipse through the small towns for short runs. The demographics, economics, and transportation links of an area dictated the theatrical offerings.

Smaller settlements like Nevada’s capital, Carson City, were dependent on their proximity to a larger town’s—in this case Virginia City’s—theater world to provide them with shows. Carson City, settled in 1858 ahead of the Comstock Lode strike, lay on key transportation routes leading to California by way of South Lake Tahoe and Placerville. By 1871 Carson City boasted that it housed the fourth best theater on the Pacific Coast after San Francisco, Sacramento, and Virginia City. The Carson Theater, the oldest public house in the state dating to 1860, seated a near record 450 patrons in 1871, after several remodels on the original theater/saloon and changes in ownership.⁵⁵ A captive, if somewhat recalcitrant audience of legislators meeting in the odd