From San Francisco Eastward
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From San Francisco Eastward

Victorian Theater in the American West

Carolyn Grattan Eichin

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From San Francisco Eastward

Victorian Theater in the American West

Carolyn Grattan Eichin

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About This Book

Finalist for the 2021 Willa Literary Award in Scholarly Non-FictionFinalist 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 Eastwar d 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.

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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 a...

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