It is difficult now to determine how much of the dramatic skeleton Densmore had put together to enable Colonel Sellers to exhibit the facets of his lovable character, survived in the play which drew crowded houses one long winter in New York. Here Mark himself is the best witness in his own behalf; and his biographer has quoted from an unpublished letter a clear-cut statement:
I entirely rewrote the play three separate and distinct times. I had expected to use little of [Densmore’s] language and but little of his plot. I do not think that there are now twenty sentences of Mr. Densmore’s in the play, but I used so much of his plot that I wrote and told him I should pay him about as much more as I had already paid him, in case the play proved a success.
Paine has printed Densmore’s acknowledgment for this second payment, thanking Mark “for the very handsome manner in which you have acted in this matter.”
During the run of the play in New York in the winter of 1874-5 I saw it twice, the second time on the hundredth performance, when Mark appeared before the curtain to tell the audience the tale of the man who tried to ride the Mexican plug and to explain that he was like this man after his fiery steed had thrown him, in that he was “speechless.” I recall the play as a rickety contrivance; it creaked in its joints; its plot was arbitrary and violent and unconvincing. Perhaps it was no worse than the earlier ‘Solon Shingle’ or the later ‘Mighty Dollar’; but it was little, if any, better. Yet it served its purpose, which was to be a frame for the humorously veracious character of Colonel Sellers, the imperturbable visionary admirably acted by John T. Raymond. Mark himself liked Raymond’s impersonation,—at least he did at first. Later he and Raymond fell out; and he put into his autobiography the assertion that Raymond was lacking in the ability to express the finer qualities of Sellers.
But playgoers could see in the part only what Raymond has expressed with the keenest appreciation of its histrionic possibilities; and they were satisfied, even if the author was not. To us Americans the character had a special appeal, because he represented at once our ingenious inventiveness and our incurable optimism. We had never met James Lampton, but we were all ready to accept Colonel Sellers as an old friend. Raymond told me once that in town after town he would be accosted by some man, who would say to him, “I saw you to-night—and I recognized myself. Didn’t Mark ever tell you? Well, he took Sellers from me! Why, all my friends knew me the first time they saw you!”
The plot of the play was melodramatic on the verge of burlesque; it called for the wholly unnecessary explosion of a steamboat; it culminated in the trial of the injured heroine for the murder of the villain who had wronged her and insulted her. For the most part Colonel Sellers had little to do with the main story; and it was only when the sympathetic heroine was on trial for her life that Colonel Sellers was integrally related to the main action. I have revived my own fading memory of the bubbling humor of this final act by reading again what Howells wrote about it at the time:
But the greatest scenes are in the last act, where Colonel Sellers appears as a witness for the defence of Laura Hawkins. As he mounts the stand he affably recognizes and shakes hands with several acquaintances among the jury; he delivers his testimony in the form of a stump speech; he helplessly overrides all the protests, exceptions, and interruptions of the prosecution; from time to time he irresistibly turns and addresses the jury and can scarcely be silenced; while the attorneys are wrangling together he has seized a juryman by the coat-lapel and is earnestly exhorting him in whisper. The effect is irresistibly ludicrous. It is farce and not farce, for, however extravagantly impossible the situation is, the man in it is deliciously true to himself. There is one bit of pathos, where Sellers tells how he knew Laura as a little girl, and implies that, though she might have killed a man, she could not have done murder.