The drama of frontier life in this country may be described as the Indian drama which is not all Indian; and even this variety of stage play is fast disappearing with the scalp-hunter, and with the Indian himself, going farther and farther to the westward every year. It may be said to have been inaugurated by James K. Paulding, a native of the State of New York, who wrote the part of Colonel Nimrod Wildfire, in The Lion of the West, for J. H. Hackett, in 1831. Wildfire, afterwards put into a drama called The Kentuckian, by Bayle Bernard, wore buckskin clothes, deer-skin shoes, and a coon-skin hat; and he had many contemporary imitators, who copied his dress, his speech, and his gait, and stalked through the deep tangled wild woods of east-side stages for many years; to the delight of city-bred pits and galleries, who were perfectly assured that Kit, the Arkansas Traveller—and one of the best of his class—was the real thing, until they saw Buffalo Bill with actual cowboys and bona fide Indians in his train, and lost all further interest in The Scouts of the Prairies, or in Nick of the Woods, which hitherto had filled their idea of a life on the plains.
J. H. HACKETT.
Only two modern plays of this character are worthy of serious attention here—Augustin Daly’s Horizon and the Davy Crockett of Frank E. Murdoch. Horizon, one of Mr. Daly’s earliest works, was produced at the Olympic Theatre, March 22, 1871, and ran for two months. In the advertisements it was called “a totally original drama, in five acts, illustrative of a significant phase of New York society, and embodying the varied scenes peculiar to American frontier life of the present day.” It was certainly an American play. In no other part of the world are its characters and its incidents to be met with. Complications of plot and scenery and certain surprises in the action were evidently aimed at by the author rather than literary excellence. A panorama of a Western river and a night surprise of an Indian band upon a company of United States troops were well managed and very effective. The play was suggestive of Bret Harte’s sketches and of dime novels, with its gambler, its Heathen Chinee, its roughs of “Rogues’ Rest” its vigilance committee, its abandoned wife, and its prairie princess. The Indian element did not predominate in Horizon, and was not offensive. The part of Wannamucka, the semi-civilized redskin, very well played by Charles Wheatleigh, was quite an original conception of the traditional untutored savage; he was wild, romantic, treacherous, but with a touch of dry humor about him that made him attractive in the drama, if not according to the nature of his kind. Panther Loder might have stepped out of the story of The Outcasts of Poker Flat—one of those cool, desperate, utterly depraved, but gentlemanly rascals whom Mr. Harte has painted so graphically, and whom John K. Mortimer could represent so perfectly upon the stage. Mortimer, during his long career, never did more artistic work than in this rôle. The stars in Horizon whose names on the bills appeared in the largest type were Miss Agnes Ethel, the White Flower of the Plains, and George L. Fox. The lady was gentle, charming, and very pretty in a part evidently written to fit her; not so great as in Frou Frou, in which she made her first hit, or as Agnes, which was to follow; but it was a pleasant, creditable performance throughout. Poor Fox, as Sundown Bowse, the Territorial Congressman, furnished the comic element in the piece; he was humorous and not impossible—the first of the Bardwell Slotes and Colonel Sellerses and Silas K. Woolcotts who are now the accepted stage-Yankees, and who furnish most of the amusement in the modern American drama. Mr. Fox has not been greatly surpassed by any of his successors in this line. Miss Ada Harland as his daughter, Miss Lulu Prior as the royal Indian maiden, Mrs. Yeamans as the Widow Mullins, and little Jennie Yeamans as the captured pappoose all added to the popularity of the play. Taken as a whole, Horizon is the best native production of its kind seen here in many years, with the single exception of Davy Crockett.
Mr. Frank Murdoch called his Davy Crockett a “backwoods idyl.” It is almost the best American play ever written. A pure sylvan love-story, told in a healthful, dramatic way, it is a poem in four acts; not perfect in form, open to criticism, with faults of construction, failings of plot, slight improbabilities, sensational situations, and literary shortcomings, but so simple and so touching and so pure that it is worthy to rank with any of the creations of the modern stage in any language. The character of Davy Crockett, the central figure, is beautifully and artistically drawn: a strong, brave young hunter of the Far West; bold but unassuming; gentle but with a strong will; skilled in woodcraft but wholly ignorant of the ways of the civilized world he had never seen; capable of great love and of great sacrifices for his love’s sake; shy, sensitive, and proud; unable to read or to write; utterly unconscious of his own physical beauty and of his own heroism; faithful, honest, truthful—in short, a natural gentleman. The story is hardly a new one. Davy seems to be the son of the famous Davy Crockett whose reputation was so great that his very name became a terror to the ’coons of the wild woods, and who left to his children and to posterity the wholesome advice that it is only safe to go ahead when one is sure one is right in going. On this motto the Davy Crockett of the play always acts. He is in love with a young lady who is his superior in station and education. Of his admiration he is not ashamed, but in his simple, honest modesty he never dreams of winning the belle of the county, or that there is anything in him that can attract a refined woman. It is his good fortune to save her life from Indians and from wolves at some risk of his own scalp, and with some damage to his own person. In a forest hut, while she nurses his wounds, she recites to him the story of Young Lochinvar, upholding the course of the borderer of other lands and other days, so faithful in love, so dauntless in war, telling of her own approaching marriage to a laggard in love and a dastard in battle, into which her father would force her. On this hint he speaks, sure he is right at last, and going ahead, like the young hero in Marmion, to win this old man’s daughter. He carries her away from the arms of the man she hates; one touch of her hand and one word in her ear is enough; through all the wide border his steed is the best; there is racing and chasing through Cannobie Lee, behind the footlights and in the wings, but Lochinvar Crockett wins his bride, the curtain falls on proud gallant and happy maiden, and the band plays “Home, Sweet Home.”
All this, of course, is the old, old story so often told on the stage before, and to last forever; but Mr. Murdoch seems to have told it better than any of his fellow-countrymen.
There is no doubt, however, that Davy Crockett, like Metamora, owes much of its success to the actor who plays its titular part. Mr. Frank Mayo’s performance of this backwoods hero is a gem in its way. He is quiet and subdued, he looks and walks and talks the trapper to the life, never overacts, and never forgets the character he represents. He first played Davy Crockett in Rochester in November, 1873, producing it in New York at Niblo’s Garden on the 9th of March, 1874, when he had the support of Miss Rosa Rand as Eleanor Vaughn, the heroine who looked down to blush and who looked up to sigh, with a smile on her lip and a tear in her eye, and who made in the part a very favorable impression. The play has never been properly appreciated by metropolitan audiences. Free from tomahawking and gun-firing, it does not attract the lovers of the sensational; utterly devoid of emotional and harrowing elements, it does not appeal to the admirers of the morbid on the stage; and, giving no scope for richness of toilet, it has no charms for the habitual attendants upon matinée entertainments.
Frank Mayo, as “Davy Crockett.”