THE FRONTIER DRAMA.
"Here in the skirts of the forest."
_As You Like It_, Act iii. Sc. 2.
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.
[Illustration: 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 _role_.
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 matinee
entertainments.
[Illustration: Frank Mayo, as "Davy Crockett."]
Its reception by the press was not cordial or kindly, and the severe
things written about it had, it is said, such an effect upon its sensitive
author that he literally died of criticism in Philadelphia, November 13,
1872. Frank H. Murdoch was a nephew of James E. Murdoch, the old
tragedian, and was himself an actor of some promise. His single play was
of so much promise that if there were an American Academy to crown such
productions it might have won for him at least one leaf of the laurel.