EDWIN BOOTH AT 19

The year was 1852, a young rising star, the son of the great Junius Brutus Booth, was in financial straits.  Most of the money earned from touring had been squandered by his father's self-indulgence and addictions.

However, there was an inner strength and instinct for survival in the rugged mining towns of Northern California that only fueled the young man's passion for succeeding on the stage--the only occupation he knew anything about, the one true love in his lonely life.


Eleanor Ruggles wrote a well-researched narrative about him entitled The Prince of Players and this excerpt defines how that phrase applied to him and to the miners for whom he performed.

Excerpt from  Prince of Players Edwin Booth by Eleanor Ruggles

Norton,  New York. 1953  pp. 57-60

SEEING THE ELEPHANT

Miners and travel obstacles in the 19^th century

         California had an expression: “Seeing the elephant.” It had been the  title of a skit satirizing the gold rush that had run in San Francisco for months. “To see the elephant” meant to trek hopefully to the gold country and be (what most people were) viciously disappointed.  The West took up the ironic idiom.   All rugged travel, hunger and heartbreaking bad luck were “seeing the elephant.”  Miners had elephants stamped on their letter paper and daubed them in red and black on their cabin walls.

         The Booths had caught a glimpse of the elephant in Sacramento. Now Edwin got a good look from trunk to tail.  At first his his father (Junius Brutus Booth) had left, he lingered on with Junius (his older brother) and Harriet in their house on Telegraph Hill, an exasperating guest.  Having no work, he spent his time drinking in saloons where the bars were still warm from his father’s instep. His nineteenth birthday (November 13, 1852) came and went. Junius was mightily relieved when Willmarth Waller, an actor-manager organizing a company to play the mining towns engaged Ted for the tour. “The name will help me anyway,” said Waller.

         Junius had learned a thing or two about how to survive in California. It was the survival of the cautious. His brother was a brash kid, and Junius advised him before starting out to “put a slug” which was a piece of gold worth fifty dollars, “in the bottom of your trunk, forget you have it, and when things are at their worst bring out your slug.”

                  At Sacramento they all changed steamers and churned up the Feather River to Marysville.  Then, piling into a coach, they jolted for miles across plains whose horizons were ringed at night by the red pillars of campfires. They inched in silence, muffling all harness noise, through bandit country where mustachioed highwaymen like Joaquin Murietta could be expected to take shape silently out of the brush.  Now and then a grizzly lumbered across the trail.  Through the night the coyotes howled. The sturdy horses braced their hoofs as they picked their way down pebbly forest paths. From the hillttops the swaying, singing coachload glimpsed an occasional white tent roof or a thread of smoke showing the whereabouts of some lonely fortune hunter.

         Some of the mining towns had real playhouses with a sign over the door announcing THEATER or DRAMATIC HALL in five-foot letters, and inside kerosene footlights and drop curtains with pictures of elephants or of a miner recumbent, his pick by his side, dreaming of home. But often traveling actors played in a calico-draped saloon on a stage of boards help up by sawhorses, or in somebody’s barn or warehouse where the all-male audience planted stools on the dirt floor and belligerently staked off places like claims.

         Waller’s troupe stopped first in Nevada City, a clump of shacks in a clearing among the tall pines, and Edwin acted his first Iago.  They played next in Grass Valley, then in Rough and Ready, then in distant Downieville on the North Yuba at the deep bottom of a valley high in the mountains. The more remote the camp, the more electric the tension in the audience of tough-looking miners who sat with their guns handy in their laps. If you could capture them they showered you with gold pieces; if you disappointed them they tossed you in a blanket. Many of them knew the classical texts by heart and yowled with irritation when the smallest cut was made.

         The actors were in Downieville when a tremendous blizzard struck. Waller herded them back along the trail as far as Grass Valley. Here the snow lay twelve feet deep in places, and food was so short and fantastically expensive that Edwin’s precious slug, fetched out of his trunk to meet the emergency, bought the company no more than one dinner. They forced themsleves out and on again to Nevada City, hoping to earn enough there to pay for the steamer trip home. But when they reached town on an icy December night they found the dramatic hall dark.

         For many days neither food not letters had got through to the camps. The stranded miners had no money for theaters.  The stranded actors huddled around the stove in the dismal hotel and began to swap stories out of their accumulated experience of their catastrophes.

         Edwin flung away and wandered off alone down the main street, which led out of the camp into a no man’s land pitted like a moon landscape with gulches left by the gold diggers.  The snow made the night look almost bright and the raw holes sculptured. He was on his way back when he saw a lantern bobbing, heard shouts and running footsteps.

         “Holla!” rang George Spear’s (a member of the company) voice, sounding half-frozen, “Ted, is that you?”

         “Yes, what’s up?”

         “There’s mail just in and a message for you.”

         “What news?”

         “Not good news for you, my boy.”

         Edwin, like his father, occasionally had premonitions, true guesses at dark events. “Spear,” he asked instantly, “is my father dead?” Spear nodded slowly.