This Victorian-Period Performer Realized that the Stage Life within the American West Wasn’t All Applause and Bouquets

The California Gold Rush. The very phrases evoked the sturdy response of an American populace pushed by journey and a lust for simple riches. Drawn inexorably west within the wake of the Jan. 24, 1848, strike at Sutter’s Mill had been argonauts from each stroll of life—shopkeepers, former troopers, fallen ladies and people prepared to parade their abilities onstage for bemused hardscrabble miners. Among the many latter was the Robinson Household, a husband-and-wife performing duo with 4 youngsters in tow. The youngest of the brood would grow to be one of the vital celebrated performers within the annals of Victorian theater within the American West. Together with her onstage portrayals Sue Robinson dropped at a viewing public the humor, angst and delicate realities of on a regular basis life in that point and place.

The “Fairy Star”

Born in suburban Chicago on Jan. 14, 1845, Robinson moved west at age 6 together with her dad and mom and siblings, who had been quickly performing for Gold Rush audiences composed primarily of younger males starved of household life. The Robinson Household trouped the size and breadth of the mom lode settlements, from northernmost Georgetown south via Coloma, Angels Camp, Murphys and numerous different hamlets since misplaced to historical past, their names—Bottle Hill, Poverty Bar, Limerick, and so forth.—reflecting each the struggles and humor of the period.

The touring life held little of the perceived glamour of the leisure world. On July 4, 1855, the Robinsons discovered themselves performing atop an enormous sequoia stump for a raucous crowd within the Sierra Nevada foothills. Three years later the household drew such a throng to Poverty Bar’s Treadway Corridor that its major stringer and flooring joists gave approach. Even when performances fell in need of expectations, Sue specifically garnered flattering notices from the varied camp presses, which often lauded her because the “jewel” of the household troupe. One reporter ascribed her reputation to a mixture of things:

“She is just 8 years outdated, but she appeared to grasp all of the fascinating qualities of her intercourse of a extra skilled age. This in connection together with her sprightly and sleek dancing, in addition to her pure magnificence and candy disposition, is adequate not solely to make her a favourite amongst us, but additionally to endear her to the hearts of all with whom she is acquainted.”

Recognizing the interesting innocence of their star attraction, Sue’s dad and mom billed her alternately because the “Fairy Star” or “La Petite Susan.” But, the countless trouping within the rough-hewn mining camps scarred the younger lady’s psyche. At age 8 she was severely injured whereas exiting a stage in Grass Valley when she brushed previous the open flame of a footlight and caught her garments on hearth. Speeding to her rescue, her dad and mom themselves had been scorched within the effort. Lucky to have survived, the Fairy Star was quickly again onstage, although from then on she was susceptible to fleeing the stage on the mere trace of hassle.

From an early age the youngest Robinson acknowledged the significance even a couple of cash might imply to the survival of her struggling theatrical household. One night, as she accomplished the Scotch lilt for an appreciative viewers of Placerville miners, the lads showered the stage with cash. Ignoring a bouquet of flowers thrown to her, Sue didn’t exit until she had retrieved each final coin, even filling her sneakers with them.

The multitalented younger lady’s singing embraced every little thing from sentimental ballads to grand opera, whereas her dance specialties included jigs, flings, clogs, the cancan, “La Cachucha” (carried out with castanets), “Fisher’s Hornpipe” and a double “Sailor’s Hornpipe” carried out with older brother Billy. Amongst her hottest numbers was a burlesque of Irish dancer and actress Lola Montez, who had reportedly taught each Sue and up to date baby star Lotta Crabtree the notorious Spider Dance, throughout which Montez would writhe and cavort to rid her flimsy costume of spiders, to the delight of appreciative male audiences.

Tragedy and a Rivalry

Sue was solely 10 when her mom fell sick and died on Aug. 22, 1855, whereas on tour in Diamond Springs, sending the household fortunes right into a tailspin. Financial uncertainty was and stays a stressor within the performing career, however his spouse’s demise pressured Joseph Robinson to take dire measures to supply for his kids. Along with making an attempt his hand at theater administration, Sue’s father opened a dance faculty in Sacramento, promoting his daughters, “La Petite Susan” and Josephine, as potential dancing companions for gents clients. As survival took priority over propriety, father Robinson—characterised by one interval newspaper as a peripatetic “bilk,” a Victorian-era time period for an untrustworthy particular person—seems to have deserted any emotions of paternal accountability for his daughters’ welfare.

One other formative think about Sue’s childhood was an ongoing, unstated competitors with Crabtree, who rose to grow to be a nationally recognized actress and selection star. Each women skilled insecure childhoods spent relentlessly touring the mining settlements to carry out earlier than largely male audiences. They often crossed paths. Sue performed the hand organ in a troupe that supported Lotta’s first skilled efficiency, and within the mid-1850s Robinson carried out in a saloon reverse Crabtree in a neighboring saloon. In a painful reminiscence for Sue, the miners deserted her efficiency, crossing the road en masse to observe the charismatic, barely youthful Lotta. Wearing inexperienced and wielding a miniature shillelagh onstage, Lotta grew to become the darling of the newly immigrant Irish then fueling the labor power within the camps.

Whereas each women discovered the fundamentals of stage presence, Robinson struggled with much less emotional and monetary help than that afforded the extra celebrated Crabtree. The disparity prompted one up to date actor to comment that had Sue been given correct theatrical coaching, she would have equaled every other actress of the time. But, the multitalented Robinson persevered within the face of adversity. Celebrated as a “baby of extraordinary promise,” she sang, danced, performed the banjo and, as she matured, excelled within the genteel comedy items and farces that adopted the featured melodramas. By age 14 Sue was receiving prime billing in present posters selling the Robinson Household.

Rising Movie star

In 1859, after remarrying a fascinating performer scarcely 10 years older than his oldest baby, Joseph Robinson moved his household to the Pacific Northwest, the place current gold discoveries augured a brand new gold rush. Enjoying their approach via Oregon and Washington by 1860, the household spent a yr in Victoria, British Columbia, headquartered in a constructing Joseph leased and transformed right into a theater. Trouping again to Portland, Sue appeared onstage with the good-looking Frank Mayo, a regional actor and comic who went on to nationwide fame. Like Sue, he had come West as a younger hopeful through the gold rush.

In some methods Sue’s life was typical for a member of an performing household susceptible to chasing the subsequent theatrical alternative and greenback. Typically ostracized from well mannered society, actors had been clannishly protecting of their very own. On Might 4, 1862, 17-year-old Robinson married fellow thespian Charles Getzler in Walla Walla, Wash., the place she quickly gave start to Edward, the primary of their two sons. Although Getzler was 12 years Sue’s senior and never her old flame, he professed his adoration for her. Looking for stability and a parental determine to assist assuage each the lack of her mom and her father’s veiled exploitation, Robinson virtually definitely hoped for a steady married life. Sadly, it was to not be. A lot because the Fairy Star had been the breadwinner for her vagabond gold camp household, so Sue shouldered the help of her husband and boys as a younger grownup.

Complicating issues was her rising standing as a celeb, which carried its personal perils. A couple of months into the couple’s marriage a smitten theater patron approached their dwelling, threatening to kidnap Sue. As Charles wrestled the deranged fan to the bottom, a hid gun within the man’s clothes discharged, killing the would-be kidnapper. On one other event, when fistfights and gunshots erupted in a theater viewers composed of enamored Union troopers and residents wanting decorum, a panicked Sue ran offstage. “Susie by no means appeared fairly the identical afterward,” recalled one eyewitness to the fray. “A slight commotion within the viewers would appeal to her consideration within the midst of her greatest track, and in her greatest play she at all times appeared as if she was just a bit afraid somebody was going to shoot.” That nervous pressure hovered simply beneath the floor. When an earthquake struck throughout a efficiency of The Soldier’s Bride at Piper’s Opera Home in Virginia Metropolis, Nev., Sue bolted from the stage, solely returning when the aftershocks had subsided. The tremulous high quality of her closing track betrayed her lingering worry.

In her greatest moments, absent such disruptions, Robinson exuded a peaceful, skilled demeanor—quiet by theatrical requirements. Feeling extra snug onstage than off, her pursuit of performing as an grownup after a childhood spent earlier than the footlights was her most reasonable, if not solely, profession selection. Empowered by her celeb standing and the flexibility to earn a residing, Sue continued performing even after marriage and the start of sons Edward and Frederick. As a dramatic actress she typically executed males’s “breeches” roles, perceived in that point and place as each sensational and erotic. Clearly, Robinson didn’t really feel hemmed in by standard gender boundaries.

For Victorian-era actresses the theater was a paradox. By getting into what was historically a male house, they breached societal norms, a transgression that discredited their work. But, the theater was a spot the place ladies might earn an earnings equal to that of a person and preserve a level of autonomy over their lives. The theater additionally had the facility to overturn prevailing gender stereotypes that certain ladies to domesticity, holding them indoors, protected, frail and helpless.

Stardom in San Francisco

Sincerity was an indicator of Victorian ideology, and Robinson’s lifelike performing—deemed “completed, truthful and good” by one critic—continued to reap constructive opinions. One other critic discovered the “younger however promising actress possessed of way more actual expertise than many who’re lauded earlier than the general public as stars of the primary magnitude.” Although the charismatic Crabtree had outshone Robinson in childhood, Lotta by no means grew past the track and dance routines that had been her bread and butter. Sue attained the next degree of recognition as a legit actress in traditional dramatic roles reverse the main male actors of the day.

Throughout her tireless theatrical profession Robinson is assumed to have performed greater than 300 completely different roles and carried out earlier than tens of 1000’s of individuals. Her first stage look within the rising leisure mecca of San Francisco was on the Union Theater in 1855. Sue was praised for her Ophelia, performed reverse the Hamlets of Lawrence Barrett, John McCullough and Edwin Adams, three of the period’s greatest tragedians. She appeared for nearly two seasons as Sacramento’s main girl, executing Desdemona, Girl Macbeth and Portia in different Shakespearean performs, in addition to comedies, melodramas and farce. In December 1868 Sue accepted a one-year contract with Maguire’s Opera Home in San Francisco, and by the early 1870s she was thought to be the most effective, if not the greatest, comedic actresses within the West.

Nonetheless, mainstream Victorian mores inevitably seeped into the lifetime of the profitable, assertive actress, who was typically billed below her husband’s final title. Getzler accompanied his profession spouse to San Francisco, the place in 1869 a home dispute led to violence. A yr later she filed for divorce. Sue’s accolades could have threatened the insecure, underperforming Charles, whose job as saloonman additionally could have contributed to alcohol abuse. The divorce papers charged that “with out trigger or prevarication…he dedicated a violent assault and battery…by beating and bruising her severely, telling her on the similar time that she was solely a factor to make use of for his personal comfort.” In colourful testimony Getzler accused Sue of being unchaste, referred to as her a “bitch and strumpet” and insisted “all actresses are whores.” In an period when courts weighed a girl’s chastity, the decide accepted his assertion the couple’s youthful son, Frederick, was not his and cut up custody. Sue saved Frederick, Charles saved Edward.

On the Transfer

After the divorce, although the lack of the companionship of son Edward grieved her, Sue continued to tour together with her personal theatrical firm. Three ladies and 5 males constituted the Sue Robinson Firm, which closed its run in Virginia Metropolis, packed up a mud wagon and pushed on to Reno. Actors had been challenged to seek out paying clients, and the search saved them continuously on the transfer. A ticket speculator in Reno charged theatergoers 75 cents to soak up Robinson’s performances and pocketed a tidy revenue, whereas the troupe misplaced cash on the deal, having coated the corridor rental. After performances in Truckee and Dutch Flat, Calif., the troupe carried out on dusty phases in gold rush cities gone their heyday, out of necessity skipping city with unpaid lodge payments.

The corporate’s luck modified in North San Juan, a Sierra Nevada hydraulic mining camp the place Sue had carried out as a toddler 12 years earlier than. On July 4, 1870, the day of the troupe’s arrival, the settlement suffered a devastating hearth. With out hesitation, two of Robinson’s main males manned a hearth hose from the vantage of the lodge roof. Thanks partially to their efforts, the blaze was confined to a small part of city, and that evening the corporate’s efficiency of Camille set a brand new theater attendance document in North San Juan. Grateful townsfolk rewarded the troupe with a number of ovations and curtain calls.

Although Robinson reportedly earned greater than $80,000 ($1.5 million in immediately’s {dollars}) within the 1860s—largely whereas touring via Washington, Oregon and Idaho—and although she had introduced her retirement on a number of events, every time she was compelled to return to the stage in help of her household. One biographer blamed her “nugatory” husband for having forfeited her earnings on faro tables throughout the West. When not touring, Sue carried out menial labor to complement the household earnings.

In keeping with buddies, such persistent monetary considerations, coupled with overwork and continued threats by Getzler that she’d by no means once more see son Edward, contributed to her decline in the summertime of 1871. Uncharacteristically, Sue canceled a number of performances, calling in sick. In early June her vindictive ex-husband despatched her sheet music to a track entitled “You’ll By no means See Your Boy Once more.” Whether or not the feelings of the lyrics pushed her over the sting is unsure. Regardless, on June 17 Robinson succumbed to an unspecified sickness whereas on tour in Sacramento. The epitaph on her tombstone in that city’s New Helvetia Cemetery reads, A fallen rose, the fairest, sweetest however most transient of all the stunning sisterhood, suggesting the fleeting nature of the performing career and the ephemeral standing of the characters she’d portrayed onstage.

Sue’s profession had been in ascendance, as she had not too long ago agreed to look as main girl at McVicker’s Theater in Chicago, one of many nation’s main playhouses. Although simply 26 on the time of her demise, she had already spent 20 years in present enterprise, her profession having paralleled the glory years of financial prosperity with skilled highs earlier than appreciative audiences.

“Not All Sunshine”

A lot of Sue Robinson’s life has been misplaced to the better drama of the California Gold Rush and its substantial impact on the settlement of the American West. Compelled right into a performing life by her dad and mom, she made one of the best of her important abilities, as each a toddler entertainer and as a stellar grownup comedic and dramatic expertise. Her early theatricalities earlier than tough, largely male audiences supplied them welcome respite amid harmful, demanding lives. She was rewarded with a profitable profession. Fittingly, her final position was in a play referred to as Ambition, an emotion that had pushed her to persist via many trials and setbacks.

Sarcastically, of their time the Outdated West figures that immediately seize the lion’s share of common curiosity seldom captured headlines past their speedy locales, whereas the favored actors of the Victorian period had been acquainted to untold 1000’s nationwide. The female and male celebrities of their day, such performers knowledgeable habits, style, society and politics. Robinson herself typically starred in melodramas steeped in morality and dedicated to the Irish expertise, thus serving to homesick immigrants take care of the realities of a brand new world. Her dramatic decisions underscored her fame, incomes her the adoration of viewers members, although every now and then the latter’s feelings received the higher of them. For instance, years after Robinson’s demise a deranged fan, nonetheless distraught over the lack of the cultural icon, tried to dig up her grave within the New Helvetia Cemetery.

Amongst Robinson’s many mourners was Gold Hill Information editor Alf Doten, an ardent fan and returning viewers member for a lot of of Sue’s Virginia Metropolis performances, who in his discover of her demise accurately surmised, “Her path via life was not all sunshine.” On studying of her demise, Doten rushed to an area photographer’s studio to buy three footage he’d taken of Sue, taking consolation within the photographs of the actress he’d admired from the flip facet of the footlights. His gesture was a becoming tribute to a girl who had been thrust into the difficult lifetime of a performer within the American West and risen to the highest of her career.

California-based author Carolyn Grattan Eichin tailored this text from her 2020 guide From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater within the American West. For additional studying Eichin additionally recommends Troupers of the Gold Coast: The Rise of Lotta Crabtree, by Constance Rourke.

Initially revealed within the Spring 2024 situation of Wild West journal.