Travel by Water and Road

At the beginning of the 19^th century, the performing arts were flourishing in the new nation. Still, even the thriving seaports could not support full seasons for commercial theaters and concert halls. To find sufficient work, performers traveled to their audiences, commuting between inland and coastal cities, moving up and down the Eastern seacoast, and eventually, as transportation methods improved, heading West. Theaters such as Niblo's Gardens in New York or the Howard Athenaeum in Boston imported European family troupes of performers. Actor-managers Sol Smith and Noah Ludlow established a chain of theaters first along the Mississippi and, later, the Ohio and Missouri rivers. In addition to actors, these circuits featured ballet dancers, slack- and tightrope walkers, and jugglers and acrobats, who appealed to both English-speaking and non-English-speaking audiences.

Touring actors sought vehicles that provided dramatic situations, rousing speeches, a variety of character parts for their companies, and starring roles for themselves. That search eventually struck on the nation's own great conflict -- the ongoing hostilities between Native Americans and settlers. When actor-manager Edwin Forrest sponsored a competition for "the best tragedy, in five acts, of which the hero, or principal character, shall be an aboriginal of this country," the winner was John Augustus Stone's Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags (1829). In 1843, Boston's National Theater billed L. H. Medina's dramatization of Robert Montgomery Bird's virulently anti-native novel Nick of the Woods, or The Jibbenainosay as "Grand National Drama." Female performers trained in ballet or pantomime were often cast as the title characters in dramas about Native American women who sacrificed themselves for their people. John Baldwin Buckstone's The Green Bushes (1851) and various dramatizations of James Fenimore Cooper's 1829 The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish were popular touring vehicles throughout the United States and England. Such plays constituted the American equivalent of the nationalist operas and ballets popular in European theaters.

The typical stock characters to appear on stage were the comic Yankee peddler and the boastful frontiersman; actors Joseph Jefferson, as Rip Van Winkle, and Frank Mayo, as Davy Crockett, interpreted these roles for decades.

Refer to Map of the United States and Mexico (1859), which details explorers' trails, transportation routes, settlement patterns, and locations of mineral wealth. These factors greatly affected tours undertaken by performing artists in America during the first half of the 19^th century.