Travel by Water and Road

Murdoch's play presented the able soldier, scout, and rifleman as a common-sense super-hero. The plot involves Crockett's love for a girl above his station, his protection of her from a pack of wolves in a blizzard, and his rescue of her during her wedding from villains. In one especially melodramatic scene, Crockett saves settlers by using his arm as a door latch while reciting Sir Walter Scott's "Lochinvar."

In the 1850s and 1860s, Boston-born Frank Mayo acted in San Francisco under the managements of Laura Keene and Julius Brutus Booth, Jr. As a member of Thomas Maguire's companies, he appeared at the opening of Maguire's Virginia City, Nevada, opera house. Mayo returned to the East Coast to play Badger in Dion Boucicault's The Streets of New York to great success. Davy Crockett was the focus of his repertory from 1872 to 1894. He also wrote Nordeck, a melodrama of Polish independence (1884). In June 1894, Frank Mayo died on a train going from Denver to Omaha while touring the west in his dramatization of Mark Twain's Puddin'head Wilson.