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Entertaining Women:
Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West
Long before actors were vying for an Oscar nomination and world wide fame thespians were trying to carve out a modest living entertaining prospectors and settlers of the Old West. Today the curtain goes up on a woman entertainer who captured the hearts of the western pioneers.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Polish Phenomenon
A cold wind blew down the canyon, carrying pellets of frozen snow and grit from the mines in the hills surrounding Virginia City, Nevada. The wind swirled through the narrow streets, bringing damp, cold air and the smell of wood smoke into National Guard Hall. A restless audience debated the prospects of entertainment this stormy evening. Could a Polish woman really deliver the goods tonight?
Miners with callused hands mingled with clean-fingered merchants and discussed the probabilities of a rousing performance. Gamblers watched the stage for signs that the mysterious Madam Modjeska would soon appear and wagered she would be unintelligible in the French play Adrienne Lecouvreur. Helena Modjeska barely spoke English, they said with knowing looks. Her English teacher had been German, they chuckled, so the odds were good that the great tragedy would become a farce.
Backstage, Helena Modjeska paced the boards, running her lines and tamping down nerves. She was more than six thousand miles from Cracow, waiting in the wings to perform a play in front of an audience of Comstock miners about a Parisian courtesan who had died nearly fifty years before. This brawling town of Virginia City was shocking, with its gambling dens and brothels doing brisk business alongside shops, hotels, and, just one street away, churches. How could she possibly convey the pathos and strength of the character through two language barriers in a town described as an outpost of hell?
That she did so, and with startling success, was chronicled in the Nevada press. Barely two weeks after Helena’s thirty-seventh birthday, the Territorial Enterprise of October 23, 1877, presented her with a gift of unstinting praise: The acting of Madame Modjeska last night at National Guard Hall was not like anything ever seen before in Virginia City. It was the perfect realization of something which we fancy is dreamed of by us all, but which we have waited and waited for through the years until deep down in our hearts we have concluded it was something too rare for any earthly one to give realization to—that it was but a longing of the divine within us which only in some other state less sordid, dull and cold that this could find full expression. But last night the dream was made real, and more than once did the audience rub their eyes and look up with that questioning gaze which men put on when startled suddenly from a broken sleep.
To learn more about how Helena Modjeska’s acting career began and about the other talented performers of the Old West read
Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West.
