As music in the Pikes Peak country was cradled in the larger and more lavish saloons, gambling halls, and other pleasure houses, so drama in the region was born of Venus Meretrix and Bacchus, better known on the Frontier as John Barleycorn. The early theaters were, for the most part, crude variety houses conducted as integral units of such pleasure resorts; the artistry of performers, who were almost entirely female, was judged by the turn of their figures and by their seductive charms in inducing members of the audience to buy drinks at the bar between acts, and during them as well.

Colorado's first stage performance was offered at Denver City on October 3, 1859. Here in Apollo Hall, an unplastered candle-lighted room above a noisy Larimer Street saloon, three hundred men paid $1 each—for the most part, in gold dust weighed on box office scales—for a seat on crowded wooden benches to see "Colonel" C. R. Thorpe and his troupe of barnstormers from Leavenworth, Kansas, present The Cross of Gold and The Two Gregories, a double bill enlivened with songs and dances by "Miss" Flora Wakely and "Mademoiselle" Haydee. Thorpe soon departed with no great burden of "dust," but "Mademoiselle" and others in the troupe remained. Recruiting the "inimitable Mike" Dougherty, a habitually inebriated miner from Gregory Gulch with a flair for the comic, they performed three nights a week to appreciative audiences whose enthusiasm on occasion reached such heights that the entire cast was loudly and publicly invited downstairs to have a drink. Later, the company journeyed to Central City, where, on the second floor of the Hadley log cabin, the gold camp enjoyed its first taste of more or less serious drama.

On December 12, 1859, A. B. Steinberger, Denver's first dramatist, wrote and directed the production of Skatara, The Mountain Chieftain at Apollo Hall, to celebrate the creation of the short-lived Territory of Jefferson. A few months later amateurs produced a play on the evils of strong drink, and a certain Mr. Wyncoop, cast as the horrid example, was warmly praised by the Rocky Mountain News for playing his role "with a most thrilling effect, particularly in his delirium-tremens scene." In 1861 the Denver Amateur Dramatic Association made its bow at the Apollo with a series of benefit performances; Pizarra, the opening play, netted $124 for Denver's first community chest.

The Colorado theater began to assume a less ephemeral form in September 1860 when Jack Langrishe brought his company to Denver by mule team from Fort Laramie, Wyoming. A genial Irishman, one of the great troupers of the early West, Langrishe "convulsed his audiences in comedy roles, principally because of his enormous nose and powerful voice"; he and Mike Dougherty soon combined their talents and organized a barnstorming circuit in the mountains, playing at Central City, Georgia Gulch, Delaware Flats, Montgomery, French Gulch, Buckskin Joe, and other boom camps; Central City was favored with a six-weeks' season of varied fare presented in the Hadley cabin, now christened the Montana Theater. Returning to Denver, Langrishe and Dougherty took over the Platte Valley Theater, the first to be built for the purpose, which had opened in October 1861 with Richard III and The Devil's In The Room, a comedy spiced with variety acts; as an additional attraction, the manager of the theater had appeared "in dress suit and white kid gloves," to recite a serious poem.

Renaming this theater the Denver, Langrishe and his partner opened with The Alistletoe Bough and during the season presented everything from high tragedy to the lowest burlesque, with occasional concerts and stereopticon shows. One playbill announced an unusual musical program, which mounted to a smashing climax that literally shook the house when, as the musicians swung into "The Battle of Charleston," a spirited overture, a salvo of cannon was fired from a battery kindly loaned for the occasion by a certain Captain Hawley; this was followed by the "Anvil Chorus," which proved something of an anticlimax, even though it was most realistically pounded out on six anvils loaned for the occasion with equal kindness by blacksmith Meyers. The Denver Theater changed hands and names many times until, as the Wigwam, it burned in 1873. During the intervening years there had appeared upon its stage many traveling companies and such noted lecturers as Artemus Ward, George Francis Train, P. T. Barnum, and Cassius Clay.

In the 1870’s the remodeled city armory in Denver became the Forrester Opera House, visited by the elder Sothern, Tom Keene, Lawrence Barrett, Edwin Booth, Joe Jefferson, Mrs. Scott Siddons, and other headliners of the day. In 1873, Ed Chase, who in the gold rush days had established the renowned Progressive gambling saloon in Denver, built the Palace Theater on Blake Street. Here, under a genial master of ceremonies, chorus girls sang and danced when not serving drinks to the audience or to those courting Lady Luck in the gambling rooms upstairs; comedians in blackface added a minstrel touch, and a large orchestra furnished music for entertainment and dancing. Conducted with decorum, the Palace was nevertheless loudly denounced by the religious as "a death-trap to young men, a foul den of vice and corruption." But for many years Chase continued to entertain here, with wine, women, song, dance, and the click of poker chips, all local and transient celebrities, including Eugene Field, managing editor and dramatic critic of the Denver Tribune for several years.

Between 1868 and 1880 substantial brick and stone opera houses, far superior to the theaters in Denver, were constructed in Aspen, Fairplay, Central City, Leadville, and other mining towns, thanks to the lordly munificence of bonanza kings, although miners paid through the box office their fair share of the expense of bringing in distinguished and often exotic "talent." In its heyday Leadville had a dozen theaters, legitimate and illegitimate. At the head of notorious State Street stood the Grand Central, built in 1878, which proclaimed itself "the largest and most elegantly appointed playhouse west of Chicago." Behind its kerosene footlights was presented lusty and often bawdy entertainment of every kind, from Around The World in 80 Days, with "real elephants and camels," to Nana, The Lovely Blonde, "four hours of Elegant Pleasures Blended with a Voluptuous Feast without Coarseness." On rare occasions the management gave a ladies' matinee, closing the bar, prohibiting smoking and drinking in the auditorium, extending positive assurances to the hesitant that "no feature of the entertainment can be objected to by the most refined society." At this house, just before his death early in 1880, appeared Charles Algernon Sidney Vivian, the English actor who in 1867 had founded the Jolly Corks, subsequently reorganized as the Benevolent Protective Order of Elks.

Most of Leadville's temples to Thespis were "wine theaters" of questionable repute. A few did not charge admission, but patrons were brusquely admonished, "You Must Patronize the Bar"—not that such an argument ad hominem was often needed. The Gaiety, the New, the Theatre Comique, and most other houses were concentrated along State Street, which was a bedlam from dark to dawn. Every evening each theater sent its large band into the street to blare for a time and then to parade the town with banners advertising Shot in the Eye, Who Stole Keyser's Dog, Female Bathers, and similar attractions. One house offered "30 Acts in Lightning Succession—No Long Waits." Curtains went up at nine, and lights did not go out until the last roistering miner, smelter hand, or Carbonate King had been pushed out the door at four or five in the morning. Tabor and other Carbonate Kings had private boxes in these theaters where the loudest applause was reserved for the personable coryphees who closest approached or actually achieved nudity. Minstrel shows were always popular; Uncle Tom's Cabin was a perennial favorite, and zest was added when "ferocious" bloodhounds were introduced to chase Eliza across the ice; to keep the general excitement within reasonable bounds, programs bore a note that the hounds would not be ''allowed to hurt the audience."

Late in 1879 the Tabor Opera House opened in Leadville with the old trouper Jack Langrishe treading the boards in such sure-fire melodramas as Life and Trials of a Factory Girl, Flower Girls of Paris, Naval Engagements, West Point Cadet, No One's Darling, and Ireland As It Was, "with Mr. and Mrs. Langrishe in the great characters of Ragged Pat and Judy O'Trot." Othello was presented early the next year, but it was thought necessary to append The Artful Dodger, a "riotous" farce. Later came Oscar Wilde, who appeared in "flossy" white silk neck-handkerchief, silk knee breeches, silk stockings, and patent-leather pumps, all lighted by a huge diamond solitaire, to lecture miners on art, dress, and personal ornament. Upon his return to England, Wilde solemnly told gaping English audiences that a few hours before his appearance at the Tabor Opera House, two desperadoes had been seized, hauled upon the stage, tried for their lives, convicted, and there promptly hanged—which indicates that the tall tales of the miners made a far deeper impression upon Wilde than his pale and bizarre aesthetics upon them. Meantime, Leadville had had its first and last taste of grand opera, and frankly confessed its disappointment. Of the six operas presented by the Emma Abbott English Grand Opera Company, Fra Diavolo was most appreciated, but local critics complained that even in this there was little blood and thunder— only one or two corpses were laid out for the theatrical undertakers —and then, too, "the bed scene in the second act wasn't all it was cracked up to be because of Miss Abbott's prudent and prudish rendition of this little episode."

In 1878 the Central City Opera House opened with "a dazzling social display" as "the intelligence of this section of the mountains" sat at the feet of Henry Ward Beecher to hear him lecture on Hard Times, a curious choice of subject for that opulent gold camp. For many years the opera house remained one of the leading theaters in the State, and Edwin Booth, Lotta Crabtree, Januscheck, Modjeska, and almost every noted player of the time trod its boards. The contemporary Aspen Opera House, while well known in its day, never achieved the renown of its contemporaries in rival camps. By the 1880's Colorado Springs had its Old Opera House, later replaced with the Burns Theater. Pueblo converted a roller skating rink into a theater in 1886, and four years later erected its Grand Opera House.

On transferring his allegiance to Denver, Tabor felt that he could do no less for the State capital than he had for Leadville, and erected the Tabor Grand Opera House, notable for its lavish decorations and furnishings, its large stage some seventy feet wide and fifty feet deep, and its great curtain picturing an ancient Roman city falling to ruin. The Tabor Grand, as it was always known, was popular with strolling players as the only theater west of Chicago with hot running water in the dressing rooms. The English Grand Opera Company of the "prudent and prudish" Miss Emma Abbott presented Maritana on the opening night in September 1881. It was a festive occasion, a new high-water mark for the fashionable patrons—if not for the shabby creators—of the arts. Showered with congratulations on every hand, Tabor was wreathed in s miles until he noted an oil portrait hanging in the lobby. Summoning his partner, "Bill" Bush, manager of the theater, he pointed to the portrait and imperiously demanded, according to a story that ran from coast to coast:

"Who's that?"

"That's Shakespeare."

"Who is Shakespeare?"

"Why, the greatest writer of plays who ever lived!"

"Well, what the hell has he ever done for Colorado! Take it down and put my picture up there!"

Mining kings, smelter magnates, cattle barons, and merchant princes were impressed with the scene and the performance, but Eugene Field was not. In his excellent column of dramatic criticism in the local Tribune, he wryly remarked that Emma Abbott had a rather pleasing voice and was every inch a lady, and British to the core, for had she not rewritten the libretto of La Tramata, as any proper British lady would, to remove every slightest suggestion of l'amour? And other of her innovations were almost as happy, he added, for it was "Emmy" who had "conceived and executed the idea of singing 'Nearer My God to Thee' in the third act of Faust, . . . interpolated 'Swanee River* in King for a Day, . . . had a trapeze performance in Romeo and Juliet, and a trained mule in Il Trovatore." Because of the theater's capacity and Denver's merited reputation as an excellent "show town," a large number of the distinguished players of the 1880's and 1890's appeared at the Tabor Grand—among others, Mary Anderson, Maggie Mitchell, Lily Langtry, Richard Mansfield, Helene Modjeska, Sarah Bernhardt, and young Minnie Maddern, later renowned as Mrs. Fiske.

Tabor's playhouse faced serious competition in 1889 with the building of the People's Theater, a castle-like structure later destroyed by fire. The popular theater of the 1890’s, however, was the Broadway, a playhouse of ornate East Indian design, which opened auspiciously in the summer of 1890 when the Emma Juch Grand Opera Company, with one hundred and fifty voices, presented Carmen. This theater soon supplanted the Tabor and was itself eclipsed in 1913 by the Denham, which later turned to repertory and, like its predecessors, eventually succumbed to motion pictures.

Denver has had several successful stock companies in the past half century. The Manhattan Beach Theater supported a summer company which presented light opera and musical comedies during the early 1900’s; for some time Lakeside Park also maintained a theater. The Denham supported a year-round stock company for many years, with Otis Skinner, Tom Powers, Ernest Glendenning, and Gladys George among the principal players. In 1909, under a program initiated by Mayor Robert Speer, the Denver Auditorium became one of the first municipal theaters in the United States; for some years leading road companies presented drama here at prices ranging from 25¢ to $1. In 1936 the Colorado unit of the Federal Theater Project took over an abandoned playhouse in Denver and for three years presented at popular prices a series of plays that included Night Must Fall, Boy Meets Girl, Animal Kingdom, and Blind Alley.

Denver's most noted playhouse, known in the profession from coast to coast, is the Elitch Gardens Theater, which made its debut in 1890 as a rather minor part of the entertainment at the Gardens and was successfully managed for a quarter of a century by Mary Elitch Long, the beloved "Lady of the Gardens." The house opened with "a select bill of high class vaudeville"; the first drama, Helene, was presented in 1894 under the direction of George R. Edison. Other successful plays followed with casts headed by "names" of the day; later, a symphony orchestra was organized and gave concerts at the theater. During its half century of existence many ruling favorites of the stage have appeared at the theater—among others, Mrs. Fiske, Blanche Bates, Eleanor Robson, David Warfield, and Theodore Roberts; Sarah Bernhardt here presented Camille and La Sorcerie in a single day, an unprecedented performance for the temperamental French star. Elitch's has served as a training school for such actors of stage and screen as Fredric March, Florence Eldredge (Mrs. Fredric March), Loretta Young, Sylvia Sidney, Harold Lloyd, Helen Mencken, and Edward G. Robinson, as well as Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Ernest Truex, and Antoinette Perry, all Colorado-born.

Other players born in the State include Fred Stone, Edward Eisner, Walker Whiteside, and Ted Shawn, the dancer, as well as Jobyna Howland, known as the original Gibson Girl, and Maude Durbin, Otis Skinner's wife and leading lady. Still other Coloradoans have v/on a name for themselves in Hollywood. Eugene Walter, author of Paid In Full and The Easiest Way, and Burns Mantle, who wrote under the nom de plume of R. M. Burns, were dramatic critics on Denver newspapers. Bide Dudley, now conducting a syndicated theatrical column in New York City, began his career on the Denver Post, as did Gene Fowler, scenarist and novelist.

The little theater movement has taken root in the State since the World War. Outstanding contemporary organizations of this type are the Civic Theater, associated with the University of Denver; the Experimental Theater of the University of Colorado, Boulder; the Little Theater of the Rockies, Greeley; the Mesa College Playmakers, Grand Junction; and the Koshure Club of Colorado College, Colorado Springs. Almost every accredited high school in the State has its dramatic club. Technical assistance is extended to many of these groups by the adult education unit of the Work Projects Administration, which also sponsors the Community Players and the Colorado Playmakers. An unusual Denver undertaking was the Bungalow Theater; its amateur company, organized in 1911 by George S. Swartz exclusively for Shakespearian productions, gave more than 1,000 performances up to its decease in 1931, and is said to have been one of the few theaters in the world to have presented all of Shakespeare's plays.

Undoubtedly the most publicized dramatic event in Colorado is the annual Central City Play Festival, which is held three weeks each summer. In 1932 the historic old Central City Opera House, which had been boarded up for years, was presented to the University of Denver, and has been authentically restored by the Central City Opera House Association with funds raised by the sale of memorial chairs bearing the names of celebrities of early days. When it was announced in 1932 that Lillian Gish would appear in Camille under the direction of Robert Edmond Jones, many scoffed, arguing that the town was too isolated to ensure the success of the festival; a few old-timers screamed sacrilege. But even the most skeptical were silenced the next year when The Merry Widow, played by Gladys Swarthout, Richard Bonelli, and a fine Metropolitan cast, attracted a record attendance. Later, Walter Huston appeared in Othello and Ruth Gordon in The Dolls House. Several Gilbert and Sullivan operas have been presented, but by far the most successful production was the fourth, Central City Nights, which revived many favorite musical and dramatic acts of the days when the old opera house was in its glory.

Although the Indian stalks across many a page of Colorado literature, his writings about himself consist merely of a few petroglyphs. He had an extensive oral literature, however, which was transmitted from one generation to the next in the form of myths and legends. Some of these were very beautiful; almost all were earthy and forthright in picturing the essential nakedness of life. Appreciative whites jotted down a few of these, which have appeared, considerably expurgated to improve their "moral" tone, in such volumes by Coloradoans as Cy Warman's Wiega of Temagami and Other Indian Tales (1908) and Hal C. Borland's Rocky Mountain Tipi Tales (1924).

But the Indian looms largest as a fantastic figure of lushly romantic fiction, as a cruel and unprincipled foe, as a wily and treacherous savage who out of sheer perversity objected violently to being uprooted and dispossessed of his ancestral home. The whites pretended that they simply could not understand this, especially as they were bringing the benighted redskin the benefits of Christianity and Civilization, and this sometimes naive and sometimes calculated ignorance is reflected in almost every page they wrote about him. The Indian's stubborn and studied hostility to the white invaders, his shifts and dodges in negotiation with a better armed and numerically superior foe, his prowess and never-questioned courage in the field, have been described again and again in works ranging from authentic historical accounts of the troubled period of settlement to such romances as George Frederick Ruxton's Life in the Far West (1849), which has been described as "the first real Wild West novel." This blood-stained story pictures the quite incredible adventures of a young trapper who almost single-handed tames the Frontier and tops a plethora of hair-raising adventures by rescuing his childhood sweetheart from death, or worse, at the hands of the howling savages. This and similar works set a pattern that readily served facile creators of popular literature, most of whom had never been west of the Hudson River. This did not deter them, however, from flooding the country with cheap western romances bound in lurid paper covers. The pages of these thrillers swarmed with rough but handsome he-men, "nature's noblemen," and titled young Englishmen who roamed the plains and mountains for the sole purpose, it seemed, of rescuing beautiful women from desperately beleaguered trading posts; for them it was a relatively simple matter to overwhelm hordes of Indians and "villainous" Mexicans, and on occasion the writers of these preposterous tales thoughtfully populated the mountains and plains with great herds of elephants and schools of alligators so that their heroes might master them bare-handed.

In its free and easy way this school of romance made use of many solid and substantial works of an earlier day. In his Arkansas Journal (1811), which may be described as the first guide-book to the region, Lieutenant Zebulon Pike recorded his explorations up the Arkansas River and into the Colorado Rockies. A straightforward scientific account of Major Long's expedition of 1819-20, written by Dr. Edwin James, naturalist of the party, increased knowledge of the territory and stimulated interest in it. A work subsequently of great use to romancers was John Dunn Hunter's semi-autobiographical Manners and Customs of Several Indian Tribes Located West of the Mississippi, published at Philadelphia in 1823, which purportedly chronicled the writer's life among the Indians in the valleys of the Arkansas and the Platte. Far more authentic were the two volumes of letters and notes published in 1841 by George Catlin, painter, one of the few whites who had a good word to say for the Comanche and the Kiowa who roamed the southern Colorado plains. Although filled with errors of time, place, distance, and ethnology, Lieutenant John C. Fremont's journals of 1842 furnished additional raw material for home-loving romancers east of the Alleghenies. Thomas J. Farnham's Travels in the Great Western Prairies (1843), George Frederick Ruxton's Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains (1847), and Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail (1849) were narrative reconstructions of frontier life and hardships, and all had scenes laid in Colorado.

With the discovery of meager traces of gold along the Platte by Green Russell's party of Georgians in 1858, D. C. Oakes returned to Iowa to publish the news to the world, gaining both fame and infamy as "the man who wrote the guide book." It was widely read and immediately stimulated the production of scores of similar publications. These guidebooks, as thousands found to their cost, were pure fiction. Gold, it was solemnly reported, could be found anywhere in Colorado —"on the plains, in the mountains, and by the streams." Asserting that its information came from "gentlemen known throughout the West for their truth and veracity," one such guidebook informed the open-mouthed and pop-eyed reader that an area of 12,000 square miles at the headwaters of the Arkansas and the South Platte was almost solidly plated with the precious yellow metal, being "richly covered with gold deposits of great purity and fineness." These literary efforts promised for a time to elevate Oakes and other imaginative writers to a high and swinging position on the tall cottonwoods in the Cherry Creek camps, which seriously talked of lynching them for their mercenary part in the "Pikes Peak Hoax."'

But gold was discovered at last, and more reliable reports of the "diggins" were published by a number of visiting journalists and writers. Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, arrived in 1859 on one of the first stagecoaches from Leavenworth, Kansas, and in An Overland Journey (1860) painted a lively picture of "the Kansas gold fields," as they were known. With him came Albert D. Richardson, who published his adventures in Beyond the Mississippi (1867), and Henry Villard, later a railroad king of the Northwest, whose Past and Present of the Pikes Peak Gold Region appeared in 1860. All three works had many readers and are still of interest.

Another New York Tribune correspondent, Bayard Taylor, poet, novelist, and diplomat, toured the region and in Colorado: A Summer Trip (1867) confessed his amazement at finding "no American Desert on this side of the Rocky Mountains"; he was equally surprised at the degree of refinement found in the mining camps and plains towns. Alexander K. McClure, subsequently known as a publisher, observed in his Three Thousand Miles Through The Rocky Mountains (1869) that "those who come here overflowing with knowledge, and the grace to dispense it in a patronizing way… generally go wooling and come shorn; but those who come as gentlemen... meet with gentlemen and receive the treatment due." Isabella L. Bird, a member of the Royal Geographic Society of England, rode over much of Colorado on horseback and in 1875 published A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains; she was enchanted with Estes Park, but the "lady" apparently met no "gentlemen." In succeeding years many European writers and sportsmen were lured to Colorado by lavish railroad brochures which extolled the rugged charms and gentle climate of the country. Some wrote works on local sports and scenery, which were published in London and are chiefly of interest for their handsome illustrations.