“Thy First Temple in the Far, Far West!”Re/Shaping Theater in St. Louis, Missouri, 1837–1839

In July 1837, a correspondent for the New York sporting paper the Spirit of the Times, which was rapidly becoming a trade paper for managers and performers, informed its readers that “the first Temple of the Drama West of the Mississippi,…the most magnificent Theatre in whole Mississippi Valley”—the St. Charles Theatre in New Orleans “alone excepted”—had been “thrown open to the people of the ‘Far West’ on Monday last.” The paper celebrated the funding and construction of new permanent theaters in western cities as evidence of the “universal desire throughout all the towns on the margin of the majestic Mississippi river to encourage the drama.” In St. Louis, as in other rapidly expanding river towns, theater construction depended on the investment and patronage of the local business-class elite, who in turn connected the viability and institutionalization of English drama with the growth and incorporation of western and southern frontiers into the nation. Struggles over the viability and culture of English theater in St. Louis reflected efforts to shape the identity of the frontier river city.¹

This article examines the terms of this contest over theater in St. Louis during the late 1830s, a new era of entertainment marked by the construction of the new theater. Struggles over the culture of spectatorship and type of entertainments featured in the St. Louis Theatre echoed similar debates nationwide but also reflected anxieties over the identity of St. Louis relative to the nation. Theater in the West was a visible extension of Anglo-Atlantic cultural and economic currents. As early as 1818, after the first itinerant English theater company arrived in the frontier trade post, a local journalist made a connection between the establishment of a “well regulated theatre, so remote from the seaboard” and the arrival of “the refinements of polished life” in “the west.” Twenty years later, if the construction of the new theater seemed to bring this colonizing vision to fruition, the degree to which this corresponded with a stable identity for St. Louis remained a significant source of tension and anxiety. In the new St. Louis Theatre of the late 1830s, local stock actors and itinerant stars performed from an English dramatic repertoire, not always to the approval of local theater critics writing in the city papers—or the theater’s managers, though the management was more instrumental than idealistic in choice of repertoire. Nor was this an economically stable institution. Performers played to at times disastrously empty theaters or disturbingly rowdy audiences and to an ostentatiously elite array of St. Louis citizens as well as strangers passing through. Struggles over the culture of the theater audience and the content of theatrical entertainment while reflecting struggles over theater nationwide also reflected a local set of questions about St. Louis’s identity as a frontier city and its place within a growing nation.²

These themes played out in the address delivered at the July 3, 1837, opening of the theater, which connected the new St. Louis Theatre with the drama of national geographic expansion and the incorporation of the frontier into the nation. The managers announced a contest for an opening address. The winning poet, Edward Johnson, was himself an agent of expansionism. The Greensburg, Pennsylvania, native had traveled west via Cincinnati, where he learned of the contest and its $100 prize money, then stopped in St. Louis to hear his poem delivered by the company’s lead actor on opening night. Johnson’s paean to the “The Drama” recounted its progress from ancient Greece through the times of Racine and Shakespeare and “Now, swift across the Atlantic” and to a new “—home! / We dedicate to these, oh! Goddess blessed, / This thy first temple in the far, far West!” The author followed this triumphant narrative with an appeal to virtue, urging audience and players to spurn vice within the theater and thus bring glory to the drama’s western “resting-place” where “if the Muse, enlighten’d, never strays / Far from the pleasant path of Virtue’s ways, / Then shall faire...