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ROTH FAMILY FOUNDATION

Music in America Imprint

Michael P. Roth
and Sukey Garcetti
have endowed this
imprint to honor the
memory of their parents,
Julia and Harry Roth,
whose deep love of music
they wish to share
with others.
 The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous

contribution to this book provided by the Music in America

Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation,

which is supported by a major gift from Sukey and Gil Garcetti,

Michael Roth, and the Roth Family Foundation.

Making Music in Los Angeles
Making Music in Los Angeles
Transforming the Popular

catherine parsons smith

University of California Press

berkeley los angeles london
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university
presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advanc-
ing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.
Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philan-
thropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more infor-
mation, visit www.ucpress.edu.

The following chapters were previously published in different form and

appear courtesy of their original publishers: a portion of chapter 3 as
“Making Music in Los Angeles: The E. C. Bagley Collection,” Coranto:
Journal of the Friends of the USC Libraries, no. 26 (1992): 56–70; chap-
ter 4 as “ ‘Popular Prices Will Prevail’: Setting the Social Role of
European-Based Concert Music,” Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology
10 (1994): 206–21 (Los Angeles issue), used by permission of the De-
partment of Ethnomusicology Publications, University of California,
U.C. Regents; chapter 8 as “ ‘Something of Good for the Future’: The
People’s Orchestra of 1912–1913,” Nineteenth-Century Music 16, no. 2
(1992): 147–61, copyright 1992–1993 by The Regents of the University
of California; and chapter 10 as “Founding the Hollywood Bowl,” Amer-
ican Music 11 (1993): 206–43, courtesy of University of Illinois Press.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2007 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Catherine Parsons.
Making music in Los Angeles : transforming the popular / Catherine
Parsons Smith.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
isbn 978-0-520-25139-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Music—Social aspects—California—Los Angeles—History—20th
century. 2. Music—Social aspects—California—Los Angeles—
History—19th century. I. Title.
ML3917.U6S65 2007
780.9794'94—dc22 2006036207

Manufactured in the United States of America

16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on New Leaf EcoBook 50, a 100% recycled fiber of
which 50% is de-inked post-consumer waste, processed chlorine-free.
EcoBook 50 is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of
ansi/astm d5634-01 (Permanence of Paper).1
Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Preface and Acknowledgments xi

1. Music Making as Popular Practice 1

part i. music for the “people”

2. “The Largest and Most Enthusiastic Audience
That Ever Has Assembled in the City”:
The National Opera Company of 1887 15

3. “A Precarious Means of Living”:

Early Working Musicians and Their Jobs 26

4. “Popular Prices Will Prevail”:

Competing and Cooperating Impresarios 43

5. Amateurs, Professionals, and Symphonies:

Harley Hamilton and Edna Foy 56

6. “Our Awe Struck Vision”:

A Prominent Impresario Reconsidered 73

part ii. progressive-era musical idealism

7. The “True Temple of Art”:
Philharmonic Auditorium and Progressive Ideology 95

8. “Something of Good for the Future”:

The People’s Orchestra of 1912–1913 106

9. Producing Fairyland, 1915 124

10. Founding the Hollywood Bowl 132

part iii. from progressive to ultramodern
11. Old Competitors, New Opera Companies in 1925 157

12. The New Negro Movement in Los Angeles 166

13. Welcoming the Ultramodern 187

14. Second Thoughts 202

15. Calling the Tune: The Los Angeles Federal Music Project 215

Appendix A. Los Angeles Population Growth, with Racial

and Ethnic Distribution 239

Appendix B. Musicians and Teachers of Music in the

United States and Los Angeles 245

Appendix C. A Music Chronology for Los Angeles,

1781–1941 251

Notes 255

Bibliography 325

Index 345
Illustrations

figures
1. Third Street, Los Angeles, 1885 17
2. National Opera Company program book, 1887 19
3. Hazard’s Pavilion 20
4. Hazard’s Pavilion interior, circa 1900 21
5. Douglas Military Band 27
6. Program for Faust, Fiesta Park, June 1897 35
7. Harry C. Wyatt 45
8. Frederick W. Blanchard 49
9. Harley Hamilton 57
10. Edna Foy 63
11. Los Angeles Women’s Orchestra 67
12. L. E. Behymer self-promotion 88
13. Program for American Syncopated Orchestra, Trinity
Auditorium, Los Angeles, 1919 90
14. Philharmonic (formerly Temple) Auditorium 98
15. Charles Farwell Edson 108
16. Jennie Winston 115
17. Fairyland program, 1915 129
18. First Annual Convention of the California Federation of
Music Clubs, May 1919 130
19. Artie Mason Carter 134

ix
x / Illustrations

20. Greater Los Angeles Municipal Band, 1921 145

21. Movie playbill, The Clansman, 1915 163
22. African American band, circa 1895 168
23. Alma Hightower with students, 1939 175
24. Olga Steeb 193
25. Dane Rudhyar 197
26. Program, Symphonies under the Stars at the Hollywood
Bowl, July 1933 208
27. Cover, The Baton, April 1937 224
28. California Society of Composers, circa 1937 233
29. WPA orchestra and dance troupe 236

tables
1. Los Angeles population growth 240
2. Population characteristics of Los Angeles and San Francisco,
1930 241
3. Principal ethnic origins of the 60,584 foreign-born whites in
Los Angeles County, 1910 242
4. Racial distribution as counted by the U.S. Census: Los Angeles
County 243
5. Gender distribution in Los Angeles and San Francisco: ratio of
males per 100 females 244
6. Musicians and teachers of music (separately) in the United
States, by gender, in 1870 and 1910 246
7. Musicians and teachers of music (in total) in the United States,
by gender, 1870–1930 247
8. Musicians and teachers of music, by gender (percentages only) 248
9. Racial minorities: musicians and teachers of music in
Los Angeles 249
10. Musicians and teachers of music per 10,000 population in 1910,
by city 250
Preface and Acknowledgments

Making Music in Los Angeles evolved through a series of productive acci-

dents and timely detours. Inspired by the wave of feminist discovery that
had filtered into the field of musicology by the late 1970s, I found myself
tracking the biography of a little-known American composer of opera, Mary
Carr Moore. My quest led to Los Angeles, where some rather simple ques-
tions presented themselves: Why had “my” composer actually chosen to go
there, to a city long ridiculed as not really much of a city at all? More to the
point, why did she choose to stay there through the last half of a long and
productive creative career, in a place long rumored to be utterly lacking in
musical interest? I had long accepted what I now call the “musical vacuum”
theory about music in Los Angeles. Moore’s career forced me to reexamine
my assumptions about her choice and started me thinking more carefully
about the role of music and music making in the lives of Los Angelenos, in
the lives of other Americans, and, by extension, even—especially—in our
lives today.
I soon learned that there was much more to the city’s musical life than
the usually recognized handful of canonic high spots, such as the founding
of the Philharmonic in 1919 and the arrival of the composer-émigrés from
Hitler in the 1930s. Everywhere I looked, there was more material that
raised more questions. As I discovered, my composer was just one of nu-
merous journeyman composers who survived very nicely, most of them in-
dependent of the film colony, finding sufficient audiences and students and
supporters to thrive, however modestly, in what was for many of them a
kind of artistic Eden.1 When I finished the Moore project, I was just discov-
ering Los Angeles and the culture on whose shoulders she and her contem-
poraries stood.
A number of stories emerged as I worked backward, looking for an ap-
xi
xii / Preface and Acknowledgments

propriate starting point for my new topic. Early on, there was a seminal con-
test over how concerts by visiting artists would be presented. There was the
People’s Orchestra, whose short and highly politicized career is now forgot-
ten, because it was carefully ignored by the now-dominant Los Angeles
Times. There were the contesting interests that, miraculously, gave the city
the Hollywood Bowl as a permanent institution. There was a series of defin-
ing opera productions. There was the conundrum of the city’s leading im-
presario, a self-promoting and tenacious individual who did not always at-
tract universal admiration. After 1920, there was the puzzle of “new” music,
welcomed early on and, after a few years, vigorously resisted. And finally,
there was the Federal Music Project, whose strengths and weaknesses more
or less reflected the position of music making and music makers at the end
of my period. Coaxing out these accounts, and others, proved a long-term
challenge.
My investigations continued intermittently, long after the biography of
Moore was completed. Presently, my study came to include the decades
from the arrival of the Santa Fe Railroad in the late 1880s up until the start
of World War II. It encompasses the period of political Progressivism and,
as it emerges, musical progressivism, along with their aftermath, that is, the
emergence of the modern, with its own strengths and vulnerabilities that
echo in our own time. All the while, the complexities of individual involve-
ment in music making and in the overall cultural fabric of the community
grew more obvious. Almost certainly more such stories remain unidentified
and untold—very likely as many music-making stories as there were com-
munities and generations—just in this one city. In these pages, it seems, I
have just begun to count the ways that we, like those long-ago Los Angeles
characters, have come to love and struggle with music as an essential means
of communication and self-expression.
The stories are unique, but their underlying messages are not. In Los An-
geles, as elsewhere, music inevitably reflects the wider cultural fabric and
even influences it. As I attempted to understand some of these inflections, I
marveled at the wealth of music making that kept turning up and at the pas-
sionate engagement it regularly attracted among all who involved them-
selves, whatever the manner of their participation. The feminist origins of
my engagement with music making in Los Angeles have surely affected the
outcome of this study, both my various discoveries and my ways of inter-
preting them, although by now the influences are more indirect, entangled
with other themes and considerations.
• • •
 Preface and Acknowledgments / xiii

Several opportunities over a considerable period have enabled me to pursue

this project to its completion. Sabbatical leaves from the University of
Nevada, Reno, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the
Humanities all made this project possible and contributed materially to my
exploration of what is basically a new area of study. Shorter fellowships
from the Andrew Mellon Foundation Fund at the Huntington Library, the
New York Times Foundation, and the Institute for the Federal Theatre Proj-
ect at George Mason University, along with several travel grants from the
Graduate School and the Department of Music at UNR, allowed research on
specific topics.
Many individuals have helped me discover and interpret the wealth of
Los Angeles music history explored here. Their expertise has been invalu-
able, and I thank them for sharing it with me. I am especially grateful to the
staff at the California State Library in Sacramento, the University of Cali-
fornia at Los Angeles (both the Young Research Library and the Music Li-
brary), the University of California at Berkeley (both the Bancroft Library
and the Music Library), California State University Long Beach, Cambria
Master Recordings and Archives, the Honnold/Mudd Library of the Clare-
mont Colleges, the Getty Library, the Hollywood Bowl Museum, the Hunt-
ington Library, the Library of Congress, Los Angeles City Archives, George
Mason University (Fenwick Library), Los Angeles Music Center Archives,
Los Angeles Philharmonic Archives, Los Angeles Public Library, National
Archives and Records Administration, New York Public Library for the Per-
forming Arts, San Francisco Public Library, Southwest Museum, Syracuse
University (Arents Library), University of Arkansas at Fayetteville Library,
University of Melbourne (Grainger Museum), University of Southern Cal-
ifornia (Archival Research Center), University of Texas at Austin (Harry
Ransom Humanities Research Library), Yale University (Beinecke Library),
and my home library at the University of Nevada, Reno. Innumerable dis-
cussions with colleagues at UNR (both in music and in several other de-
partments) and in the Society for American Music, the American Musico-
logical Society, and the Conferences on Feminist Theory and Music, held
biennially since 1989, have stimulated and challenged my thinking. Several
individuals made their private collections available and lent their personal
expertise, and I thank them. Lance Bowling at Cambria Master Recordings
and Archives of Lomita, California, has been particularly helpful; his Cam-
bria label plans to issue an audio CD of sounds from pre–World War II Los
Angeles in support of this volume. Ralph E. Shaffer helped with accessing
materials not easily available otherwise. In addition, I am particularly grate-
ful to Paul Charosh, John Koegel, Leta Miller, Gayle Murchison, David
xiv / Preface and Acknowledgments

Nicholls, Cindy Richardson, Wayne Shirley, Marge Sill, and several others
for their careful reading of all or substantial portions of the manuscript at
various stages and for the valuable suggestions that resulted. The editors at
the University of California Press and a whole series of anonymous read-
ers there have contributed materially to the shaping of the volume as well
as the preparation of the manuscript. Family members and friends have
heard much more about this project than they might have chosen for them-
selves; I thank them profoundly for their tolerance and patience, their con-
sistent support, and their many useful suggestions. In the end, though, I am
responsible for the topics chosen, the opinions expressed, and the conclu-
sions drawn in this book.
Chapters 3, 4, 8, and 10 originally appeared in different form in scholarly
journals and are used here with permission. Earlier versions of these and
several other chapters were read as papers to the Society for American
Music, the American Musicological Society, and elsewhere.
I also acknowledge with thanks a subvention from the Society for Amer-
ican Music, which defrayed most of the author’s expenses for manuscript
preparation.
1 Music Making as Popular Practice

Los Angeles is regularly reported as having had little to offer in the way of
music—“culturally unfocused” in one recent, relatively tolerant formula-
tion—until émigrés from Hitler’s Germany began to find their way there
in the mid-1930s.1 Yet in 1910 more musicians and music teachers were
working there, in proportion to its total population, than in any other city
in the United States. In fact, almost half again as many professional music
makers addressed the demand for music teachers, church soloists, bands-
men, theater musicians, and other paid music makers per capita than in New
York City, then the center of the entertainment industry in America.2 Even
if the U.S. Census figures (summarized in two appendices here) are less than
precise, it is clear that, long before canned and digitized music of all de-
scriptions could be had virtually anywhere for little more than the touch of
a finger, a lot of music making took place, involving a lot of people. More
than that, the presence of music was so fully taken for granted, so com-
monplace as a way of life, that later observers thought its abundance
scarcely worth comment. Music making was truly popular.
This widespread practice of music as a popular activity changed over the
three decades before and after that 1910 Census, just as other aspects of the
culture changed, resulting in the “transformation” referred to in my title.
By following that changing practice in this one city, over that half century
and more, this book lays bare some unexpected elements bridging two style
periods in music (late romantic versus modernist for concert music) that are
often, for the United States, considered separate and almost independent of
each other. On one hand, the book sketches a part of the essential back-
ground against which the musics of commercial mass culture blossomed in
the twentieth century. On the other, it suggests some previously unex-
plored, even deliberately ignored, connections (and disconnections) be-
1
2 / Music Making as Popular Practice

tween the practice of American musical romanticism (sometimes labeled the

“genteel” tradition) and the seemingly abrupt emergence of musical mod-
ernism in the 1920s. Although these two periods have been described in
terms of stylistic differences in the music, it turns out that the gaps between
them reflect changing ideas and practices about class, gender, age, and eth-
nicity as well. Those gaps, as we also discover, were repeatedly contested in
music as elsewhere, though in often fragmented and indirect ways.
As is already clear, I use popular here in its earlier sense of widely preva-
lent forms of engagement with music, rather than in the later sense of
music’s most commercially profitable (as well as widely prevalent) genres. At
the start of my period, the term was appropriate to much music that we no
longer consider popular. In fact, a lot of the music making (and music mak-
ers) traced in this book became less visible when the term popular music
came to imply primarily the music of commercial mass culture. Some music
of that older sense of popular has disappeared, and some of it came to be con-
sidered “elite,” partly for its increasingly rigid class associations, partly be-
cause its survival depended on some form of special investment or some
other cultural formation, as opposed to commercial mass culture. Because of
this focus, the book might be thought of as describing a special case of the
“antimodern.”3 In music, though, the situation has its own complexities, for
that now largely submerged earlier practice did much to shape the terms
under which much later public music making took place. It becomes clearer
than ever in these pages that apparently straightforward acts of music mak-
ing carried wider social and political freight than the notes on the page might
suggest and that the complexities of the process were far greater than music
critics noted at the time or even than recent cultural critics have argued.4
This, then, is a social history. Even though much of it deals with what is
now called concert music, it rarely deals directly with the notes or the
sounds. Instead, it centers on the extensive web of listeners, patrons, teach-
ers, students, and entrepreneurs, as well as performers and composers, all of
whom I include in the term music makers. It celebrates the involvement of
a large portion of the population, even before commercial mass culture and
new forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction gained more than a toe-
hold.5 The European-based concert and opera traditions, right along with
the practices of domestic, theatrical, ceremonial, religious, and many other
kinds of music, all had widespread currency in Los Angeles—as elsewhere
in the United States—as common means of self-expression and communi-
cation, among men as well as women, and across a wide range of ethnic and
racial identities.6 Most of the music making discussed here comes from
these traditions and practices.
 Music Making as Popular Practice / 3

I treat a wide range of music makers, women as well as men, for no single
individual or group could embody so widespread and varied a practice. The
organization of public music making is also very important to my study. Yet
I have deliberately chosen to avoid focusing on such criteria as success in
importing the most famous virtuosi to give public concerts, or the music of
commercial mass culture, or the primacy of the mid-twentieth-century aes-
thetic of high modernism, as other authors have done.7 (All of these crite-
ria come up, but so do many other things less often discussed. On the same
principle, I have not placed the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra
(1919–), for long the lynchpin of the city’s concert music establishment, in
its customary front-and-center position.) Often-drawn distinctions such as
amateur-versus-professional or public-versus-private are likewise down-
played or, occasionally, challenged. All of the four types of activities pro-
posed by Michael Broyles as necessary to the formation of a concert music
establishment—the development of musical organizations including per-
forming groups, the construction of concert venues, the emergence of pa-
trons, and the education of an audience—are among the activities reported
here. Yet they are present in far less tidy categories and with far more over-
lapping and mixed motivations than those neat categories might imply;
even then they are not the whole story, for commercial presenters and their
various economic interests played an essential role, too.8 In practice, that
means that the individuals I discuss were performing musicians as well as
variously patrons, entrepreneurs, and other musical activists. Some can fit
into more than one of these categories. Social class, gender conventions,
racial and ethnic identities, business interests, and political leanings shaped
the manner of their participation as much as did individual talent and per-
sonal inclination.
This is a regional study as well as a social history, unusual because it does
not focus on a specific genre or performing organization, as many studies
centered on individual cities do.9 For Los Angeles, the only works with wide
historical aspirations until recently have been Henry W. Splitter’s “Music
in Los Angeles,” covering Anglo concert life and theater circa 1850–1900,
and Howard Swan’s 1952 Music in the Southwest, which traces the history
of concert music in the city almost entirely through the eyes of one impre-
sario.10 As a regionally based social history, this book takes us in directions
in which, given the constraints of their one-volume format, the several ex-
cellent overviews of American music cannot go, for their size limitations
prevent them from offering more than broad-stroked accounts of regional
differences.11 The West Coast perspective of this book is, in fact, a rare one
for an investigation of Progressive-era music making or the advent of mu-
4 / Music Making as Popular Practice

sical modernism in the United States. The choice of Los Angeles, with its
early geographic isolation, its roots as a Mexican mission settlement, and its
relatively late development as an Anglo city, may even seem quixotic for
such a study. Yet, within limits, Los Angeles can be taken as a case history
for medium-sized U.S. cities, especially those in the heartland and the far
west. Minneapolis, Denver, Portland (Oregon), and Oakland (California),
for example, all reported large proportions of musicians and music teachers
in those tantalizing 1910 Census figures in appendix B, table 10; as with
many other cities, they too organized community choruses, symphonies,
and concert series, all with their own stories.
There is some justice in choosing Los Angeles as an example for the Pro-
gressive era, though, for the city was a hotbed of political and social pro-
gressivism. (Most dramatically, California’s late vote for Bull Moose candi-
date Theodore Roosevelt tilted the presidential election of 1912—the first
election in which California women voted—away from the dominant Re-
publican Party to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.) Actually, public music mak-
ing became directly entangled with Progressive politics; that entanglement
is an important part of this story. There is also irony in choosing Los Ange-
les, for the city eventually became one of the major world centers for the
new entertainment technologies (especially the movies, but also recording
and television) that radically changed the practice of music making in the
course of the twentieth century. These new practices, though spawned in
part from the Progressive-era music culture, ultimately dwarfed much of
that culture. I defer here to the substantial bibliography that already exists
on the new media, for the several general studies of Southern California
history are largely silent about the music making discussed here, although
it played so important a role in the culture.12
Another irony, given Los Angeles’ more recent racial, ethnic, and linguis-
tic diversity, is important here. In 1890, one-fourth of the city’s population
was foreign-born, at first glance a large proportion but nevertheless small by
comparison with San Francisco, Chicago, or New York. Even the residents
who identified themselves in the U.S. Census as Mexican, always more nu-
merous than in most other U.S. cities, remained a relatively small minority,
though one with more influence than the suspiciously low census numbers
suggest. (The city had, after all, begun as a part of Mexico, and the cultural
memory of this origin has never been lost.) During the years of the spectac-
ular growth described here, most of the city’s new residents were already U.S.
citizens, coming from elsewhere in the country rather than from abroad, giv-
ing the city a rather unusual degree of middle-class homogeneity.
It may come as a surprise that the broad transformation in the practice
 Music Making as Popular Practice / 5

and experience of music such as is exposed here can be traced through a so-
cial history that focuses on any one city, let alone this one. Surprisingly, the
concept of transformation emerged in the course of what began as a regional
study, with no real idea that it would become the book’s main theme.
Coupled with the emphasis on music making as an everyday activity, the re-
gional approach has another, related aspect. It has been pointed out with re-
spect to literature that regional studies allow women more visibility and
more agency than has been the case for more broadly based surveys.13 Thus,
the feminist tilt present here (in this case by initial authorial intent) has
been closely tied to the regional approach all along; it has also become a cat-
alyst, an essential element for understanding the dynamics of cultural
transformation.
In all U.S. cities, women were always much more numerous among
music makers than they were among the most famous musicians of the age,
and Los Angeles had a significantly higher proportion of female residents
than was the case for other western cities.14 Women made up 60 percent of
the musicians and music teachers who serviced the city’s music makers in
the 1910 Census and 61 percent of the total population. (See table 8 in ap-
pendix B.) Locally as well as nationally, performing musicians tended to be
male and foreign-born, whereas teachers of music were more likely to be fe-
male and U.S.-born. (The tendency for women and men with special talent
and strong interest in music to follow different career paths is dramatized
here, part of my insistence on including both in most of the stories told.)
The high proportion of women engaged in public music making, much of
which turned out to be teaching, led some critics to express concern over the
“feminization” of a profession long considered dangerously unmasculine
for U.S.-born white males, even after the ratio of women to men was re-
versed in the 1920s.15
There is, further, a class distinction about music making relative to the
sexes, for music makers in this time period were only beginning to emerge
from the cultural assumption that the music professions were not appro-
priate for U.S.-born males, for whom almost any profession or trade would
presumably be more “manly” as well as more stable financially, but that
music making was, for middle-class women, a desirable domestic skill. As
opportunities arose to make music outside the home, women of a certain
class and level of achievement were better situated to pursue them than
they were to take up many other occupations. In addition, the woman-
dominated audience that had developed for many music events, and indeed
the separate “women’s sphere,” remained important even after the Nine-
teenth Amendment gave women the vote in 1920, as the thriving women’s
6 / Music Making as Popular Practice

club culture of the following two decades attests. Forms of music making
mainly associated with the women’s sphere rapidly lost their formal audi-
ences after 1945 and have by now largely disappeared. It seems important
to acknowledge these points as playing a major role in several of the music-
centered projects described here.
The relatively short period covered here—just over a half century—
lends a certain Aristotelian unity of time as well as place to this story. Con-
cert organizing, so large a factor in this narrative, developed over a consid-
erably longer period in cities older than Los Angeles. Almost from the start
in this case, the newer media were beginning to challenge or augment the
older practices of concert giving, live theater, music printing, piano sales,
and do-it-yourself home music making, as means for the dissemination of
music. The older practices rubbed up against developing new technologies
with increasing frequency, especially from the time of World War I. In ad-
dition to these factors, contemporary, largely external but influential
changes in the organization of the entertainment industry were impacting
public music making and changing the lives of working musicians.16 More-
over, the rapid population growth that took place nationwide (mainly
through immigration) was carried to an extreme in LA, lending its own
twist to the narrative. While the overall population of the United States
tripled in the half century between 1880 and 1930, Los Angeles grew by a
factor of 100, from a town of 11,000 to a metropolis of 1.2 million. (See ap-
pendix A for more of the numbers.) Up until 1930, the city’s population at
least doubled in every decade but one. This meant that local institutional
history was carried by relatively few people, and traditions of music mak-
ing were frequently readapted to the new geographical situation or reinter-
preted by the continuing supply of new residents.17 Thus, as critic Julian
Johnson remarked in 1909, Los Angeles was by no means a “settled city”
with “settled musical interests.”18
The Progressive era in U.S. history encompassed the closing of the west-
ern frontier, the Spanish-American War, and World War I. Higher real in-
come and shorter hours for workers combined with the new technologies of
sound recording, motion pictures, and (eventually) radio to draw forth an
entirely new cluster of industries, collectively dubbed commercial mass en-
tertainment, and even new kinds of music.19 The new industrial and com-
mercial monopolies generated a labor movement in their wake.20 Along
with immigration, increased ethnic diversity, and the women’s rights move-
ment, these changes (and more) generated public discussion, most visibly
among educated, U.S.-born white men, about who we were as a nation and
what we should become. Both the changes and the discussions had broad
 Music Making as Popular Practice / 7

implications for music making, which became especially clear in the debates
precipitated by Antonín Dvorák’s sojourn in the United States in the
1890s.21 In the various pronouncements of the participants in that debate,
the rapid development of commercial mass culture and the major role
played by music in it were acknowledged only indirectly. The increasing po-
larization of commercially successful (i.e., “popular” music, in the later
sense, as opposed to “elite” music) was not acknowledged either. Specific
racial and ethnic contributions are subsumed at one end of this polarization,
unrecognized in print but widely understood nonetheless. African Ameri-
can contributions were ignored, and European, particularly Germanic in-
fluences, decried as participants in the discussion fumbled toward the in-
vention of a characteristically “American” tradition in music. In Los
Angeles, the discussions about “American” music bore their most visible
fruit in the production of the American opera Fairyland, but they also were
part of the background that generated other experiments, such as the
People’s Orchestra.) The particular size and makeup of Los Angeles’ immi-
grant populations, shown in appendix A, was another factor that affected the
changing status of music making in the early twentieth century.
• • •

This investigation of the popular (widely prevalent) in Progressive-era

music takes several specific forms, including explorations of events, organ-
izations, and individuals, as it exposes these underlying, extramusical
themes. The several stages in the transformation of my title are marked
here by descriptions of the visits of three traveling opera companies (se-
lected from many.) Each appeared under very different and very revealing
circumstances. At the start, opera was popular entertainment in both senses,
with visits from a half dozen companies in most years; therefore, I begin
part I with the spectacular 1887 visit of the pretentious National Opera
Company and its anomalous reception in Los Angeles as a highly success-
ful popular entertainment. (The company’s visit to Los Angeles is routinely
omitted from accounts of its history, making this moment the first of sev-
eral surprises here.)22
I continue with discussions of the careers of several individuals. In addi-
tion to any claim they have to historical importance or previous neglect,
they are chosen to demonstrate the range of personal involvement to be
found among individuals caught up in this culture of music making. I take
up such disparate figures as Charles Leland “Lee” Bagley, journeyman clar-
inet player and durable union activist, and Lynden Ellsworth Behymer, the
city’s best-known impresario, whose role was rather different from what
8 / Music Making as Popular Practice

has been commonly thought. I describe a selection of early public events for
which working musicians provided music. Among performers, I concentrate
on Harley Hamilton, respected violinist, teacher, and conductor, and Edna
Foy, aspiring violinist and long-time concertmaster of the Los Angeles
Women’s Orchestra. Public concerts were often organized by the musicians
themselves or by early theater operators and music dealers, such as Henry
C. Wyatt (hereafter H. C. or Harry C. Wyatt) and Frederick W. Blanchard
(hereafter F. W. or Fred W. Blanchard). Some of these individuals—most
prominently Behymer, who surfaces several times—remained active and
influential for decades. In addition to the wider cultural implications of
music making, I want to establish what making music meant to each of
these individuals and how it helped define and was defined by their roles in
the culture. They remind us that, no matter how mediated by cultural cir-
cumstances, music making can bring forth powerful, sometimes unexpected
and contradictory individual responses; these can be emotional, sensual, ra-
tional, intellectual, kinesthetic, or any of these in combination, and they can
change with changing conditions.
Part II addresses the period circa 1905–22, when musical progressivism
reached its high point and its ideology was most fully articulated. Its major
operatic event, the heavily promoted local production of a new “American”
opera, Horatio Parker’s ill-fated Fairyland (1915), actually followed several
other Progressive-era landmarks spread over several years. Its predecessors
included the construction of what came to be known as Philharmonic Au-
ditorium, with its specific church connection as a lasting reminder of deeply
held convictions about the moral and ethical power of music, common
across the political spectrum; the short and conflicted career of the People’s
Orchestra (another discovery); and the events leading up to the founding of
the Symphonies under the Stars at the Hollywood Bowl, by far the most
successful and long-lasting product of progressive music making and ideol-
ogy in Los Angeles. Their organizers and patrons, among them Clara
Bradley Burdette, Charles Farwell Edson, Artie Mason Carter, and (once
more) Fred W. Blanchard, are perhaps an even more varied lot than the in-
dividuals who appear in part I.
In part III, I take up the transition from the Progressive to the modern
and the “ultramodern,” thus addressing aesthetic issues more directly along
with cultural changes. Performers and composers (Olga Steeb, Dane Rudh-
yar, Harold Bruce Forsythe, William Grant Still, and more) take the stage
somewhat more frequently here. Back-to-back visits of two competing
opera companies in 1925 dramatize the demise of opera as a widely popular
event and its entrenchment as an elite, class-affirming happening. Where
 Music Making as Popular Practice / 9

visiting opera companies large and small had once been a staple of the much
smaller city’s theatrical life, now two weeks of large-scale opera were too
much, even though the city’s population was ten times larger. Other
changes are juxtaposed with the simultaneous social ascent and accompa-
nying ossification of opera. For one, a potent echo of the New Negro move-
ment resonated in the Los Angeles of the 1920s.
The repertoire of traveling virtuosi and the large opera companies may
have grown static, but the “ultramodern” arrived anyway, leading to a new
aesthetic polarization between the old and the new in concert music as well
as to a new relationship between the sexes in matters musical. Contrary to
received tradition, experimental, often dissonant ultramodernist music was
at first welcomed in Los Angeles, although the welcome deteriorated rapidly
after 1926. The welcome reminds us forcefully of the early identification of
the ultramodern with mysticism and the occult, as well as its association
with the dangerously foreign “other.” (This story, told in chapter 13, has
been so well obliterated that even the founders of the Evenings on the Roof
series a decade later were unaware of it. They believed that they had intro-
duced ultramodernism to Los Angeles themselves.)
The career of the Federal Music Project, a part of the Depression era’s
Works Progress/Work Projects Administration (WPA in both cases)
(1935–42), serves as a postscript, both summing up the role of music mak-
ing through the Progressive era and setting the scene for the music making
of a later generation. The FMP’s Los Angeles version included an effort to
reinvent opera as a community-based ensemble event and restore its pop-
ular aspect in a new way. Although that project ran aground in a sea of mis-
management, the changes it helped set in motion became significant in later
decades.
Differences in the cultural values associated with different genres make
the stories diverse for bands, orchestras, opera, choruses, and other music
media, but they share some elements in common. Tensions were pervasive
and continuing over the ways performances were organized and promoted.
A range of commercial aspirations and more-or-less altruistic interests was
always present, with seemingly endless variations and anomalies. Some-
times the divisions fell along lines separating political Progressives (with
some Democrats and socialists as musical allies) from more orthodox Re-
publicans. Most often, the issues involved who the audiences should be, in-
cluding the construction (literal and figurative) of venues and the setting of
ticket prices, as well as what features of performance and repertoire were
considered most desirable. Gender, too, became an underlying theme, for
women were more likely to claim the high ground of altruism and to act
10 / Music Making as Popular Practice

under the old banner of music, particularly concert music, as a secular reli-
gion. It is no accident that women were so powerfully involved in the ide-
alistic ventures described in part II or that the disillusionment with ultra-
modernism that becomes so clear in part III was tied to the decoupling of
dissonant-sounding and experimental music from religious mysticism. In-
deed, it was in the 1920s that the role of L. E. Behymer as impresario became
a negative one, discouraging new musical enterprises and in the process
shunting women toward what was fast becoming a ghettolike women’s club
culture, despite such successes as the low-budget opera reading clubs.
Throughout, the distinction between the popular and the elite in music
making was unstable, its inflections dependent on both the date and, in part,
the position of the observer as well as the genre. As becomes clear, opera,
once a major, self-supporting element of popular culture, struggled to sur-
vive as new forms of popular culture, particularly the movies but also
vaudeville, emerged to shove it aside. (Signs of its rebirth were still rare at
the end of the period discussed in this book.) It is one of the ironies that the
symphony orchestra and its literature, which had so fully captured the
imagination and intelligence of so many well-trained musicians of goodwill,
became so thoroughly entrenched in opera’s elitist role, dependent by the
end of World War I for its audiences and its very survival on the patronage
of the white middle and upper classes. Fortunately, a constructive, if quiet,
cross-fertilization has always occurred among the relatively elite operatic
and symphonic repertoires and the genres we think of as more commer-
cially oriented or less musically literate, if only because no music making,
and none of its makers, exists in a cultural vacuum.
For all my claims of inclusiveness, I acknowledge several omissions as
well. Mexicans colonized the Los Angeles area several generations before
the coming of the Anglos; their continuing and diverse presence has always
been significant, even at those moments when their numbers were rela-
tively small in proportion to the whole population. In treating that influence
only in passing here, I defer to the already large body of scholarship on the
Mexican presence and influence in Southern California.23 Likewise, I have
not addressed in any detail the growing importance of the Hollywood movie
colony, the technological changes in music making, or the coming of the
émigrés from Hitler. Each of these topics would have provided many more
excellent stories and greater insight; together they would have extended
this book to several more volumes.
It is not surprising that a city’s music making carried these complex and
incomplete cultural narratives in the Progressive era, a period when concert
music and opera were marginalized as elite, white, confusingly gendered
 Music Making as Popular Practice / 11

fragments of a much larger amusement industry. It is also not surprising

that many persons strongly resisted the pigeonholing of concert music as
an elite form of entertainment, with a relatively narrow audience, and that
women played a large role as resisters. In fact, resistance to the elitist aspect
that came with the commodification of concert life remained a major factor
in Los Angeles’ music history.
Some of what is described here survives now in such unexpected places
as school music programs and remains prestigious for an ever-smaller cir-
cle. Yet it is little known or understood by most of those who make their
music largely by newer means. The accounts here combine to reveal the
wide range of music-making interests, activities, and values that lie beneath
that remarkable census figure from 1910 and, in doing so, offer some insight
about the changing role of music making in the city and the nation. Always,
in Los Angeles as elsewhere, the basic issue in the Progressive era and af-
terward was about the ownership of music. The resulting struggles often
echoed and even influenced pervasive battles about economic organization,
class, gender, ethnicity, and race. Who would call the tunes, who would per-
form them, who would hear them, and what would be the context in which
they would be heard? How did the widely popular in concert music and
opera come to blossom in the era of political Progressivism, then find itself
transformed a few decades later, unreasonably burdened with restrictive,
class- and gender-related associations, yet prepared, on some level, for a re-
birth? This book addresses those questions.
pa rt i

Music for the “People”

2 “The Largest and Most Enthusiastic
Audience That Ever Has Assembled
in the City”
The National Opera Company of 1887

The city of Los Angeles began as a Spanish mission, founded by a party of

thirty-one ethnically diverse Mexican citizens, in 1791. The community
that grew up around it remained small, diverse, isolated, and generally left
to its own devices long after Mexico became an independent country and
the missions were secularized and effectively abandoned. When Anglos
began arriving in the 1840s and a takeover threatened from the north, Pio
Pico, then governor of the Mexican province of Alta California, asked
histrionically, “Shall we remain supine, while these daring strangers are
overrunning our fertile plains, and gradually outnumbering and displacing
us?”1 The inability of the Mexican government to respond, because pressed
by its losses in the Mexican War, made a nonanswer pretty much inevitable;
as a result, Los Angeles joined the more Anglo-dominated northern part of
California to become part of the United States in 1848. Like their more
northerly compatriots, the Spanish-speaking Californios of the Los Ange-
les basin, who had only recently displaced the local Native Americans, were
themselves displaced, left to assimilate as they might into the new culture.
Later Anglo arrivals, most prominently Charles Lummis, cherished a sen-
timental fondness for the lost frontier culture, exoticizing it through
mission-style architecture, a run of Chamber of Commerce–inspired fiestas,
and an extensive folklore around the mythical “days of the dons.”2
For most of the 1880s, the city-to-be remained an isolated frontier town
on the far side of the already-storied Wild West. In a note for the 1880 Cen-
sus, Mayor J. R. Toberman reported that half of the city’s six square miles
was planted in orchards and vineyards, which served as its parks. Its water
supply came from the Los Angeles River, an uncertain source; street sweep-
ings and dead animals were buried, spread, or dumped in the often dry
riverbed downstream from the town. He also claimed two theaters seating
15
16 / Music for the “People”

about six hundred people each and several smaller rooms used for concerts
and lectures. These catered variously to German- and Spanish-speakers,
both of whom were abundant, as well as Anglos.3 One venue was Turn-
verein Hall, opened in 1872; another was the Teatro Alarcón, opened in 1878
in the Terán Building on Upper Main Street.4 Already, visiting opera com-
panies, albeit small ones, were an integral part of Los Angeles theatrical life,
taking their place as a thriving popular entertainment with a widespread au-
dience.5 For example, in 1875, when the city’s population was well under ten
thousand, two small troupes came from San Francisco, offering popular op-
eratic scenes. Sig. Marra’s Grand Opera Company offered excerpts from
Don Pasquale (Gaetano Donizetti, 1843) and Il Trovatore (Verdi, 1853); the
Inez Fabbri Company offered excerpts from Linda di Chamounix
(Donizetti, 1842), Norma (Vincenzo Bellini, 1831), Der Freischütz (Carl
Maria von Weber, 1821), and La Traviata (Verdi, 1853). Both companies
found it profitable to make return visits.6 Considerable church music was
also presented; late in the 1870s, local performers were to be heard at the
“Unitarian Thursdays,” initiated by Caroline Severance, and in other pub-
lic and semipublic locations.
The celebrated Adelina Patti, perhaps the most famous diva of the nine-
teenth century, performed in Mott’s (renamed Armory) Hall, the largest
indoor performing space available, in 1886. Her visit helped inspire some
serious theater building. The O. W. Child’s Grand Opera House, seating a
modest five hundred, opened in 1884, and the larger Los Angeles Theater
opened four years later. In between, in 1887, Hazard’s Pavilion, a much
larger hall without permanent seating, went up. All three new venues
hosted entertainments mainly intended for English-speaking audiences,
marking the cultural shift brought by the city’s rapid growth. Small opera
troupes, all self-supporting, all offering cut-down versions of operas and
operettas, expanded their visits in the course of the 1880s. Relative to the
population, they played to good-sized audiences, usually at prices that
ranged from twenty-five cents to a dollar. Shortly before the Grand Opera
House opened, the Campanini Operatic Company had offered a program
with operatic excerpts. At the Grand Opera House, the Bijou, Pyke, and the
Emma Abbott English opera companies, all were well enough received to
pay return visits, shifting to the larger Los Angeles Theater on their return.
The Abbott company, which had first visited in 1885, offered La Traviata,
Lucrezia Borgia (Donizetti, 1833), The Mikado (Gilbert and Sullivan,
1885), Martha (Friedrich von Flotow, 1847), Il Trovatore, Mignon (Am-
broise Thomas, 1866), La Sonnambula (Bellini, 1831), The Bohemian Girl
(Michael W. Balfe, 1843), Faust (Charles Gounod, 1859), Linda di
 “The Largest Audience” / 17

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 1. Third Street, Los Angeles, 1885. Day’s Music Store is on the left. Cour-
tesy of Cambria Master Recordings and Archives.

Chamounix, Crispino e la comare (Federico and Luigi Ricci, 1850), and The
Carnival of Venice (Errico Petrella, 1851). When the Carlton Opera Com-
pany came for the first time, it played Manon (Jules Massenet, 1884), Er-
minie (Edward Jakobowski, 1885), and one other, then added Fra Diavolo
(Daniel Auber, 1830) and The Drum Major’s Daughter (Jacques Offenbach,
1879) for a second run.
The first transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869, had terminated
hundreds of miles to the north, in San Francisco. Another line, a branch of
the Southern Pacific, soon ran south from San Francisco to Veracruz, Mex-
ico, providing Los Angeles with indirect rail links to both countries. When
a second line was completed in 1886, this one leading directly from Kansas
City to Los Angeles, the city’s already-rapid growth accelerated. Competi-
tion from the new Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe drove cross-country fares
down sharply and opened the city to the massive overland immigration that
became its hallmark.
• • •
18 / Music for the “People”

Almost as soon as it was physically possible, an opera company that was de-
signed to alter the role of opera as a favorite popular entertainment ap-
peared on the scene. The National Opera Company, directed by the famous
Theodore Thomas, was spectacularly different in overall size, aesthetic pre-
tensions, and ticket prices from others that visited both before and after.7 It
required its own train (reportedly thirty-one cars) to haul its extensive cos-
tumes, scenery, and its 305 members, including a large orchestra, ballet, and
chorus. (Most companies numbered a handful and depended on whatever
local musicians constituted the orchestra at each stop.) Founded a year ear-
lier as the American Opera Company, by Jeannette Thurber of New York,
the giant company’s stated purpose was to raise the standards of operatic
performance around the country and domesticate large-scale operatic per-
formances as self-consciously “American” by including Americans in the
casts and singing in English.8 The paying public would thus have access to
the elite version of opera, not often available outside New York. The hoped-
for result would be the provision of more elaborate and “authentic” (i.e.,
more complete) performances with full forces, presented as works of art
with their own integrity for a nationwide public rather than as entertain-
ments freely adapted to local circumstances.
In its second season, the big company traveled to San Francisco, then a
much larger, richer, and more cosmopolitan city than LA. Its visit to Los An-
geles was an afterthought at that time, and it remains so, for it is consis-
tently omitted from later accounts of the company’s career.9 Despite its lofty
aspirations and extravagant size, the company was expected to pay its own
expenses on the road, just as the smaller companies did. In San Francisco,
its audiences were disappointingly small, as apparently had been the case
elsewhere. There was open time as a result, creating the possibility of an
added engagement. Even so, the company’s managers demanded the enor-
mous guarantee of twenty thousand dollars—or so the LA papers re-
ported—before it would risk playing to this smaller market to the south.
Otto Weyse, identified as a wealthy German wine merchant, was said to
have posted the guarantee, probably acting in concert with other wealthy
individuals. The Southern California backers tried a different approach from
San Francisco’s. They spurned the almost-new Grand Opera House, still the
only structure in town equipped for visiting theatrical companies, partly be-
cause its owners demanded a higher rent than usual, partly because it seated
only five hundred. Instead, they elected to rent Hazard’s Pavilion, which had
opened just two weeks earlier with a flower show (the first of many locally
generated events there). The presence of Hazard’s allowed the local pro-
moters to try for a much larger audience than the formal Grand Opera
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

Figure 2. National Opera Company program book, inside

cover, May 1887. Two performances were added to the original
five in response to the program’s enthusiastic reception. Cour-
tesy of Cambria Master Recordings and Archives.
20 / Music for the “People”

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 3. Hazard’s Pavilion, 1887–1904, site of conventions, exhibitions, major

opera productions, and, in its last years, prizefights. Philharmonic Auditorium re-
placed it on the same site. Courtesy of Cambria Master Recordings and Archives.

House could accommodate. The new hall quickly acquired a temporary

stage and approximately four thousand seats, some of them nothing more
than redwood planks on temporary risers.
• • •

To give a better idea of what a huge undertaking this project was for this
small and remote town, I digress long enough to describe the other com-
mercial entertainment offered at the same time—in May 1887—as adver-
tised (or otherwise covered) in the city’s daily papers. Apart from a few lo-
cally organized fundraisers, theatrical competition with the big company
came from events scheduled at the Grand Opera House. Earlier in May,
Baird’s Minstrels had played there for a few days, and Mr. and Mrs. George
S. Knight had played Over the Garden Wall (Willis and Herman, 1885) and
Rudolph, Baron von Hollenstein (Howard and Belasco, 1887) on alternate
evenings, leavened by one matinee consisting of Otto, a German (Marsden,
1878). (Both companies had played in New York City and elsewhere, taking
 “The Largest Audience” / 21

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 4. Hazard’s Pavilion interior, circa 1900. security pacific collection/Los

Angeles Public Library.

advantage of the popularity of dialect-based comedy.) During the opera’s

weeklong visit, Professor A. E. Carpenter offered “scenes in psychology and
mesmerism . . . wonderful, amusing, instructive,” also at the Grand Opera
House.10
More serious competition came from the local Turf Club, which offered
its second annual horse-racing meet, four afternoons at Agricultural Park
(now Exposition Park), probably also the location for professional baseball
games. The daily trotting and running events drew coverage as extensive as
the big opera company, although reports on who attended and the finery of
the women present (probably few in number at the racetrack) were absent
from newspaper accounts. The Turf Club’s ads included “Good Music”
among its (clearly secondary) supporting attractions.11 Closer in, at Main
and Nineteenth, Washington Gardens, already a well-established pleasure
garden and later an amusement park, offered an ostrich farm (“40 ostriches
on display at all times”), a zoo, and regular concerts by Meine’s military
band and Doh’s orchestra, well-known local groups.12 Somewhere in be-
tween, a “Great Cyclorama” of the Battle of Gettysburg was open in the
daytime and evenings. (Cycloramas were a popular form of spectacle before
the advent of movies.) The ad concluded with directions: “Take the South
Main-street cars to the immense Pavilion especially erected to exhibit this
decisive battle of the late civil war.” The National Opera Company’s visit
22 / Music for the “People”

promised to eclipse all previous public events, certainly including those de-
scribed in the ads.
Although they had had little advance notice of the National Opera’s
coming, all of the local newspapers carried enthusiastic promotional stories
and plot summaries before each performance, then reviewed both the per-
formance and the audience. With one accord, the normally competitive pa-
pers reported the whole week as a major social happening and a “high-class”
music event, making a fuss over the splendor of the ladies’ attire and print-
ing long lists of the more prominent locals and out-of-towners from
Pasadena and elsewhere who came for the performances. The prominent Tri-
bune, Herald, and Evening Express all carried similar front-page accounts.13
(So did the now-ubiquitous Times, at that point a minor sheet with a knack
for attracting adverse libel judgments.) Although the reported numbers are
contradictory, it is clear that the attendance was very large, especially con-
sidering the modest population of the area.
Newspaper reporting of the company’s third performance, Charles
Gounod’s very popular Faust, illustrates the company’s critical reception in
more detail. The Evening Express called it a “grand performance. . . . A vast
audience filled every seat in the great hall. . . . Not less than 4000 were pres-
ent. . . . Much more pleasing to the popular ear than the music of Wag-
ner.”14 The Tribune, which claimed the largest circulation in the city,
stressed the popular, merely “tuneful” nature of Gounod’s music and care-
fully distinguished between those listeners who were and were not musi-
cally “educated.”

The largest and most enthusiastic audience that ever has assembled in
the city of Los Angeles greeted the National opera company last
evening. Every seat in the vast auditorium was filled, and the aisles and
lobbies were packed. Well did the performance justify the size of the au-
dience. The opera of Faust is one of the most tuneful and bright in the
company’s repertoire. Gounod, while not a master of composition, as
was his acknowledged ideal, Gluck, is yet a master of the art of compos-
ing music that pleases the ear of the people (by the people meaning
these who have not been educated to understand and appreciate the
more subtle movements of musical action). His opera of Faust is per-
haps his best work. The cast last evening was fully adequate to the cor-
rect interpretation of this master piece, and the mise en scene was gor-
geous in the extreme; indeed, it may be doubted that any production
has ever been more elaborate.

The Tribune critic noted the production of Faust by the Abbott company
two years earlier and remarked that Emma Juch, the Marguerite, lacked the
 “The Largest Audience” / 23

appropriate “girl-like appearance of innocence and trusting love” of others

who had sung the role, that she had not “enough mezzo-soprano quality”
to handle the low notes, also that her acting lacked “the virile energy” of
Emma Abbott. Nevertheless, he agreed that she infused “a deal of sympa-
thetic earnestness,” that “her voice is sweet and strong,” and “her . . . mod-
erate conception of the character fully disarmed any critical comparisons.
She was enthusiastically applauded.”15
In addition to its other coverage, the Times supplied a wonderfully Dar-
winian account of the history of music as it had evolved through the ages,
leading directly to this particular week of opera: “In the [National] Opera
Company we find the consummation of what Jubal in the world’s younger
days reached toward so eagerly with untaught hand; what the Egyptian, in
his pride of power and pleasure, so longed to attain; what Greece hewed the
way for, and with ready ear was listening for down the line of ages. Let us
rejoice in our triumph and be glad. All the ages have been at work to give
us what we now enjoy.”16 The company’s initial repertoire had included
Lakmé (Leo Delibes, 1883), Lohengrin (Wagner, 1853), Faust, The Merry
Wives of Windsor (Otto Nicolai, 1849, here as a matinee), and Aïda (Verdi,
1871). The response to the first two operas was so enthusiastic that on
Wednesday evening the management announced two added performances,
a double bill of Delibes’ ballet Coppelia (1870) and Victor Masse’s The Mar-
riage of Jeannette (1853), for Friday evening. (Flotow’s Martha was substi-
tuted at the last moment for the ballet.) They also added a grand finale for
Saturday evening, Anton Rubinstein’s monumental Nero (1879). It is
worth noting that none of these operas was as much as forty years old, and
the grand finale less than ten. Thus this enormously successful run con-
sisted entirely of what would be considered today contemporary works, in
sharp contrast to the later practice of large opera companies.
Even allowing for the inconsistent and very likely exaggerated reports,
the attendance figures are staggering for so small a city, whether for popu-
lar events or not. Some newspaper reports have the large house full for
every performance except for the ill-fated Friday evening double bill. Some
were silent on attendance at the matinee, raising a question about how full
the house was that afternoon. The most conservative figures come from the
Express, which reported only twenty-five hundred on opening night. For
Faust, however, “a vast audience filled every seat in the great hall. . . . Not
less than 4000 were present.” For Aïda, “some say 3700 people were gath-
ered.” Martha drew the “lightest house,” and the audience for Nero was the
largest “except for Faust.”17 (The report for Tuesday’s Lohengrin is missing,
and no numbers are given for the matinee.) The Tribune’s numbers were
24 / Music for the “People”

higher. It seems reasonable to guess that for the seven performances, the
total audience numbered on the order of twenty thousand and may well
have been more. The city’s total population (including the very young and
the very old) would not reach fifty thousand for another three years (or one
hundred thousand if the surrounding towns are included). While it is true
that some of the audience came from Pasadena and other neighboring towns
and that some people attended more than once, the response to the National
Opera Company indicates that its visit to Los Angeles was a grand commu-
nity happening.18 At least half the town’s adult population was “elite” for
the week, if the claims to such status for opera are to be taken seriously.
Clearly the role of opera—how its class association was to be viewed—
was in a state of flux. The Times compared the National Opera Company’s
money-losing run in San Francisco with its performance in Los Angeles, one
of the few places where it prospered, in these terms:

The [San Francisco] city papers attribute this fact to the high prices at
which tickets were sold, which excluded virtually the great middle-class
of well-to-do people, who, while they have enough upon which to live
in comfort, have not enough to pay three and four dollars for as many
hours amusement. There is doubtless something in this. These high
prices result in exclusiveness, shutting out that large class in the com-
munity who are able to pay only a fair price for being entertained, but
whose combined contributions would make a much better showing
than the larger sums paid by the wealthy. Many people thus deprived of
attending are people of musical taste and fine culture—people who
would be as appreciative listeners as could be desired. It would be no
loss to any operatic company if their schedule of prices were placed
within the reach of this class in every community. The time is coming
when the wisdom of such a course will be more fully appreciated.19

Nevertheless, as the Herald reported, the audience “willingly paid prices for
seats four times greater than the ordinary rate charged for first-class enter-
tainments.” From this the paper inferred “an aesthetic taste and culture on
the part of our people which argues that we possess more dilettanti to the
square foot than any other city in the Union.”20 The company’s Los Ange-
les success resulted from the local decision to stage it in the largest available
venue—a decision that clarifies opera’s continuing role as popular enter-
tainment, with a large public following.
Theodore Thomas later wrote in his scrapbook for this tour: “Travel with
opera from April 10th, going to San Francisco, ended tour in Buffalo June
15th, 1887. Of all experiences in my life, this was the most trying.”21 While
he may have been responding to specific problems with management, budg-
 “The Largest Audience” / 25

ets, and productions, the comment may also relate to the far greater com-
plexity of “improving” the taste of Americans for opera than for symphony,
the challenge he mainly addressed during his long career. Certainly there
were specific local challenges; adapting the scenery to the informal condi-
tions of Hazard’s Pavilion, which had no permanent stage, was just one.
Even so, it is regrettable that Thomas apparently had nothing to say about
the company’s remarkable reception in Los Angeles. Thomas’s elite opera
company with popular aspirations drew an audience so large that it has to
be seen as distinctly popular. At other times and places (and a generation
later in Los Angeles), presenters of opera battled for the allegiance of high
society and paid only lip service to the general public. Although the au-
thoritative New Grove reports that the National Opera Company “failed
dismally,” it was anything but a failure in Los Angeles.22 There, for one glo-
rious week in 1887, newspaper hype or not, the elite, the popular, and even
the commercially successful were unequivocally one and the same.
Exploring the Variety of Random
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CRAL AMKHK'A. CGI Th Mi plateau itself • M- .1 here were

natural >vhi<-h led -an (•migration in that dhv<-;i<>n at a v« Th
.MI valley of ( Ihihuahui M; and the Sierra Kl 1 and Santa I-Y. the l»y
which Xew Mexico was populated, i north-casl. l»y tin- vall-.-y •>!'
the ( hi'anch of Hi' Rio . on to a considerable extent for ; on the
inner side of the w< Q llan^e in tlie of Chihuahua, the roads of that
state terminate t«» ! the west with the plateau and lead tl. ihutu of ;
mines to the south and ea In southern Mexico the isthmus of
Tehuantcpec furnishes the first lo\v pass through the continent from
the Atlantic to the Pacific, the altitude of the in 1G° 45', being only
855 feet. The attention of the early discoverers was drawn to this
remarka depression of the Mexican plateau; and the idea <>f
constructing a canal through it, though [previously entertained,
received a sudden impulse in 1871, wl. it was ascertained in the port
of San Juan de I'll ,;a that some cannon that were cast at Manila
had crossed the isthmus hy the rivers Chimalapa and Goazacoal.
.I'Yom Minatitlan, on the Atlantic, the r-ad l^ads south up
Goazcoalco River and term 'unites at rl huante] )ee on the Pacific. (
)n a ])arallel with the Tamiiieo and Acapule I across Mexico we now
see the cordilleran ]>!.-. t itself broken through and differently
shaped; n which the Laurcntian axis of the .Ytlantie sid- lie continent
tinds a repetition in the peninsula of Yuca tan. Canal surveys were
made through this | i»y the; Spaniards. ™IIuml>oldt, Pol.; Dae
roC'auic Canal*, 5.
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C62 PASSES AND KOUTES. The remaining passes in Central

America most notably connected with the dissemination of settlers
on the Pacific slope have nearly all been brought into prominence as
routes for railroads or canals. The Nicaragua route to California, in
its pass through the western range, in latitude 11° 15', and the
Pananiti route, in latitude 9° 10', are the only ones of historical note,
however; and they, as port ages connecting great sea routes on the
Atlantic and Pacific oceans, have an extensive history of their own.
In addition to these, where the distance from sea to sea is so short,
and the mountains are so fre quently interrupted and low as they
are in Central America, the number of passes of more or less local
importance is too large for mention in this connection. Those
actually surveyed for interoceanic canals or railroads were,
continuing southward from the isthmus of Tehuantepec, the
Honduras Pass, leading south from Honduras Bay along Ulua River to
the bay of Fonseca, crossing the water-shed in latitude 13° 45'; the
Nicaragua Pass, leading west from Grey town along the navigable
waters of San Juan River and Lake Nicaragua, and crossing the
water-shed to San Juan del Sur, in latitude 11° 15'. The Costa Rica
Railroad line leads west from Port Limon, at the mouth of Macho
River, to the head of Grand River, flowing into the gulf of Nicoya. It
passes the dividing ridge in latitude 10°. Along this route a fine
macadamized wagon road wras completed in 1866.30 The Chiriqui
Railroad route leads west-south-west from Chiriqui Bay, on the
Atlantic, to the gulf of Dulce on the Pacific, following small river
valleys on either side, and crossing the water-shed in latitude 9°. o
At the isthmus of Darien three different routes have been surveyed,
all of them approximately in latitude 9°; the Panama Railroad route
from Limon Bay up Chagres River having only a distance of I nter
oceanic Railroad Kept. , quoted in. Davis1 Interoceanic Canals, 9.
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TIII: i c fnrfv-seveii and ;i half miles and ;ui ahit' hundred

and iiftv-four %/ this route lias been tin- mosi prominent line of
travel from the Atlantie t . the Pacific, l>.-fumin^ >nd t > the
Central -Union I'acilic Railroad in the amouni of iis travel after isr>'j.
That leading from ( Ionia R; , . <>n tin- Atlantic side, th<- site of
the old > -!i colonvof Darien, following Chucumaque KiveMo t! ^•ult'
of San Miguel on the I \Mcilic. and \ be route inns!' i;ivcr;il)lv
reported on of all those ad\'o";iti-d i'or an interoeeanic canal by the
ollieer deputed 1 mal the comparison by the United > of ]}y the
trend of the coast at Pananri. as v/.-ll as hy 1li ••• Atrato route to
tho Pacific, the Spaniards \vei n.-itni-allv led iirst to exploi'e and to
take p ion of !iat appeared to them to be the more valuabl !tinent;
and the discoveries of placer gold-minus in South America had the
effect of leading ss the isthmus and to the south a much larger
emigration of Spaniards than went to the western coa-t of Xorth
America. To the south Panama has contributed a stead v llow of
emigration for as many centuries as there are decades in its
existence as a route to tl Northwest Coast. Yet Panama has done
more and won more by the latter since 1849 than in all her pr« vious
history. With the discovery of America, which i approximately that of
the Pacific Ocean, by Hall journey from the Darien settlement over
the isthmus of Panama in 1513, began the commercial movement
and emigrations from the north Atlantic, which in less than four
centuries have assumed the character of a Mvncral invasion of the
western world by the [ndo -European race, foremost of all race- in
physical i-fection and mental development. Having fairly p« MM!
themselves of the Atlantic Ocean, there immediately arose a rivalry
among themselves for th 9lA'Ln.iilroad* 11-10.
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GG4 PASSES AXD ROUTES. possession of the road to the

Indies. A passage, in short, from the north Atlantic to the Pacific,
giving its possessor absolute control of European trade with the
Orient, was deemed necessary by England to offset the fortune of
the Spaniards in dominating the Central American region. Thus the
north-west passage became the grand de sideratum of the English;
its history is told else where. But the problem had to await its
solution until the Anglo-American emigration to Oregon through
South Pass had developed the fabulous wealth of the Pacific flange
of the cordillera in both silver and gold, as has now been shown.
Their superior mechanical and engineering capabil ities in time gave
the English and the Anglo-Ameri cans possession of every road to
the far east by land and sea. When the pass by the Laramie plains
through the Rocky Mountains was finally perfected by railroad, not
only was the north-west passage realized, the north Atlantic beinor
brought into com7 O O mercial proximity to the Pacific, but the
destinies of the world for a thousand years hence instantly un
ravelled themselves. The extensive admixture, after the discovery of
America, of the Indo-European races now gathered under one
language and a northern civilization, rather than that of a Latin race,
placed the emigration to the north Pacific in historical rela tions of
the widest scope, and, as affecting race mix tures, of the utmost
human interest. By reason of their geographical position the North
Americans were now enabled to lay one hand upon the Atlantic and
the other upon the Pacific, midway between the Occident and the
Orient, and within easy reach of the great populations of both, and
thus permanently placed in possession of the central and
commanding situation of the civilized world as it is to be. We have
traced out the broad road made by nature in the valley of the Yukon,
forming the north-western extremity of the cordilleran plateau, and
along which
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ATIoit is beli tin- f »r nat ive A; W \Vorld fr<>m A i;i : th<

!><>th of id language l>ein^ the f tin- A . division of mankind. Tli -
of the west and ill- >U'_rht 7 !<> face, though d by ti I J'aciiic, liavt-
aeveri bele - ha I - bed be tween (hum a lino of communication j>!
dicatrd l>y the trend of the Cordillera, and t of (lie ocean ndin-j; in a
Denial cli id America, formed the commercial lii^h\\ of the Russian^
iVom their Asiatic coast to tin.- Qorl t of America. IJriedy as we have
glanced at the physical condi tions under which the emigrations from
e, 'id w ha -en influenced and directed, until finally th-v have come
together, it is noteworthy that th till Tt, and must continue to exert,
a like influence, in •reciter decree as the progress of i lenient, «>f in
dustry, and of wealth shall enhance the importance of
communications: a permanent guide to the student of history who
would attempt to read the future.
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CHAPTER XXI. MACKENZIE'S VOYAGE. 1789-1793. ORIGIN,

OCCUPATION, AND CHARACTER OF ALEXANDER MACKENZIE — His
JOURNEY TO THE ARCTIC OCEAN AND RETURN -- EMBARKS AT
FORT CHEPEWYAN FOR THE PACIFIC — PROCEEDS UP PEACE
RIVER — WINTERS AT FORK FORT — CONTINUES HIS JOURNEY
THE FOLLOWING MAY — AR RIVES AT THE FlNLAY BRANCH —
TURNS SOUTHWARD INTO PARSNIP RIVER — ASCENDS A BRANCH
OF THIS STREAM TO ITS SOURCE — PORTAGE AT THE GREAT
DIVIDE — DESCENDS BAD RIVER TO THE FRASER, WHICH THE
PARTY FOLLOW AS FAR AS QUESNELLE — RETURN TO A TRAIL
ABOVE WEST ROAD RIVER — STRIKE OUT OVERLAND FOR THE
WESTERN OCEAN — ROUTE — ARRIVE AT FRIENDLY VILLAGE —
GREAT VILLAGE — RASCALS' VILLAGE — REACH THE SEA AT
BENTINCK NORTH ARM — OBSERVATIONS — TRACES OF
VANCOUVER — RETURN — TROUBLES WITH THE NATIVES — NAR
ROW ESCAPES — REACH FRASER RIVER — ARRIVE AT FORT FORK
— THE JOURNEY COMPLETED. WE come now to the first passage by
a European of the Rocky Mountains north of California. This honor
belongs to Alexander Mackenzie, a native of Inverness, knighted by
George III. for his distin guished services. Emigrating to Canada
while yet a young man, in 1779 he entered the service, as clerk, of
Mr Gregory of Montreal,, a prominent fur-trader of that day, and
subsequently a partner in the North west Company. After remaining
with Gregory for five years, he engaged in business on his own
account, becoming partner, first with Pangman and Gregory, and
later in the Northwest Company. Mr Mackenzie possessed a vigorous
mind and a fine physique. In form he was of medium stature and of
spare muscular build, symmetrical, very strong, lithe ( C6C;
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PREPARATION 'id active, and capable of enduri fati^n His

features wei ^ular. < bright and searchll IT and iiioulli (ireciaii. and
lii> i'i uvhend hi^h, intellectual, and crowned witli dark \\ hair. Firmn
nid wri^ht marked the man in py attitude and expression. Lips, chin,
and facial illumination, 1 implied the p« > don of a will whi'-h would
never r< itisfied until its purp< eompli>hed. In thou-ht he was as
refined and noble as in outward sion lie was dignified. His energy
was mild, not of the impatient, fretful order, and therefore well
suited to his self-imposed task. His lar;_ ntle eyes imparted to his
decisive feature- a suavitv of expression <>f the utmost importance
to him in deal ing with his own men, who were sonietinn > inclined
to he mutinous, no less than with affrighted savasri . o ~ who in him
beheld the first white, man they had < en. It was an enterprising
spirit and an inquisitive <-ominercial mind which prompted
Mackenzie to attempt explorations; and when these ardent, desires
were conded by his associates, who were willing to 1,,-ar their
portion of the expense, the' field of his ambition lay hefore him
unobstructed. More immediately it was the old endeavor to find a
practicable route from ocean to ocean, in this instance united with
commer cial zeal, that stimulated a journey to the Pacific. Xor was
the hazardous enterprise to be entered upon with precipitation.
Success, so far as careful preparation could go, must be secured in
advance. Hence before undertaking his journey we tind Mr
Mackenzie studying astronomy and navigation in London so that he
mi^ht properly record his obser vations wherever he should ^o.
Hein-- neither geolo gist nor naturalist, he would not trouble himself
with what he knew nothing about. Patience he knew t1 value of, as
well as the capability to endure and th tact to make others endu:
Herein were all th of BUC ! coniin >tthllMa-m, and
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6G8 MACKENZIE'S VOYAGE. strength, which accident or

incalculable events alone o could circumvent.1 The journey to the
Arctic Ocean, though of the highest consequence in its results to
science, need not long occupy our attention. It dates from Fort
Chipewyan, a post of the North west Company, situated at the
western end of Atha basca Lake, near where Peace River, which
opens a passage from the Pacific slope, discharges its waters, and
the channels which carry them to the Northern Ocean take them up,
and where the distinguished explorer was sometimes in charge. The
site of this post was at this time, of all places on the continent, a
point of inquiry, the great rivers on either hand being to the
intelligent, thoughtful mind two mighty marks of interrogation. Mr
Mackenzie set out on the 3d of June 1789, in a birch-bark canoe,
having on board a German, and a crew of four Canadians, two of
them with their wives. In two other smaller canoes, with his family
and fol lowers, wras an Indian called English Chief, who laid claim to
the honor of having attended Hearne in his Coppermine River
exploration, and who now purposed adding to his laurels by
following a still more famous discoverer. These natives were to act
as hunters and interpreters. One of the company's clerks, M. Le
Roux, accompanied the expedition a portion of the \vay in another
boat laden with goods for purposes of traffic with the natives.
Trapping beaver, shooting wild-fowl and reindeer, and catching fish
as they went, the party proceeded by wTay of Slave River to Slave
Lake, and thence down the Mackenzie to the Arctic Ocean, where
they gave chase to whales and paddled 1The journal of his
expedition, entitled Voyages from Montreal on the River 8t Laurence
through the, Continent of North America to the Frozen and Pm-ific
Oceans in the Years 1789 and 1793, was published in London in
1801. It is far more elegantly written than are the journals of fur-
traders usually. The reader feels that he is perusing the work not
only of a shrewd and intrepid commander, but of a humane and
intelligent gentleman.
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TO Till: ARCTIC OCT.AX. CCO nin<:ng ill*' ierl ,]] the while,
however, Inoldi I' >r ;i 014 /' '/'""' >A as tin- ( 'aiiadians ealled it,
and IM-M in no \ desirous of visiting a northern Whthe explorer en 1
I!K- river \vlii<-h 1..- nun. the ])<» ill. ni <.f its mouth was wholly
unknown to liini, and along i ;t ire way, both in goin^-and ruin lu-
SOUL;-' >im; stream which should conduct him w- 1. He was not a
little surprised, th< to iind himself in July in the icy regions of t1
farthest north and under the stai summer sky and never Betting
summer sun of the hyperb; instead of on the shore of the more
genial Pacific. rFhe journey was unattended l>y the usual hardships
'r-breadth escap* The natives were not tr«»ul;l , food was plenty,
and navigation < , J.oad. I witli line; peltries, Le Koux r» mrned
homeward from. Slave Lake. At Bear Lake iron ore and coal \ found.
The natives indulged in a variety of tal more or less absurd
concerning1 lakes and rivers toward o the setting sun, relating what
they supposed would most accrue to their advantage. The Eskimos
affirmed that eight or ten winters previous they had seen 1 the we :
rd, at a place they called Belhoullay Couin, or White Man Fort, large
canoes full of white men, who gave them iron in exchange for
leather. He en deavored to persuade the natives to guide him a-
TOSS the country, but was unsuccessful. On another occa sion the
explorer gave a native some beads to make a dra \ving of the
adjacent country." After an absence of one hundred and two da;
Mackenzie returned to Fort Chcpewyan the li_Mh of September,
regarding as somewhat of a failure what was indeed a success, none
the less brilliant becau easily achieved. - 'This singular map he
immediately undertook to delineate, :md ingly I a very long point of
land '• '.\ the rivers, : : without • least attention to tlirir cor. \\liich
lieivpi* runni: iut . . at the extremity of 'Hans of' Lhaullay Couin, or
White Man I .;i 1'ort, and con. I; v.-hich this river «'. If at Whale
Island commtuu nrith Norton Sound.1 MacL \\y.,bo.
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670 MACKENZIE'S VOYAGE. Three years after his northern

tour Mackenzie again made preparations to set out in search of a
route to the Pacific Ocean. His present plan was to ascend the
current that flowed near his door instead of descending it.
Embarking at Fort Chepewyan the 10th of October 1792, he
proceeded up Peace River with the intention of reaching that autumn
the base of the Rocky Moun tains, where stood the most distant
western settle ment3 of the Northwest Company. This would give
him a fine start for the ensuing spring. The first station on the river
at that time was called Old Establishment,4 which the party reached
early on the morning of the 19th, just in time to prevent its total
destruction by fire, arising from the carelessness of a party who had
camped there the previous night. Next day they reached New
Establishment,5 that winter in charge of James Finlay. The exploring
party landed amidst the firing of guns and the re joicing of the
people, who were now especially happy over the prospect of rum,
for not a drop had these martyrs had since the previous May, it
being then the rule that the summer traffic of this locality should not
be stimulated by fiery potations; wherefore, if the savage wTas
forced to abstain, it were unseemly for the civilized man to
denaturalize himself. But neither civilized nor savage on this occasion
were in the least backward in confessing the general aridity of their
constitutions, whereupon Mackenzie produced a nine-gallon keg of
rum and some tobacco, and calling together the redskin hunters, to
the num ber of forty-two, embraced the occasion to preach 3 Fort
Chepewyan was the westernmost depot of supplies at this time, but
there were several trading establishments along Peace River, the
farthest being about 200 miles distant. While on his first journey
Mackenzie left McLeod in charge of Fort Chepewyan ; during his
second expedition Roderick Mackenzie ruled. 4 This station was only
relatively ancient, and was so called because there Was one later
built a short distance up the river called New Establishment. Both of
them had been erected within two or three years. 5 Fort Vermilion
and Fort du Tremble were subsequently erected on sites passed
before reaching this point.
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UP PEACE RIVER, tin-in "limn, telling tin-in lm\v to conduct

tln-ni• their o\\ 11 ;IIM| the white man's be&i interparticularly tin-
white man All listened attentively and promised unreservedly. \Vitli
such palpable beaven <»f happiness in immediate viev . what
missionary could not perform mirac],- of < don? ( )i;t of th«' three
hundred nati\< •- concrefirated \u-< ^5 ' 7 aboui sixty were hum
Warned hy the formi of ice on the I'ivci-, and with an apology \\>r
his un wonted liberality in the distribution of drink toba on the third
day after his arri\'al continued hi.> journey, alter ^ivin \me inst nu-t
i«». to Mr Fin lay. The volleys of musketry lin^-his departure
expre»ed thu thanks and ^ood \\ 3 . »f the peop! His loaded canoes
liad Ix-cii de-jiatdied 1 • that now his progress was rapid. Pa^.-iiiLf
the s[)ot wliei-e afterward was placed Mdvod Fort, lie arrived at a
small hranch of the ri\ unin^ in from the south, six miles heyoiid
which was his wint.-i-in^ place, called Fort Fork, whore ho landed
<>u the 1st of November. Thither the previous spring two men had
hr.-n sent to dear the ground and s<|iiare lo^s for buildings. Right
well had they improved the time: for U->id« having prepared the
timher and planks lor the erection of a bouse, they had cut enough
palisades n inch. in diameter and eighteen ieet lon^- to end -pot
one hundred and twenty feet square, and had du- a ditch three feet
deep in which to plant them. Pitching his tent until the buildings
should he com^5 ^2 pleted, Mackenzie called the neighboring sa-.
>Aether, and ^ivin^ to each some rum and toh, Ije.Lcau to preach
to them according to his custom. 1! told them lie had heard had
reports of them and h had come to learn the truth. If they did well,
they shonlii !;(.« treated with kindness: if ill. they should 1 punished.
Immediately the whole assemhl: J Ins devout followers, ready to
belie\e and do as the
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GT2 MACKENZIE'S VOYAGE. master might say, as long as

the rum and tobacco should last. As the winter deepened the cold
became intense. The 23d of December a house was finished for Mac
kenzie, of which he took possession, and a block of five houses
more, each twelve by seventeen feet, was soon completed for the
men. Many sick and maimed amoi »o* the natives, and some among
his own men, came to Mackenzie to be treated, and although he was
not a surgeon he did not decline the responsibility, but gath ered
such remedies as he happened to be familiar with and applied them:
for fur-hunters in those days must know something about everything
or suffer severely sometimes through ignorance or lack of wit. This
explorer saw in the healing art no great mystery locked in the Latin
terms of ancient mysticism, but a V simple practical matter which
every man possessing common-sense might learn and apply.
Quantities of furs were brought in; for the deep snow having not yet
come, the beaver could be easily tracked. Food was abundant, and
Mackenzie took care to keep himself and men in good condition for
the arduous efforts of the coming summer. o Thus not unpleasantly
wore the winter away. The new year was welcomed with the
discharge of fire arms, and spirits and flour distributed among the
men. Frigid-featured nature was subdued by smiling spring. April
bade the snowr adieu, though the river was yet covered with ice;
and with the pink and purple May flowers, and the yellow-buttons,
came the voyageur's most exasperating summer pests, the gnats
and mos quitoes. No sooner was the river free from ice than
Mackenzie closed the year's business by writing up his accounts, and
having despatched six fur-laden canoes to Fort Chepewyan, he
prepared to embark at once on his journey of discovery. Nine men,
two of whom were native hunters and interpreters, had been
selected for the expedition, and every one of them promised to
stand by his com 
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:K. mander to tin- last.6 ( )MC cam ei I'M with lour and
three quarters i'«-rt beam and twenl six indies hold, was launched
for 1 Ti Blender craft, defined to carry ten ]><•] with all their iMjuij .
arms, ammunition, provision for presents, ans th tluvc thousand
pounds, wa& yet so slight thai two mm could easily cany it three or
four miles without >pping. On the Oth of May 17'.):) tlie party left
Fork Fort and pointed their little vessel up the stream. I* them
spread primeval nature in redundant ga\ ( )u the west we're
decorated ten formed of altcnia precipice and plain; high hills co1 I
with wlii spruce and hirch rolled oil' toward the • : alder and willow
fringed the stream. Vast herds of elk fed quietly upon the uplands,
and myriads of Imil'alo with their frisking young enlivened the plains.
The fieiv grizzly was ] >asseil by at a respectful distance. Ground
hogs and cormorants were likewise let alone. Gai, lor food was easily
secured without detention, the hunters going before. At first
navigation was easy; though the current was swift, strong arms sent
the quivering bark rapid! up the stream. In propelling, poles were
used me freely than paddles. But by and by obstacles were en
countered in finding a passage through these unknown waters. It
soon became apparent that this was to 1 a journey different in kind
from the last, one which would try men's strength, temper, and
fidelity. Cascades became frequent, driving the travellei from the
water into the woods. Sharp rocks cut into the sides of the boat;
sunken trees pierced the bottom, and rapids and whirlpools opened
seams, the heavy cargo increasing the strain. On the 21st of May
they encountered a torrent 'The names of the white men were
Alexander Maokay, Fran 'is Beau-. "Baptist r.i.i.siiu, J'Yanniis Coiirtuis,
.Jacques Ilraui-hani]'. uK's I )iin-itc, the two last mentioned having
been \vith Mack former jounx Hnr, X. W. COAST, VOL. I. 43
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C74 MACKENZIE'S VOYAGE. walled on eitlicr side by almost

perpendicular moun tains. For three leagues the river was white with
rage as it rushed onward between two mighty walls of rock. Already
the men began to complain, and talked of returning. The place, they
said, was simply im passable.7 Mackenzie paid not the slightest
attention to their remarks, but prepared to go forward. With
exceeding difficulty the ascent was made by cutting trees and
warping the canoe up the side. The summit reached, it was let down
on the other side in like man ner with the aid of ropes. The cargo
was carried over the portage on men's backs. Three or four miles a
clay, and that with excessive fatigue, was the most that could be
made. A written account of the journey was sent down the river
from time to time, enclosed in a tight keg. Arrived on the 31st at the
fork, where one branch, subsequently called Finlay River, from James
Finlay, who made a tour in this region shortly after Mac kenzie, came
in from the north-west, and another, afterward known as Parsnip
River, from the quan tities of wild parsnips that grew upon its banks,
flowed in from the south-east, the explorer took the southern
stream, although his instincts pointed toward the northern one,
which was larger, less raging, and came from seemingly nearer the
course he wished to follow.8 But before starting, an old Indian had
cautioned him by no means to be led away in that direction, as in
divers branches it scattered and was soon lost 7Fraser, who in 1806
followed the track of Mackenzie, says of him at this point : ' I can
affirm that from the portage to Fenlay's branch, and which I con
tend to be the main branch of the Peace River, we had few of the
difficulties he mentions to have encountered. The navigation is not
only safe but as easy as in the lower part of the Peace River. '
Franer's First Journal, MS. , 70. It may be that the water was higher
during Mackenzie's ascent than during Eraser's ; at all events I
would sooner suspect the latter of churlishness than the former of
exaggeration. 8 Malcolm McLeod, son of chief -trader John McLeod,
in his notes to Archi bald McDonald's journal of Governor Simpson's
canoe voyage up Peace River and down the Columbia in 1828,
makes frequent reference to Mackenzie's say ings and doings; see
also McLeod' s Map Peace River; Mayne's Brit. GoL, 84; Macfie's
Vancouver Island, 208.
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DISAFF] the mountains. Therefore In- took tinh branch,

which was the proper one. S<> rapid now was the currenl .-Mid so
il, INCH threw oil' restraint, ami openly cue [•edition and nil eng i in
it. Calmly M, keii/je bore with them, for they had sull'ered jmieh;
vertheless he iirmly expressed jiis determination to proceed. The
heaver in this vicinity were given an excellent character for industry,
acres of laiy poplars having 11 cut by them at various places alon^1
the ,111. ]iaiu and thunder were frequent and re. Thus the explorers
continued their way, pa»hi'_;- th streams which ilowed in from their
left, and leaving .tion Biver and the branch which leads to McLeod
Lake, on the ri^ht.1' 'lie day Mackenzie ascended a hill and climbed
a tree in order to obtain a view of the country. It was so thickly
wooded that he could distinguish but little-, but toward the north-
west he saw a le country with snow-clad mountains beyond; another
ridge, snowless, stretched southward, and betwi the two he fancied
his route lay. Descending again to the river he was at a loss to know
whether his boat was above or below him. Discharging his gun,
there was no reply; then he broke branches and threw them into the
river, that, carried downward by the current, they might notify his
party, if they were below, of his whereabouts. Another discharge
failed to produce any reply. Mackenzie then ascended the stream for
some distance, and turning retraced his o steps, his anxiety
increasing every moment. At last wet and weary he reached his
party and learned that 9 From the narrative alone it is almost
impossible to follow tl. 'Htion up this river, but with tin- aiil of Mr l-'r,
rij>t M;ir',, urse is iii;uli' plain. The most diirct route, and the one
hitherto believed t > i been t;ikeii by the first expedition, \v;is that
past MeLf«,d 1 ( me Portage; but in my narrative oJ rb jonrney
following, I oleariy sh'i\\- it was ; [i branch which w.. ndrd. lending
to a shorter portage, after which was another .small stream to b<
'ing Kiver.
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C76 MACKENZIE'S VOYAGE. the canoe had been badly

broken, that the men were n more than ever exhausted and
discouraged, and that in his absence they had been laying plans to
build a raft and return. Still the journey was continued, Mackay
walking much of the time with the hunters, that their minds might
be diverted from returning, as well as to lighten the canoe. The
shooting of a porcupine is recorded; they also found patches of wild
parsnips, the tops of which they gathered and boiled with pemican
for their supper. On the 9th of June the party came upon a tribe of
Rocky Mountain Indians, who mani fested both fear and courage at
their appearance, though some fled to the forest. Assured at length,
they permitted the strangers to approach. They had heard of white
men, they informed the interpreters, but they had never before seen
such a sight. They obtained iron from a people living on a river to
the westward, which was only a branch of this river, and between
which and Peace Hiver there was a carryingplace of eleven days'
march. For this iron they gave beaver and dressed moose skins, and
the tribe with whom they traded travelled a whole moon to reach
the country of other natives, who lived in houses, and from whom
they traded for this same iron. The last named people likewise must
make a journey for it from their country to the sea-coast, where they
found white men like those present, who came in ships as big as an
island. Thus we see the poor savages in the heart of this immense
wilderness beset by civil ization behind and before, and even then
the pale strangers, harbingers of death, at their door. Here was a
dilemma. Mackenzie wished to strike s mie stream which would carry
him to the Pacific. To find the spot of Carver's speculations where
the four great rivers of the North American continent, a northward
flowing stream, an eastward, a southward, and a westward, all took
their rise within an area of thirty miles, did not seem at all likely at
this moment.
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ABORICIX IV. C77 To ii'l T River much farther was

impossible. For a moment In- \va I fco abandon t L and strike out
along tin; line of the iron i !.<•!' but a little reflection -tii-d him that
a coi would be suicidal, as he could in rry a tenth part of the m uy
food, ammunition, a presents t»> secure him good t rent ineiit
among lhsavage tribes in the In-all of the wilderm Meanwhile the
most generous hospitality was af forded thestrangers by th savages,
for not only did they bring them iish for food, and beaver-ski]
presents, but at night, at the solicitation of tin- civili/.ed Christians,
the men of the forest not only signed to them their beds, but the
partners of them. Next morning mention was made by one of t!
natives, while standing by tin- camp fire, of a grriver in the direction
the white men were going, and between which and them were three
lakes and th carry ing -places. From these lakes, which were all near
the source of the river they were now on. small stream flowed into a
large river which ran toward the mid-day sun though it did not
empty into the ocean.10 They were many and brave who inhabited
that country, so said the informant, a they built houses and lived on
islands. This coin ciding with what filled the ardent mind of the
explorer, and being what he wished to believe, he straights
embraced the tale as true. Then taking from t o iire a black coal, and
stripping from a log a piece bark, he directed the native geographer
to draw him a map of that country, which was satisfactorily done.
Moreover, one of the savages was induced to act as guide to the
border of the neighboring nation. And now once more all wras
activity and hope. The 10th of June the company, refreshed, embark
10A r< tact iVscription of the Eraser, \vlm-h conl-1 n oriV.l to the
imau;Hmti<»u of tin; writer, for he ; 'The opinion that the river tliol
not discharge it.^'lt" iut<> t ..• confidently imputed to 1 of the
country.' .'/ ami yet the ) Joes not discharge directly into ihe inaLn
oceuu.
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678 MACKENZIE'S VOYAGE. As usual on such occasions, for

the safety of the guide the old men of the tribe expressed the
greatest so licitude,11 though the guide himself did not appear
greatly troubled. Five beaver-skins presented Mac kenzie the night
before, were returned, with the as surance that he would be back
that way in two moons and purchase them- -which conduct on the
part of a European must have astonished even an unsophisti cated
savage. Proceeding up the river, the first night from the friendly
camp, fearing that the guide might repent his bargain and desert,
Mackenzie sought fresh assurances. o ~ "How is it possible for me to
leave the lodge of the Great Spirit?" the young man replied; "when
he tells me he has no further use for me, I will then return to my
people." They passed, the llth, a river on the left, winding round a
conical elevation called by the Indian guide Beaver Lodge Mountain.
Another small stream was seen coming in on the same side, two or
three miles above which they left the main channel, which was here
not more than ten yards wide, and entered a sluo^ish meandering;
stream,12 still narrower, which OO O ' ' soon brought them to a lake
two miles in length and from three to five hundred yards in width,
fed by mountain snow. Here was spruce for the principal wood, with
white birch, willow, and alder. There Avere swans in great number,
geese and ducks; like wise moose, deer, and many beaver; and of
birds, blue11 On a former occasion when Mackenzie carried away a
guide, an ancient of the natives exclaimed: 'My nephew, your going
pains my heart. The white men rob us of you. They take you among
your enemies ; you may never return. Were you not with the chief I
should be disconsolate ; but he calls and you must go ! ' 12
Strangely enough Mackenzie does not say, when he quits the main
channel, whether he turns to the right or to the left. But turning to
Eraser's manuscript we find the same place thus described: 'Monday,
30th June 1806. Bad rainy weather; notwithstanding we set off early
and soon passed a considerable river that flows in from the left close
to the place called by Sir Alexander Mackenzie the Beaver Lodge.
About half a mile farther on we passed another river on the right,
and then put ashore to cook for La Malide. Soon after we left the
main branch on the left and entered another small river on the right,
the waters of which are very clear and deep. ' Frastr's First Journal,
MS., 112.
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A \T SriPJT. G79 j,-i nd humming-bird Wild \ the banks in

>n. .1 ' ing to thu upper end of the Lib-, 1 landed ;u id unloaded.
Here wa Height of Land, tin of the great >hud wliidi part. -d the
lalling wa . sending those on one >idu to thu c. ma thus;- on 1 to
thu w. 'Fills was on thu TJth of June 1793. Following beaten path
leading over a ]<>\v ridge eight hund. and iteen ]' L* to another
small lake of about thu samu sizu as tliu one just luft, they again
umbarl. and found themselves now moving along with the cur rent.
At thu end of the hike they discovered a M river, shallow at first, but
soon increased l»y other small struanis, through which with difficulty
tl forced their way, unloading to carry at four o'clock, and at live
entering another lake nearly round, and in diameter about one third
of a mile.15 Thuncu thentered another river called by Fraser
subsequently Bad J vivur, which rushed impetuously over Hat stOB
so that soon they were obliged to land, unload, and encamp. It is far
more frightful in canoe navigation descending than ascending
unknown streams with iVeijiient cascades and falls. This shooting of
rapids which the Great Spirit indulged in, the iu-\v guide did not
relish. A great spirit that required guiding in mountains which he had
made, was rather a tame affair after all, and might possibly bu
mortal unoii to be dashed in pieces on thu rocks. At all events his
heavenly canoe might split and lut thu poor Indian 13 'This I
consider as the hidiost ,-nnl southernmost source of the Vnji^ah or
I1 ,'i\vr, latitude r>l '_' t' north, longitude 1'J1J \vt'st from « which
after a winding eour.se through a \ ;ent of conn many laru'e rivers in
its pro ;iiid ]ia->ing through tinempiie.s itself into the Fro/t-n O.van,
in 7 of the .Mackei rety foot of which he w . ploivd. 11 J''i'aser. /•'.,
••nal, MS., 1 1."), calls this port;/. hundred yards long,' and the lake
at the southern end of it 'about three miles l.'iig. ' L> ' The distanc. •
hundred and sixty yards to another lake not quite as large as the
last.' i'ru.-* r'd J-'ir-4 Journal, MS., 1 l.">.
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660 MACKENZIE'S VOYAGE. drown, hence he would fain

return. But the spiritwater of the white men was sufficient to fortify
his courage, so that he promised to go on. Earty next morning, the
13th of June, a road was cut and the canoe carried, as they thought,
below the rapid. The water here was anything but placid, and on
embarking the men insisted that Mackenzie, who had started to walk
with some others in order to lighten the canoe, should enter the
boat and die with . them if they were doomed to die. The evil they
feared came upon them quicker even than they had anticipated.
Scarcely had they shoved off from the bank when the canoe struck.
The swift current then catching the boat drove it sideways upon a
bar. All hands jumped into the stream, which so lightened the boat
as to enable the water to carry it over the bar into deep water.
Clinging to their craft, the men climbed in as best they could, leaving
one of .their number behind. Before they were fairly seated they
were again driven against a rock, which shattered the stern and
threw the boat to the opposite side, there breaking the bow in
pieces. The foreman caught some overhanging limbs, but was
dragged from the • boat in his attempt to arrest its progress. An
instant more and they were in the midst of a cascade, and the
bottom breaking on the stones. The boat now filled, o all jumped
into the water, and the steersman called out for the men to save
themselves. In a peremp tory tone Mackenzie ordered them not to
quit their hold on the boat, which command they fortunately obeyed,
thereby not only saving the cargo but their own lives; for carried out
of the breakers, where they would have been dashed in pieces or
carried over other yet more fatal falls, an eddy caught and threw
them into shallow wrater, where they made a stand for their lives,
the wreck meanwhile resting on a rock. It came upon them like a
flash, the embarkation, the dangers, the destruction of the boat, the
miracu lous escape of the men- -not more than five minutes
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NARROW ESCAP1 v ired to si rip these expLn I heir bo and

part of t Ii. |uipme, Tln-ir tii tho; of the fcwo men who were ]<-i't in
peril ous predicaments in the wal and when, fortui me up unhn hey
be^-an t what th< could IVoiii fene wivek. Si ran id e -d damage,
hut tin: halls v. There were shot, however, of which balls could !>••
made. Such efl'i -eN as were not swept away were now landed and
spread out to dry. AVhen tin- Indian I tendants of the expedition
who were walk in id bunting on the shore saw the danger and
misfortune which had befallen those in the boat, they d themselves
upon the bank and lifted up their voic and wept, without making any
move to render a an Mackenzie's companions were at heart we;
than the savages; for when they saw the sad pli-ht • which they
were reduced, they rejoiced inward! for now they were sure that the
hated expedition mu be abandoned. But not so the commander.
Reaching shore battered and benumbed, so cold and exhausted that
he could hardly keep his feet, having stood in the water holding the
shattered canoe until the wet remnant of cargo was landed, he said
little but listened to the remarks of others, and congratulated them
on their •ape. Not a word was spoken of continuing the journ«-y
until the men had been made warm and comfortable by a good lire
and a hearty supper; not until liquor enough had been administered
to i their >pir'n and throw a halo of romance round their misfortune
Then very gently Mackenzie recalled to their minds that before
starting he had notified them that hard ships and dangers were
before them; that t! u promised to stand by him : and that he did
not lu-liex to be mentl who would forfeit their word through fear, lie
was going forward, he said, if he went a
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682 MACKENZIE'S VOYAGE. and if there was a man of

Montreal present who was afraid to accompany him, he had greatly
mistaken their character. It was enough. Not a word more was said
about turning back — as long as the effect of the liquor lasted.
Although it had been regarded as a hopeless case, the canoe was
repaired with gum and bark so as to do service after a fashion.
Meanwhile the guide had given the Great Spirit the slip when he saw
him thus come to grief. Cutting their way through thickets, they
carried the now soaked canoe through dangerous swamps, midst
swarms of gnats and mosquitoes, under a burning summer sun,
making only two or three miles a day.16 After another succession of
rapids and falls, on the 17th of June, at the end of a carry ing -place
three quarters of a mile in length, through which they had to cut
their way, they put their boat again in the water, but were soon
stopped by drift-wood. Thus they alternated between the water and
the land until noon, when they found themselves within three
quarters of a mile of the great river. Here the stream which they had
just descended broke into small channels, none of which were
navigable, so that they were obliged to cut a passage through the
under brush and drift-wood, and then drag the canoe and carry the
cargo through a swamp to the bank of the great river, which they
reached at eight o'clock.17 16 Fraser complained greatly of this Bad
River, as he called it, affirming it was the worst piece of canoe
navigation he had ever encountered. Notwith standing he had
Mackenzie's experience to guide him, he did not make much better
work of it. At the long bad rapid he says * the canoes were
continued one after another by six men and one of ourselves; and
though they were but lightly loaded it was with much difficulty they
were run down ; and through the awkwardness of the men mine
was run against a large embaras in the middle of the river which
broke the bow and smashed all the pieces to the second bar.
Fortunately there was not much water in the river, and the channel
was narrow. All hands jumped out and pulled the wreck on shore
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