The Wakely sisters--Rose, Louise and Flora--were the "First Ladies" of the professional theater to appear on the Denver stage. When Rose, known professionally as Mlle. Maydee, [sic] disappeared suddenly in the fall of 1860, simultaneously with the disappearance of a gambler named Thomas Evans, the cry of "Abduction" resounded throughout the swarming young mining town on the banks of Cherry Creek. Evans was branded a fugitive and his trial was scheduled under a big cottonwood tree--providing Sheriff Ned Wynkoop, who set out in pursuit, could overtake the pair.

THE false-fronted wooden buildings along Denver's Larimer Street made long shadows on the dusty, wheel-rutted thoroughfare on an afternoon in late September, 1859. A team of oxen, pulling a heavily laden emigrant wagon, pulled up in front of Harry Gunnell's Billiard Saloon--a spanking new two-story frame building gleaming in a freshly applied coat of white paint.
    Holding the reins was a lean young man whose dark curly hair showed beneath the brim of a dusty sombrero. Beside him on the driver's seat was an older man who was flanked by a second young man, fairer of complexion than the driver but no less handsome. If any of the idlers on Larimer Street that Indian summer afternoon took the trio to be father and sons, they would have been right.
    The father was Charles R. Thorne, Sr., a seasoned actor-manager who a decade earlier had managed New York's Chatham Theatre; the sons were Tom and Will. Their mother, who had been a member of an English theatrical clan, the Mestayers, before her marriage, had remained behind at Thorne Hill, near Leavenworth, Kansas. An older brother, Charles R., Jr., was back East carving a name for himself as a "matinee idol"--except that the custom of holding matinees had not yet been inaugurated to plague hapless players in the American theatre.
    "Now, Tom," the elder Thorne said to the driver of the ox team, "just move your team up a little for easier unloading."
    Several weeks before this little scene was enacted in the street in front of the billiard saloon, an English photographer named George Wakely had crossed the Plains from Leavenworth, accompanied by his wife and three stepdaughters--Rose, Louise and Flora Brown--better known on the stages of Missouri Valley towns as the Wakely Sisters.
    Thorne knew before he and his two sons set out from Leavenworth to blaze a trail of theatrical activity in the Rocky Mountains that the Wakely Sisters had preceded him so he took no actresses on the arduous, if not perilous, trek across the Plains. He also knew that several young men with some theatrical experience were already in the Denver area.

WITH these young men and the Wakely sisters, Thorne's Star Company presented, on Monday night, October 3, 1859, the first dramatic performance ever staged in the Rocky Mountain region.
    The play was "The Cross of Gold," or "The Maid of Croissey." Between acts, Rose (listed on the playbill as "Mlle. Haydee") danced "La Zingarella," and Flora Wakely sang a popular song, "Maggie's By My Side." Following the drama, the troupe enacted the farce of "The Two Gregories." (Double bills were the rule on the legitimate stage at that period, as they became in motion picture theaters seventy-five years later.)
    When the performance was over, Thorne announced to the audience that he was gratified by the capacity turnout, so much so that he planned to remain in Denver all winter and would build a "commodious" and "elegant" theater in the spring. But it didn't work out that way.

    During the first week of October, 1859 Thorne's Star Company presented six more plays in the hall above the billiard saloon--christened Apollo Hall, either by Thorne or by Libeus Barney, Vermonter, who was chiefly responsible for its construction. Then Thorne "took a benefit"--a theatrical custom of those days when stars and manager, near the close of an engagement, would receive all or a stipulated portion of the receipts of a single performance so advertised in advance. Frequently this would provide the actors or manager with sufficient funds to tide them over until they could reach another town and another engagement.
    For Thorne's benefit the troupe performed Sheridan Knowles' drama of "William Tell." Then Thorne and son Will vanished from Denver, leaving Tom and the Wakely Sisters to "carry the torch" of histrionic art deeper into the mountains.
    Rose Wakely, by now known to the gold-seekers as "Miss Millie," took over the management of the troupe and three performances a week were given at Apollo Hall, weather permitting.
    Miss Millie took the troupe to Golden City in January, 1860. She was slightly injured when thrown from a horse at Golden, but had recovered sufficiently by January 20 to accompany the troupe to Mountain City, where John H. Gregory had uncovered a rich quartz lode the previous summer.

48                                                                                                   Old West

    On its first visit to Gregory Gulch, Haydee's Star Company gave five performances in a log building, then returned to Denver's Apollo Hall. Admission to Apollo Hall was payable in greenbacks, coin or gold dust. A pair of gold scales was a necessary piece of box office equipment. Barney, the hall's "landlord," wrote to his hometown newspaper, the Bennington Banner, this account of the method he used to obtain funds for the purchase of a new beaver hat:
    "Providing myself with a pan, a whisk broom and a turkey's wing, I rushed, not for the mines but for the box-office of Apollo Hall, and there commenced 'prospecting.' On the floor were scattered bits of paper, ticket-stubs, cigar stumps, tobacco cuds, dust and dirt. With the turkey wing I swept up these contrarieties. I tunneled the cracks in the floor with the whiskbroom and in the pan I placed the compound."
    When he had sifted the heavier gold dust from the trash, Barney added, he had $13.56 in fine gold, enough to pay for a splendid beaver hat.

THE WAKELY SISTERS and other members of the troupe were absent from the Apollo's stage for a time during the late winter, to promote a series of "select" balls at $3 per ticket, including supper. At one of these balls Miss Millie slapped Tom Thorne's face and the incident was duly recorded in the pages of the Rocky Mountain News.
    Soon(?) a much greater sensation stirred Denver citizens that fall when Miss Millie vanished from her boarding place simultaneously with the sudden departure of a gambler named Thomas Evans. Evans was known to have been an ardent admirer of Miss Millie, but so were dozens of other swains.
    "Miss Millie has been abducted"--so went the rumor--which spread quickly throughout the mining camps to the west and along the Overland Trail to the East. There was talk of forming a posse to find Evans and return him to Denver for a trial under a big cottonwood tree on the bank of Cherry Creek.
    The the [sic] News reported: "The pair has been overtaken on the road to the States and will be brought back." Evans and his supposed "hostage" were overtaken at Julesburg and returned to Denver by Sheriff E. W. (Ned) Wynkoop, who was a close personal friend of the Wakely Sisters, their mother and stepfather. Mr. and Mrs. Wakely and the other girls had been away, in one of the mountain camps, at the time of Rose's reported abduction.
    When the fugitive pair was returned to Denver, Miss Millie was easily able to convince the aroused citizenry that she had accompanied Evans with no more persuasion on his part than is customarily permitted an ardent lover.
    A week later on an inside page of the Rocky Mountain News, in the smallest possible type, appeared this notice: "Married--on the 24th inst. by H. C. Harrison, Esq., Thomas Evans to Rose M. Brown, all of this city. The beautiful and fascinating danseuse now makes her debut in the matrimonial field and we wish her a brilliant and prosperous engagement."
    Mr. and Mrs. Evans remained in Denver only a few months after their marriage, then boarded a mail coach for St. Joseph, Missouri, where they could entrain for Evans' old hometown of Indianapolis.
    Sheriff Wynkoop, who had returned the elopers to Denver from Julesburg, had little difficulty in persuading Louise, Miss Millie's younger sister, to become his bride.
    Flora was courted by J. B. (Buzz) Caven, a member of the Cibola Minstrels, a semi-professional group who had entertained Pikes Peakers before the arrival of Thorne's Star Company in the fall of '59. Buzz and Flora were united in marriage by a Denver clergyman at the summit of Pikes Peak--probably the first major "press agent stunt" in the Rocky Mountain region.

WHEN a major gold strike was reported on Grasshopper Creek in the Northern Rockies in the summer of 1862, Buzz and Flora Caven joined the exodus from Colorado and they were among the few hundred settlers in Bannack, then in Idaho Territory but subsequently the first capital of Montana Territory.
    During that first winter, the Cavens were extremely popular since Buzz was a first-rate fiddler and Flora had a pleasing voice and knew all of the currently popular ballads.
    The Cavens were "in on the ground floor" when one of the biggest gold strikes in Western history was made the following spring in Alder Gulch, about seventy-five miles east of Bannack, but they failed to strike it rich themselves.
    During the stampede from Bannack, Buzz Caven was chosen to be "miners' sheriff" at the site of the new bonanza, but he never served in that capacity. Instead a fugitive killer from California named Henry Plummer somehow got himself installed as sheriff of Alder Gulch.
    The Cavens were the parents of the first boy born in Alder Gulch, but after the birth of four other children, the couple separated--Buzz to wander off to eastern Nevada, where he is buried, and Flora to remarry. Flora is buried at Helena, Montana.
    Old troupers will tell you "Denver has always been a good show town." Down through the years most of the great stars of the American theater, as well as luminaries from abroad, have appeared in the "Mile-High" city. The Tabor Grand Opera House, built at great cost by Horace Austin Warner Tabor in the early 1880s, was once the finest playhouse in the West, and the equal of any in the larger cities of the Atlantic States. A number of performers of star caliber got their start in one or another of Denver's good stock companies.
    But no "stars over the Rockies" ever shone with more brilliance--or, at least with more popular acclaim--than did the Wakely Sisters, back in 1859 and the early '60s. There should be some sort of a monument to their memory in or near Denver--and what could be more appropriate than to erect it on the bank of Cherry Creek, under a spreading cottonwood?

Spring, 1967                                                                                               49

Source:

Clark, A. L., (Archie L.), "Denver Has Always Been a Good Show Town," Old West, Western Publications, Austin, 1967, Vol. 3, No. 3, Whole No. 11, (Spring, 1967), pp. 48-49.

    I'd like to thank Julie Cope, [email protected], of Panama City, Florida for sending me a copy of this article. I first ran across a reference to it in the Colorado Unified Catalog, The Prospector, several years ago, but until now, was never able to find a copy of it. It was not until a few days ago, after Julie sent me a copy of the article, that I was finally able to determine where the original article had been published. In addition to being a good read, it also gave me my first look at M'lle Haydee, her sister Flora and their husbands, Thomas P. Evans and "Buzz" Caven. As far as I'm concerned, this article is worth its weight in gold.

    Julie, thank you so much for sharing the fruits of your labors with me. I am very, very grateful.

    Once again I'd like to thank my brother, Geoff, for the outstanding job he did on the scans of the photographs that accompany this article. Geoff bought me a copy of the magazine that this article originally appeared in for my birthday and then spent hours fussing with the captures he made of the original illustrations. All I can say is that I don't know how you do it, Geoff. You've managed to work your magic again. I can't tell you how grateful I am for your time and talent. You're a real inspiration.

    All my best,

    Chris