Across the Continent

Across the Continent; or, Scenes from New York Life and the Pacific Railroad (1871), a melodrama by James J. McCloskey (revised by Oliver Doud Byron). [Wood's Museum, 42 perf.] In the depths of New York's most fetid slum, Five Points, a bedraggled widow (Lizzie Safford) begs callous, greedy barroom owner John Adderly (Charles Waverly) for pennies to feed her starving children, for her husband has spent his last cent at Adderly's gin mill. When Adderly refuses, she curses him and his heirs, then goes out in the snow to die. Twenty years later, Adderly has framed a good‐hearted gambler, Joe Ferris or “The Ferrit” (Byron), unaware that the noble Joe is the widow's son. Adderly is also attempting to destroy a rich merchant, Thomas Goodwin (Joseph Sefton), at the same time he is seeking to marry Goodwin's daughter Louise (Annie Firmin). Joe escapes from prison, entraps Adderly, and sees him go to jail. Five years later Joe has renounced the city and gambling and taken a job as stationmaster for the Union Pacific in Indian territory. The Goodwins detrain at the station, only to have it attacked by Indians who have been goaded into action by Adderly, recently escaped from jail. As the raid begins, Joe desperately telegraphs for soldiers, who arrive by train just as Louise rushes into his arms. Although the work was dismissed by most critics with terms such as “claptrap,” “rubbish,” and “purely sensational,” Byron's tour de force performance and the clever employment of such newsworthy features as telegraphy and the then equally new Union Pacific Railroad gave the piece a special excitement for audiences and provided Byron with a profitable vehicle for many seasons. The Canadian‐born playwright James J. McCLOSKEY (1825–1913), who went west in the California gold rush of 1849, performed with almost all of the great actors of his day before turning to writing. He wrote dozens of plays, many recounting his California experiences, among them: Daring Dick (1870), Rory of the Hills (1870), The Far West (1870), The Trail of the Serpent (1871), Poverty Flat (1873), For Lack of Gold (1873), Life or Death (1874), Arabs of New York (1875), Buff and Blue (1876), Nuggets (1880), and The Bowery Boys (1881), but Across the Continent was his only major hit. Ironically, McCloskey made no money on the play, having sold the rights to Byron. For brief periods he managed the Marysville Theatre in California and the Park Theatre in Brooklyn, then spent his last years as a court clerk in New York.