Frontier drama

   By 1880, the American frontier depicted in the drama was a romanticized version of the West. There were plays about Jesse James and his gang even while the originals were still at large, but most of these were the fare of the ten twent' thirt' circuits. Aiming higher, Joaquin Miller's The Danites (1877) remained popular well into the modernist period. Other plays of Western life include Bartley Campbell's My Partner (1879), David Belasco's The Girl I Left Behind Me (with Franklin Fyles, 1893) and Rose of the Rancho (1906), Augustus Thomas's In Mizzoura (1893) and Arizona (1900), the dramatization of Owen Wister's The Virginian (1904), and Porter Emerson Browne's The Bad Man (1920). The great classics of the genre came early in the 20th century: Belasco's Girl of the Golden West (1905), Edwin Milton Royle's The Squaw Man (1905), and William Vaughn Moody's The Great Divide (1906).