A rebel on the comstock: The life and times of actress Lillie Edgington (1856-1917)

Abstract

By 1880 the theater had become a potent force in American popular culture, a mechanism for social interaction within a community and one that drew actors from outside it. This was especially true for the peripatetic populations who resided in the remote mining camps of the West. During the boom times on Nevada’s Comstock (1861–1880), enthusiastic audiences welcomed the visits of popular entertainers not with bouquets but with silver bars thrown onstage. Yet while actors were plentiful, successful stage careers for women were rare. One Comstock native who repeatedly challenged contemporary social structures was the actress Lillie Edgington (1856–1917). Raised in wealth, seduced at 14, forced into marriage at 18, and thrice-divorced by 24, she monetized her looks and her scandalous reputation to launch a theatrical career that offered her public admiration and economic independence, things few of her female peers were able to achieve. This independence came with the challenges a single woman faced working in a male-dominated arena, loneliness, sexual harassment, and social censure, together with the burdens of her chosen profession, uncomfortable lodgings, cramped dressing rooms, and dreary train journeys. Yet Lillie’s story both illuminates evolving theatrical tastes and helps to illustrate ways in which, despite social barriers, women could use the stage to claim their own identity, establish their own economic autonomy, and construct their own legacies.

Keywords:

• 19th-century actresses
• David Belasco
• Comstock Lode
• American theaters
• Eadweard Muybridge
• early cinema
• Western women

In mid-19^th-century mining camps of the American West, women were a minority among the mass of miners, merchants, gamblers, and conmen who made up the general population (White-Parks, 1997, 258–73; Barman, 2008, 99–127; Jensen & Miller, 2004, 9–36; Scharff & Casas, 2015, online). In 1860 California, for example, men outnumbered women by nearly 3 to 1; ten years later the numbers remained unequal at 2 to 1 (Historical Statistics of the United States, 1975, 25). On Nevada’s Comstock in 1860, 95% of the population was male, and by 1870, at 70%, that number was still high (Barber & Campana, (2021), 14). The women in these fluid, peripatetic communities were often poorly treated with limited agency and restricted choice of occupation. But there were exceptions, and one of these was the actress, Lillie Edgington.

Raised in wealth, seduced at 14, forced into marriage at 18, divorced for adultery in a blaze of scandal, Lillie claimed an independent authority at 24 by going on the stage. Her independence came with the challenges a single woman faced working in a male-dominated arena, loneliness, sexual harassment, and social censure. Added to these were the burdens of her chosen profession, uncomfortable lodgings, cramped dressing rooms, and dreary train journeys. Yet Lillie’s lived melodrama, one that included her father’s cherished racehorse helping to launch the Hollywood film industry, illuminates evolving theatrical tastes and illustrates ways in which women could exploit theatrical careers to establish their own autonomy and construct their own legacies. According to one writer, actresses have, over time, “been almost the only women to maintain a concrete independence in the midst of society” (De Beauvoir, 1961, 661–2). Lillie never became a well-known star, but her career was a cause célèbre in her lifetime, and one of the most colorful of all the actresses in the early theater of the American West. As an example of a woman striving to make her own way in a social environment generally hostile to women living independent of marriage, Lillie’s choices stand as experiments in efforts at individual liberation and sexual and economic fulfillment. Her experiences represent an entire class of women authoring their own identities through the aegis of the theater. Within this context, this article seeks to show how one woman used the apparent barriers of marital abuse and public notoriety as stepping stones to economic independence and public acclaim.

1. Materials and methodology

Primary materials used to examine Lillie Edgington’s life and career include federal census reports, contemporary memoires, and official county records kept in the notably complete collection of Nevada’s Storey County courthouse. The surprisingly underutilized archives of contemporary newspapers provide an additional resource and offer wide-ranging opportunities for further research. Growing up, Lillie’s beauty and her parents’ social status made her an object of interest to newspaper editors on the Comstock. The scandal surrounding her first divorce made her the subject of their printed gossip. Her stage career turned her into a public figure, and in an era when libel laws were applied unequally to women, newspapers wrote revealing articles about the Comstock actress which opened her private life to public scrutiny and speculation. Secondary materials on women in the West are abundant, but frequently focus on prostitution and the “soiled doves” of the mining camps (Williams, 1980, passim; James & Raymond, 1998, 274–78; Goldman, 1981, 1–2, 114, 179 n. 2). Lillie’s story is different and begins with the arrival in California of a fortune-seeker from Ohio named Abe Edgington.

2. The colonel on the comstock

In 1852, four years after gold was discovered in the millrace at Sutter’s mill in January 1848, a 24-year-old from East Springfield, Ohio, named Abram Merkel Edgington, arrived in Placer County, California, hoping to strike it rich (Angel, 1881, 484). Attractive, genial, and generous, for the next eight years, Edgington worked at an assortment of jobs—miner, merchant, teamster, lumberman, gambler. During his final year in Placer County, he lived in a boarding house run by a young widow from Kentucky named Mary Elizabeth Bailey (nee Allen, b. 1838), and in 1860, when he moved across the state line to the newly opened mining slopes of the Comstock in Nevada, Mary Bailey accompanied him as his wife. Her four-year-old daughter, Lillie, soon became the apple of her stepfather’s eye and the entire focus of her mother’s social ambitions.

The family settled in Virginia City, and over the following decade and a half, Abe Edgington’s fortunes rose as an investor and entrepreneur. Known as “the Colonel”, Abe became a prominent and popular figure on the Comstock, serving as deputy sheriff of recently formed Storey County, as deputy internal revenue assessor, and later as a director of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad (San Francisco Weekly (SFW), 1875). “It does one good to see Abe once more in town,” wrote the editor of the Territorial Enterprise in 1874. “When we see him around we somehow feel that all is going on about right” (Territorial Enterprise (TE), 24 December 1874). Like everyone else on the Comstock, Edgington invested in mining stocks and mine claims, but the exact source of his sudden wealth in 1871–72, before the discovery of the last great Comstock bonanza in March 1873, was a mystery. According to a contemporary, it may have come from his luck at the gaming tables and racetrack. “[When I think of one] of the real old-fashioned gamblers,” wrote Comstock newspaperman Harry Gorham, “he of the open house and the marvelous dinners, and the lavish entertainment; I think of Abe Edgington. He was more or less of a legend when I first went to the Comstock” (Gorham, 1939, 131). If Edgington was a popular character, his wife was not. Large and imposing—in later life she weighed nearly 400 pounds—Mary Bailey Edgington was tactfully described by one who knew her as full of “wonderful energy and determination of character … who will not give up her rights until the last battle has been fought” (Montana Standard (Butte, MT), 1884). The less charitable considered her bossy, bullying, and overbearing. The couple were both ambitious, but Mary’s ambitions were centered on her undeniably beautiful daughter who was widely admired for having “a tall, slender and graceful figure, with large blue eyes, a sweet mouth, delicate complexion, and of a very intelligent cast of countenance” (RGJ, 15 August 1878).

As Lillie grew, Mary decided that she needed a more opulent setting to show her off, and in 1872 Abe obliged by building a lavish mansion at 66 South B Street on Virginia City’s “Millionaires” Row’. The result was an impressive, three-story edifice in a fashionable French Second Empire style (Francke, 1992, 258–69). Another remarkable extravagance in a water-deprived, high desert mining camp was the emerald perfection of the Edgington lawn. “[Nowhere] in this place,” enthused the local newspaper, “have we seen a sward of green, thick and perfect as carpets, as Mr. Edgington’s grounds … The grounds about the building are terraced with flowers, shrubs and ornamental trees … reminding one of the famous hanging gardens of Babylon” (Territorial Enterprise (TE), 8 August Multiple dates). The interior furnishings of the home were just as lavish, and for Lillie, “the pet of the household”, a bedroom “fit for a fairy” had been created. This large, airy space, noted the newspaper, was “the pleasantest one” in the house, equipped with black walnut furniture and pale blue carpeting. For Mary Edgington, the mansion was not an end in itself but an investment in stagecraft intended as a backdrop for the display of her beautiful and justly coveted 16-year-old daughter. Mary was presenting Lillie as a matrimonial prize for the wealthiest bidder. Unfortunately for Mary’s ambitions, Lillie already had her own agenda.

Fairy-like in looks the lovely Lillie may have been, but beneath the veneer, like her mother, she was made of sterner stuff. Two years before the B Street house was built, while Lillie was still a 14-year-old schoolgirl, a charming conman named Julian C. Janes came to town. The Territorial Enterprise described him in 1876 as “a cross between Don Quixote and [the swashbuckling hero] Nick of the Woods” (TE, 2 September 1876). Charismatic and manipulative, a born performer who spun fabulous stories about his past, he presented himself to the populace as a gentleman and scholar of superior fortune. His looks and manners appealed so much to Virginia City’s movers and shakers that the Board of Education offered the self-proclaimed “Professor” Janes the position of “Principal and teacher of the High School” at Virginia City’s Third Ward school where Lillie was a student (Uhlhorn, 1873, 78; TE, 5 January 1875).

Lillie quickly developed a passionate crush on the new principal, and according to Janes’ own account, principal and pupil started “courting” soon after he first arrived in town. That courtship seems to have included sexual seduction. As events would later prove, Janes was a predator and opportunist who saw in his young student the way to an easy fortune. But Lillie’s mother was not about to give her blessing to a conman. Janes may have offered a handsome face and considerable charm, but he was a small fish in Virginia City’s silver sea. Alarmed by her daughter’s sexual precocity and afraid of public scandal, Mary quickly focused her marital ambitions on an affluent, considerably older Jewish butcher named Mark Strouse, a pragmatic choice that conflicted wildly with her teen-aged daughter’s own romantic desires.

3. Mark Strouse

In 1872, Mark Strouse was a 27-year-old, observant Jew, who had been born in Lauterbach in central Germany, the youngest of the ten children of Bila (Bertha) and Moses Strouse (or Strauss; Angel, 1881, 570). Arriving in America at 15, he was the embodiment of boomtown Comstock’s vernacular zeitgeist, a successful immigrant entrepreneur who began as a butcher and using imagination, skill, and an obsessive attention to business achieved economic and social success. Big, boisterous, opportunistic, ready with his fists, he was a self-made man who would skirt the law if necessary (James, 2021, online). Among a myriad of business ventures, he owned the successful Central Market, a 3000-square-foot, four-story Virginia City landmark that occupied a whole east-west block between C and D Streets (Collins, 1864, 200). Strouse was one of Virginia City’s most eligible bachelors and although a devout Jew, he was captivated by the Colonel’s 16-year-old Episcopalian daughter. In the mining camps where racial tensions could be acute, religion often cut across racial lines, and religious toleration became a surprising side effect of the West’s multiculturalism. Strouse’s willingness to accept a Christian wedding ceremony instead of insisting on a Jewish one despite his loyalty to his own religion is an example of this. From Catholics to Confucianists, from Evangelicals to Russian Orthodox, the mix of peoples who supported “a dizzying array of alternative religious conceptions”, and whose received beliefs challenged each other in “this marketplace of morals” found, of necessity, ways to cooperate (Maffly-Kipp, 1994, 5). Mary Edgington’s quest for a wealthy husband for her daughter would have struck no one as unusual, and his religion was hardly a bar. Financial pragmatism superseded religious niceties, sanctioning the actions of an ambitious mother and making them laudable.

For Lillie’s mother, several factors came into play regarding Strouse’s suit, not the least her daughter’s involvement with Julian Janes. Her husband, too, was suffering from ever worsening tuberculosis and a rapidly diminishing fortune. With Abe’s failing health, the family wealth had become more myth than substance. Edgington’s later biographer attributed his shrinking income to an overly generous nature, but rather than outsized generosity, gambling seems to have had more to do with the Edgingtons’ pecuniary problems (Angel, 1881, 584). An inveterate gambler, Edgington’s weakness was horses, and he sank a fortune into his stables. In the early 1870s, the Colonel joined the elite group who patronized Virginia City’s racetrack north of town. In 1872 he was named president of the town’s racing association, and in 1875, a trustee of the State Jockey Club. Abe’s prize possession was a grey Morgan trotter that he named “Abe Edgington” after himself. Bought as a colt and later sold for $20,000, the horse proved a famous racer, that “in point of beauty and speed, there is none to excel” (Weekly Alta California (San Francisco, CA), 1875). In 1875, forced to sell the horse, Edgington saw him become the property of railway magnate Leland Stanford, who then made him immortal. On 18 June 1878, pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge created a film strip of 12 exposures taken in less than half a second of “Abe Edgington” trotting at an 8-minute gait while pulling a sulky on the Palo Alto racetrack in California. Muybridge’s experiment with film launched motion picture technology (Leslie, 2001, online).

Edgington’s gambling and worsening tuberculosis, together with Lillie’s clandestine affair, led Mary to increase pressure on her daughter to accept the infatuated Strouse. Although Lillie stubbornly held out, in late 1873 Abe’s failing fortune coincided with Julian Janes’ abrupt departure from Virginia City “to attend to business in the East”, a departure almost certainly paid for by the senior Edgingtons. Deserted by her paramour and made painfully aware of the family’s pressing need for money, Lillie was left with little choice. She married Mark Strouse on 14 January 1874 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church with Reverend Ozi Whitaker presiding (Marriage Book of St. Paul’s, 1873, 298; Marriage Records, 276). “Now,” the Reno Gazette-Journal later commented snidely, “anyone who has seen [her] and knows Mark Strouse, understands perfectly well that a woman of feeling and refinement would not be the happiest being in the world were she compelled by her people to marry the man for his money” (RGJ, 1878).

Despite the reluctance of the bride, the wedding was the social event of the season, and most of Virginia City showed up to watch the festivities. One guest noted in his diary: “Drove to St. Paul’s church—so crowded inside and out that we staid (sic) in front in carriage and watched [com]motion—when crowd came out we drove up to Edgington mansion on B St. to reception—Grand Affair—Big Crowd—Whole house thrown open—plenty of waiters—band of music—big time—plenty of cake and wine—dance, etc.” (Doten, 1973, 1217). According to the Gold Hill Evening News, at the wedding reception, “the happy bride and groom stood in a beautiful alcove at the south side [of the parlor] festooned with lace curtains and almost surrounded by luxuriantly growing natural flowers [and] as the mother of the bride happily expressed it, all reared by herself, including the fairest Lily of them all” (Gold Hill Evening News (GHEN), Various dates).

The newlyweds moved into an elaborate residence at 56 South B Street, a block north of the Edgington mansion. Strouse was ready to indulge his bride but could hardly have been under any illusions that she had married him for love. Lillie’s attitude was less devoted wife and more sole shareholder in a particularly lucrative bank. For her, Strouse was a useful source of money, necessary in supporting her position as the most fashionable woman on the Comstock. Newspaperman Harry Gorham, who knew her during these years, wrote that, “Lily (sic) Edgington was never still. [She was a free soul], independent in thought and action” (Gorham, 1939, 131–2).

Maybe you can imagine the kind of girl she was when

I tell you of her going into Meyers Dry Goods Store and

asking Meyers if he had anything new in stock that might

interest a female who wanted to look her best in company.

“Yes, Lily,” said Meyers (for she was known to all by

her first name), I have just received in stock some of the

prettiest jabots I have ever seen.”

“Show me one,” said Lily, and in answer to her request

he placed on the counter some of those delicate little articles,

something, I think, like a soft, ruffly collar. It immediately

caught Lily’s eye.

“How much?”

“They are ten dollars each,” answered Meyers.

“How many have you got in stock?”

“I have an even two and a half dozen,” was the

polite response.

“If you will promise not to import any more of them,

you may send them all up to the house and charge them to

Mark,” said Lily.

And to show Meyers how she felt about it, she added,

“No tart in this town is going to run around and say that she

has the identical neck fixin’s that Lily Edgington has.”

Lillie’s casual $300 purchase charged to Mark was equal to 75 days’ pay for a Comstock miner.

Even if her marriage was not to her liking, Lillie nevertheless did her duty by the Strouse family line and presented her husband with their first child, a daughter, on 14 November 1874, just ten months after their wedding. Strouse named the child Bertha for his mother and as an adult Bertha Strouse looked much like her father. This may be one reason why Lillie showed no particular interest in the new baby and continued to cut a swath through Virginia City’s fashionable society. Just before baby Bertha’s first birthday, on 16 October 1875, when Lillie was again pregnant, Abe Edgington died at the Arcade Hotel in Sacramento. The immediate cause of death was given as peritonitis or blood-poisoning, but the underlying cause was the tuberculosis that he had battled for years. Edgington was 47 years old, “highly esteemed by a very large circle of friends”, and generally mourned. “The news of the decease of that noble, true man, A. M. Edgington”, eulogized the Nevada State Journal, “caused a feeling of the profoundest sadness to fall upon Nevada like a pall. His qualities and good heart made him a universal favorite among his friends, whose names are legion” (Nevada State Journal (NSJ; Reno, NV), Various dates). The Colonel left his wife $75,000 in his will after his debts and expenses, which were also legion, were paid.

Of all the men in Lillie Edgington’s life, and there were many, it was Abe whom she had loved and trusted the most. His death shattered her. Besides the opulent marble tombstone that her mother provided in Virginia City’s main cemetery, Lillie left her own tribute, a marble memorial displaying a hand lying on a pillow holding a lily flower, with the inscription, “Lillie’s Tribute to Her Father”. For the rest of her life and through multiple marriages, she never ceased to be anyone other than Lillie Edgington, and when her last husband buried her in 1917, he had no idea of her mother’s name, but he knew who her father was, and he buried her not under her married name but as Lillian Edgington.

Having in her own mind provided for her daughter and having buried her husband, within weeks of his funeral Mary Edgington sold up in Virginia City and moved to San Francisco. The Edgington mansion on B Street, which had served its purpose in launching Lillie, had already been sold by Abe in August 1875. His horses were gone, the pride of his stable sold a month earlier in July. The Edgingtons had put all their resources into providing Lillie with a rich husband, and by the time Abe’s estate was finally settled, neither Mary nor Lillie inherited the fortune that Virginia City expected (Edgington Estate Papers, 1877, Probate 324). Lillie was pregnant when Abe died at the Arcade Hotel, and on 13 May 1876, she gave birth to her second daughter whom she named Abby for her father. Although her 18-month-old daughter for whom she had little affection was a healthy child, Abby, like the grandfather for whom she was named, was fragile and four months later, on 13 September, Abby died suddenly leaving both parents distraught. By January 1877, Lillie was pregnant again. Less than a year after Abby’s funeral, she gave birth to her third child, a son. Shortly after the birth, the Territorial Enterprise for 6 September carried the sad news that: “After only a few hours” illness, yesterday, the infant child of Mr. and Mrs. Mark Strouse died. The afflicted parents are wild with grief over the bereavement’ (TE, 6 September 1877). Within four years, Lillie had buried her father, said good-bye to her mother, and watched helplessly at the deathbeds of her two younger children. The death of the longed-for Strouse heir seems to have been the final breaking point for a marriage that was doomed from the beginning.

4. Divorced, abandoned, annulled

It was at this critical juncture with the death of her father and two of her three children and the departure of her mother for San Francisco that Julian Janes reappeared on the Comstock. From what he later told a Reno newspaper reporter, he had always “been determined to have his old lady-love back again” and was willing to sacrifice “everything in the world to get the woman he loves” (RGJ, 1878). With Janes’ return, Lillie reignited their affair, and by April 1878, her suspicious husband was having her followed. Being as well-known as they both were around town, the illicit lovers needed isolated places to meet. One of their most frequented was the Bowers mansion just outside Washoe City. Only a short train ride west of Virginia City, the house and grounds had become the public playground of the Comstock and were “the Valley’s most beautiful recreation spot” (Ratay, 1973, 225). Groves of poplar trees surrounded the house, and water from natural hot springs was piped into adjoining, stone-lined pools. In the center of each pool, “was an irregular shaped island covered with shrubs and locust trees. The island in the upper pool was connected to the main grounds by a small wooden bridge” (Ratay, 1973, 225). Sundays during the summer, the Bowers mansion was crowded with bathers, brass bands, and picnickers. The Nevada State Journal proclaimed it, “The Saratoga of Nevada” (Nevada State Journal (NSJ; Reno, NV), Various dates). Among the summer crowds were Lillie Edgington and Julian Janes. The attractions of a secret island or of the isolated bath houses built nearby would have been convenient for a couple looking for privacy.

According to divorce papers filed by Mark Strouse on 13 August 1878, Lillie Strouse, “[did] on the 28^th day of July A. D. 1878 at the Bower’s (sic) Mansion in the County of Washoe, in said State of Nevada … commit adultery with one J. C. Janes, and did commit adultery with said J. C. Janes at divers places in the said County … at divers other times between the first day of April A. D. 1878 and the said 28^th day of July A. D. 1878” (Strouse Divorce Papers, 1878). Although Lillie challenged the charges in court, she did little to fight the divorce which was granted on 14 August 1878. The resultant scandal caused a sensation on the Comstock and a frenzy in the press. Notoriety would follow the errant wife for the next decade. The Nevada State Journal remarked with sarcastic understatement that: “The case is one that has created great excitement in Virginia’s high-toned circle” (NSJ, 16 August 1878). Some sympathy for Lillie existed among those who knew the backstory of her marriage, but the opprobrium that resulted from the scandal rather predictably attached to the wandering wife and her lover rather than to any deficiencies on the part of the enraged husband.

On the day following the finalization of the divorce decree, Lillie and Janes were married in Reno in a private parlor of the city’s up-scale Depot Hotel by Reverend Dr. William Lucas, rector of the Reno Episcopal Church (Marriage Registers, A, 177; Wren, 1904, 194–5). Divorce was still forbidden by the church, but Janes had lied to Lucas, assuring him it was Lillie, who was the injured party and convincing him to perform the ceremony. To the press, who knew better, he proclaimed his own innocence, telling them shortly after the ceremony, “It is rough that the divorce should have been granted on the grounds that it has, but I’ve been so lied about and misrepresented in this matter that I’m calloused … I can understand now what innocent people suffer when people insist upon believing them guilty” (RGJ, 1878). The Reno Gazette-Journal commented tongue in cheek that, “Being a gentleman he, of course, suffers terribly from the loss of his wife’s fair name, but bears it in silence like a man.”

The newlyweds planned to spend their honeymoon at Lake Tahoe, but before they could leave Reno, they were overtaken at the train station by the local constable, his deputy, and a Jewish clothing store owner and friend of Mark Strouse named Hyppolite Roos. Roos was one of the many creditors Janes had left back in Virginia City holding a host of unpaid bills. A brawl ensued with Janes first mocking Roos, and the infuriated Roos reaching for his pistol. The deputy sheriff and his constable broke it up, but another fight broke out when the bridegroom—in what could be perceived and probably was an anti-Semitic gesture—“reached out his delicate fingers and tweaked the [creditor’s] prominent nose”. Forced to pay up before leaving town, Janes infuriated the clothier further “by taking $21 from his pocket and slowly counting it out into the willing hand of [the constable].” “Professor and Mrs. Janes,” concluded the paper drily, “left for the lake this morning” (RGJ, 1878). It was not an auspicious beginning, and things were to get far worse. Although Lillie had finally married her Prince Charming, there would be no happily ever after.

As described in the Reno Gazette-Journal for all the world to read—and it was the gossip du jour for the entire West Coast on and off for the following decade—the next four months of her short-lived second marriage were anything but blissful. Subtitled “The Dying Echoes of a Scandal that Shook the Comstock”, the newspaper gleefully laid before the public the whole sordid aftermath.

The marriage in Reno of Professor Janes to Mrs. Lillie Strouse,

the ex-wife of Mark Strouse, of Virginia, the day after the husband

had divorced her on the ground of excessive intimacy with the

fascinating pedagogue, has, as everybody now knows, turned

out disastrously. It will be remembered that Janes represented

himself here to a Gazette reporter, and many others as a man of

considerable wealth, relating how he had made a lucky hit at Bodie

(CA) and cleaned up about $12,000. He also announced that after

the honeymoon he would take his equally well-to-do bride with

him to Germany and there devote several years to the improvement

of his mind at some one of the famous universities, presumably,

giving a rest during that time to his overtasked morals …

These nebulous plans went unfulfilled. Upon arriving at Lake Tahoe, Janes went on a spending spree, shelling out large sums of money “for vast quantities of champagne, and otherwise conducting himself like an extravagant fool. San Francisco was next visited” (RGJ, 19 December 1878). And here in the City by the Bay, Lillie’s romantic folly finally ended.

Laboring under the illusion that he had successfully plucked his chicken by marrying a wealthy wife, Janes spent lavishly only to learn that Lillie did not come with endless treasure as dowry. Continuing the sorry saga, the Gazette went on to add that:

The mother of the bride one day saw in the window of a

Kearny street pawnbroker a piece of valuable lace which

she had long before given her daughter. The description

given by the pawnbroker of the person who had left it

with him fitted Janes exactly. The mother searched for her

daughter and found her living miserably in two rooms in

Oakland, doing her own housework and even washing.

She confessed that her new husband had sold and pawned

all her jewelry and other things of value that she had when

she married him. She went home with her mother and has

remained there ever since.

Having taken all her worldly goods, Janes had abandoned his abused wife and vanished, as the paper poetically put it, to where the woodbine twineth. Swallowing her pride and now more or less broke, Lillie appealed to Mark Strouse to take her back. Having made him the most famous cuckold on the Comstock, her appeals went unanswered. “An effort is being made to soften the heart of the original husband to the point of consenting to take back the wandering wife, but he, being a man of sound mind, utterly refuses to listen to such a preposterous proposition (RGJ, 19 December 1878).” Strouse’s public repudiation, while unsurprising, must have stung, but Lillie had grown up among the “tarts and jayhawks” on the rough and ready streets of the Comstock and was a survivor. Within four months of the Janes catastrophe, she had found herself a new husband and married him in Tucson, Arizona. The Daily Nevada State Journal reported that: “Miss Lillie Edgington, who subsequently became Mrs. Strouse and afterwards Mrs. Janes, being divorced from both in the course of modern events, was married on Monday night in Arizona, to a man named Maynard, son of a former San Francisco capitalist. The twain are supposed to be honeymooning somewhere in the neighborhood of Yuma City” (NSJ, 16 May 1879).

Lillie’s third husband, Benjamin G. Maynard, was eight years her senior and the son of Lafayette Maynard, a successful San Francisco real estate broker with a mansion on O’Farrell Street. In 1860 the senior Maynard owned a quarter of a million dollars in real estate and had $2,000 in the bank. Like Lillie Edgington, Ben Maynard was a child of wealth and like the vanished Julian Janes, fancied himself a lady’s man. The San Francisco Chronicle noted in 1871 that at a party thrown by his mother, he “devoted himself to the pretty young lady with the pink roses in her hair during the greater part of the evening” (San Francisco Chronicle (SFC), Various dates). When his father died on 29 December 1876, The Oakland Tribune reaffirmed the public belief that Maynard had “amassed a large fortune, which was increased by successful mining speculations” (The Oakland Tribune (TOT), Various dates). But as with Abe Edgington’s putative wealth back in Virginia City, all was not as it seemed. Contrary to societal expectations, when his father’s will was settled, Ben was left nothing. Once again, whether Maynard thought he was marrying an heiress or Lillie thought she was marrying the heir to a real estate fortune, both were to be deeply disappointed. Each soon discovered their mistake, and the marriage did not last six months. Both partners returned to San Francisco lugging their lost illusions, and by 1880 Ben’s widowed mother had turned the family manse on O’Farrell Street into a boarding house, and Maynard was living there, working rather prosaically as a clerk for the railway.

5. “Life upon the wicked stage”

Indulged daughter, trophy wife, victim, and dupe, sexually exploited from the age of 14 and with three disastrous throws at the marriage-go-round in six years, Lillie at 24 decided to take her destiny into her own hands and make her notoriety work for her. Now without husband or income, she made the bold move to monetize her looks, her fashion flare, and her dubious celebrity by embarking on an acting career. By 1880, the theater had become a potent focal point in American social life. Every small town in the West boasted of or aspired to an “opera house”, but choosing a career on the stage was risky for a woman as it was an arena where few succeeded (Auster, 1984, 2). Looks, poise, presence, rhetorical skills, and a sense of fashion, all necessary for success, winnowed the field of limelight ambition. Another disadvantage was the commonly held belief that an actress was a woman of loose morals, beyond the pale of respectability, a reputation Lillie’s several divorces had done little to disprove. Stars, however, then as now, drew adulation. Moral condemnation, particularly on the frontier, rarely raised its head against theatrical success. Fame in the theater brought “a concrete independence”, and with it came earned economic autonomy and public admiration, things few of Lillie’s peers were able to achieve.

Popular actresses made good money. In an era when the average female teacher made less than $55 per annum and a woman tailor earned just 83¢ a day, a career on the stage and its salary could look very appealing (Leach, 2019, online; Bureau of Labor, 1940, 128). According to a study done by the University of Washington (Special Collections, undated, online):

In the antebellum period, beginning actors’ salaries

ranged from $3 to $6 per week; utility players’ salaries

from $7 to $15 per week; “walking” ladies and gentlemen,

$15 to $30; and lead actors were paid anywhere from $35

to $100 per week. Traveling stars could command $150

to $500 per 7- to 10-day engagement, plus one or more

benefits. Except for the lowest ranks of actors, these salaries

were good for this period, especially for women, even

though they were paid less than men in comparable roles.

According to the U. S. census, the number of women who listed their profession as actress grew from 780 in 1870 to 2027 in 1880, a number that rose steadily to nearly 20,000 (courtesy of the film industry) by 1920 (Hooks, 1947, 169). Although many actresses in 1880 had grown up in families of performers, like Jennie, Sophie, and Irene Worrell, daughters of a circus clown, or Carrie Chapman, daughter of a riverboat entertainer and entrepreneur, there were increasing numbers of untrained ingénues or “debutantes” making their first bow on the stage. The theater critic of The San Francisco Examiner wrote bitingly in December 1880 of the “thousand times”, he had had to review “the debutantes [on the stage] … [who had] the self-same faults and the very same advantages that [all the] others have possessed” (The San Francisco Examiner (TSFE), 1880).

Although she had grown up in a remote location, Lillie’s exposure to the theater would have been anything but cursory. In the heyday of the mining camps, 1850–90, cross-continental commerce in acting troupes flourished as entertainment-starved miners paid out hard-earned silver and gold to see thespian sensations like Adelaide Neilson, Sarah Bernhardt, or Lillie Langtry. Everything from minstrel shows to Shakespearian extravaganzas played on the stages of the Comstock towns of Virginia City and Gold Hill (Watson, 1964, 74). Whether they arrived in troupes or as individual performers, entertainers were welcome visitors across the West. Some like the popular Lotta Crabtree, who grew up in California, were considered in Nevada as one of their own, but most came from Europe or the East Coast on extended tours. The Comstock, with its deep pockets, was a favorite destination for traveling theatrical troupes who hailed its tradition after a well-received performance of throwing silver bars onto the stage rather than bouquets (Watson, 1964, 169, 202).

Between them, Virginia City and Gold Hill had four theaters, and the local newspapers announced a new troupe’s arrival nearly every week. During Lillie’s childhood in 1864 alone, accredited stars and lesser luminaries like Ada Clare, Matilda Heron, Fannie Brown, Sally Hinckley, Flora Bray, Virginia Howard, and the Worrell Sisters, all appeared on the stages of Gold Hill and Virginia City. But the actress who caused the greatest stir in that year was the theatrical sensation, Adah Isaacs Menken. When she arrived on the Comstock in March, Menken already had a national reputation for her performance in the daring melodrama, Mazeppa. The play called for her to ride across the stage in a nude bodysuit tied to a white horse. Anticipation of her arrival reached fever pitch and filled the columns of the local newspapers. Initial performances at Maguire’s Theater on D Street were sold out. As a prominent member of the community and a friend of the theater owner, Abe Edgington with his racing cronies was almost certainly in the audience. For his eight-year-old, romantically inclined daughter, the Comstock-wide excitement aroused by the presence of this notable star of the stage was the stuff of fairy tales. Serenaded by the theater band outside her hotel window, presented with expensive presents, fêted and lionized, Menken and her company stayed nearly a month and made a considerable profit from eager crowds of patrons.

Sixteen years later, in the memories of the grown-up and now thrice-divorced Lillie Edgington, the theater of her childhood, of Adah Menken and her sister actresses, of its taste of scandal and feverish excitement, of its promise of adventure, travel, and public adulation, appeared to offer an attractive option to her current unhappy situation. By 1880, Lillie had joined a population of Western women who through force of circumstance needed to provide their own income. Although a child of privilege, Lillie was resilient, and had that indefatigable fighter of battles and weaver of plots, her mother, to negotiate contracts and help her fashion a future in show business. San Francisco with its coterie of former Comstock residents and its appetite for scandal provided the perfect setting for the stage debut of the disgraced Comstock Belle. One of these former residents, Tom Maguire, was a pioneering theatrical impresario and owner-manager of the Baldwin Theatre at Market and Powell Streets. Called the Napoleon of managers and a friend of the late Abe Edgington, Maguire had run a string of theaters on the Comstock in the 1860s and been the impresario who had presented Adah Isaacs Menken to Comstock audiences (Taranto, 1997, online). He had known Lillie since childhood and recognized at once her current box office potential.

Also willing to help introduce a new star was the Baldwin Theatre’s stage manager and a former member of the Comstock’s Jewish community, David Belasco. He, too, was a friend who had known Lillie since his time as stage manager of Piper’s Opera House back in Virginia City in 1873–74 (Winter, 1918, vol. 1, 86–7, 113; Evans, 1983, 112; Krumbein, Undated, online). Later known as “the bishop of Broadway” for his eccentric dress, Belasco put an emphasis on naturalism in acting, something very new at the time. He became one of the most influential pioneers in the American theater, launching the careers of thespians from Maud Adams to Barbara Stanwyck and mentoring the early film careers of actresses like Jeanne Eagels, Helen Hayes, and Mary Pickford. Of his time on the Comstock, Belasco would later say that he had met “more reckless women and desperadoes to the square foot … than anywhere else in the world”, and into that category he would certainly have put his new protégée, the Comstock Lillie (Belasco, 1991, v–vi, 18, 42).

Together with her mother, Lillie moved from Tyler Street to 1001 Golden Gate Avenue, just a block from the Baldwin Theatre. On 7 December 1880, Miss Lillie Edgington, actress, made her theatrical debut as Pauline in The Lady of Lyons; or, Love and Pride, a five-act melodrama written in 1838 by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The choice of debut vehicle, switched at the last moment from Romeo and Juliet, was no doubt deliberate (NSJ, 7 December 1880). Pauline’s plight, that of deceived sweetheart and faithless bride enduring the burden of a bankrupt father and a wealthy suitor ready to buy her in marriage, was perilously close to Lillie’s own life. Variations of this Madame Bovery/Anna Karenina-like plot were tremendously popular for the period and featured a beautiful woman, unhappily married, tempted by a “miscreant”, and then deserted and abandoned either to an early death or to a life of remorse and shame (Watson, 1964, 148–9). Women as the fallen sex, inherently weak, exploited and suffering were themes that played well in the theaters of the 1880s. Or to quote contemporary playwright Dion Boucicault, in whose plays Lillie would later appear, “every woman has a ruling caprice—some characterizing weakness” (Boucicault, 1873, 10). The exhibition of the disgraced ex-Mrs. Strouse showcased in a performance that echoed her own lived drama must have been tremendously titillating to an audience that had read the newspaper accounts of the Comstock scandal and were avid for spectacle.

Yet in addition to the censorious and the scandalmongers, there were sympathetic friends who wished her success. Even before Lillie had set foot on the stage, some members of the press, willing to be impressed, were singing her praises. Months before her debut, the theater critic for the Weekly Arizona Miner in Prescott, Arizona, who had never seen her act, was already enraptured by her. “Miss Lillie Edgington, a native of Virginia City, Nev. … [is] commanding in person and beauty, her every move and action is that of the Shakespearian mould, and it is predicted … that she is to … surpass any female that has ever appeared in the role of tragedy” (Weekly Arizona Miner (WAM; Prescott, Arizona), Various dates). This unearned encomium (possibly planted in the paper by Maguire) continued two months later, under the hyperbolic headline “The Coming Star”, with the announcement that Lillie would play Juliet in December at the Baldwin Theatre. “Miss E. has wonderful elocutionary powers, and will, no doubt succeed to (Adelaide) Neilson’s fame as an actress” (WAM, 19 November 1880). Despite Tom Maguire’s penchant for producing Shakespearian extravaganzas, Lillie’s debut role was switched only weeks before opening from the demanding intricacies of Shakespeare’s Juliet to the broader, less demanding requirements of Bulwer-Lytton’s Pauline. With no training for the stage, theater management must have been able to evaluate Lillie’s acting skills or lack thereof during rehearsal. Yet the role of the reckless, willful Pauline was a better marketing choice for the wayward bride of Virginia than the innocent, adolescent Juliet.

Even in the melodramatic role of Pauline, Lillie’s lack of acting experience showed. Despite “appearing before a houseful of friends who are only too ready to applaud [her]”, reviews were deeply disappointing (The San Francisco Examiner (TSFE), 1880). The critics took sly digs at her as an untrained novice. One unfortunate circumstance was that only a few months before her debut, the renowned Adelaide Neilson had completed an engagement at the Baldwin Theatre playing both Juliet and Pauline and unflattering comparisons were made. The most generous, if patronizing, review noted that “Miss Edgington has a good stage presence, a clear and musical voice, she does not lack intelligence, and with hard study and disposition to accept any part that may be offered to her, there is little doubt but that she will eventually become a useful and a good actress” (The San Francisco Examiner (TSFE), 1880). With her future on the line, Lillie proved to be a quick study in stagecraft, particularly in melodrama. The pressure to self-fashion a successful stage career encouraged her to study her fellow players both from her vantage onstage as well as from the viewpoint of the audience where she could often be found. Despite lacking the skills of an Adelaide Neilson or a Sarah Bernhardt, The Oakland Tribune theater critic commented the following month that the budding actress had “established herself in popular favor” (TOT, 17 January 1881). Three months later in March 1881, the Sacramento Record-Union noted her presence in the audience of the Baldwin Theatre and remarked that by performing two characters “very cleverly” as understudy for another actress, she had “quite redeemed herself from the obscurity into which she seemed destined to plunge after her debut” (Sacramento Record-Union (SRU), 1881).

Lillie’s acting career continued for nearly six years, the first two in San Francisco in repertory at the Baldwin Theatre and the last four in New York. While in San Francisco, under Belasco’s tutelage, she worked with several well-known actors, including William E. Sheridan, who had been a member of Edwin Booth’s troop. According to one Belasco biographer, Lillie played both Pauline and Shakespeare’s Portia and “other leading female parts” opposite him, a tribute to her rapidly growing onstage skills (Winter, 1918, v. 1, 224). In January 1881, she played the Baroness Falkenberg in the melodrama, Wedded by Fate. Written and financially underwritten by Henry B. McDowell, the playwright son of a Union general, David Belasco summed up its reception “as [a] local play by a local author [that] people flocked to see” (Winter, 1918, v.1, 228). The critics, however, commented that even though, “All the town went to see it, and the management reaped a profit … it is a better play than the actors could act” (Unattributed, 1881, v. 3, 282–3). Lillie followed this performance in February with the role of Irene Reston in the “mystic sensation drama”, Back from the Grave, playing an orphaned governess, “faithful to the last, ‘midst all the frowns of fortune’” (San Francisco Chronicle (SFC), Various dates). In that same month, she also appeared as a con artist named Suzanne O’Hara in Led Astray, a romantic farce that called for her to repeat such memorable lines as, “I am so confused—I’m sure I am blushing; I blush so easily” and “You frighten me; I am so timid.” Perhaps daunted by her character’s assumed blushing timidity, Lillie’s performance in the role was underacted and deemed by the theater critic of the San Francisco Chronicle as “too quiet” (SFC, 6 February 1881).

In 1881, with Lillie firmly ensconced on the boards at the Baldwin, Mark Strouse left Virginia City and moved to San Francisco to open the Bay City Market. Whether or not this sudden proximity was a motivating factor, Lillie decided to leave the city. There were other motivating factors as well. Lillie’s independence had been dearly bought. There had been bad reviews, endless gossip, and the public exploitation of a woman who built a career on the circus of her own notoriety. The Baldwin Theatre, too, was in trouble. As David Belasco’s biographer later wrote, “the history of the Baldwin, and of the stock company, for … July 1880 to July 1882, is one of anxious striving … public indifference … (and) declining fortunes” (Winter, 1918, v.1, 228). Financial difficulties finally cost Maguire control of the venue, and Belasco, himself, made plans to leave San Francisco for New York to become the stage manager of the Madison Square Theatre (Wagenknecht, 1982, 310).

After barely two years on stage in San Francisco, Lillie left to join her mother in Montana at Mary’s new business venture, the Edgington House Hotel in Butte. It must have been a dismal time. A provocative item found its way into the 18 June 1882 edition of The Independent Record of Helena, Montana, noting that actress Lillian Edgington, currently living in Butte, had been “wounded in the ankle Tuesday evening by the accidental discharge of a pistol she was examining” (The Independent Record (TIR; Helena, MT), 1882). No further details were given. Whether the shooting was an accident or whether Lillie had tried to harm herself, a month later she said good-bye to Butte. The Montana Standard announced on 26 July that “Miss Lillian Edgington having accepted an engagement with a troupe in New York, left for that city Sunday morning” (The Montana Standard (TMS; Butte, MT), 1882). Lillie was headed for the Madison Square Theatre, probably through the auspices of its new stage manager David Belasco. She changed her billing from Lillie Edgington, scandal of the Comstock, to Lillian Edgington, serious dramatic actress. The Weekly Nevada State Journal announced in February 1883 that Lillie was in New York City, “waiting a theatrical engagement” (Nevada State Journal (NSJ; Reno, NV), Various dates).

For the next four years, Lillie performed in New York as well as on the road. Road life was one of the theater’s greatest challenges, burdening players with uncomfortable lodgings, dirty dressing rooms, travel costs, and venues smaller and less profitable than in larger cities (Auster, 1984, 55, 58). “Most actors were not paid for rehearsal time and since the theater season lasted for thirty to forty weeks a year, players could usually expect long layoffs” (Unattributed, 2021, online). A single woman, too, even one traveling with a troupe, could face unwanted companions like loneliness and sexual harassment. Despite such hardships, Lillie soldiered on and continued to garner flattering notices. In September 1882, she was on stage at the Standard Theatre on Broadway between Thirty-second and Thirty-third Streets, playing Toto Turflana in Laura Don’s “romantic comedy drama”, A Daughter of the Nile. Lillie owed the role to her friendship with Don with whom she had worked on stage at the Baldwin Theater in San Francisco. Both were also close friends of David Belasco. Don, who had written the starring role in the play for herself, described the character as a woman “warm blooded, passionate, longing for fame, splendor and pleasure”, and could have found no worthier incarnation of these qualities than her supporting player (Craig, 1882, 8). The show was a hit, judged “the first American play of any worth produced (this season)” (Brown, 1903, v.3, 247; Berg, 1884, 276). In October 1882, Lillie was in Philadelphia performing in Legion of Honor, and the following January she appeared in Cleveland, finally arriving on stage as the play’s leading lady to “a $4,000 house as Parthenea in Ingomar (the Barbarian)”, with very favorable reviews (Cincinnati Post (CP), 27 October 1882; The Montana Standard (TMS; Butte, MT), 1882). In that same month, the theater critic in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, wrote that: “Lillian Edgington gave such good satisfaction [on stage] that we are unable to say anything more than praise in her behalf” (Wilkes-Barre Times Leader (WBTL), 1883).

During the spring and summer of 1883, Lillie toured the mid-West from Atchison and Topeka, Kansas, to St. Louis, Missouri, as Arabella Lucinda in Our Summer Boarders, a farce by Elliott Barnes that had premiered in January at the Grand Opera House in Brooklyn (Nevada State Journal (NSJ; Reno, NV), Various dates). Her reviews were good; her dramatic range greatly improved, and her popularity with audiences growing. Her theatrical future seemed assured. A few months later Lillie was back in New York, and on 26 July 1883 she could be seen in the role of Olive Skinner in The Silver King at the Haverly Theater on Fourteenth Street, a role she performed multiple times over the next two years. Once again, the character of the daughter of a man who lost all he had gambling on the horses but later made a fortune with a silver mine was a role that held echoes of Lillie’s own life. The theater critic for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that: “This celebrated melodrama grows rather than diminishes in popularity … Last night’s representation left little to be desired … Misses Helen Tracy [and] Lillian Edgington … [who] supported the role of Olive Skinner … were recognized as old friends of the public” (The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (TBDE; Brooklyn, New York), 1884). Lillie’s co-star Helen Tracy, like Laura Don, were members of that growing sorority of women, divorced, separated, or single, who were claiming independent identities, fashioning public personas, and earning incomes on the stage. While Laura Don died prematurely in 1886 at 33 of tuberculosis, Tracy, who knew Lillie well and performed in a number of plays with her, went on to motion picture fame in the early silents (Romeo and Juliet, 1916; The Land of Promise, 1917).

In November 1883, Lillie was performing The Silver King at the National Theater in Washington, D. C., and “in her ladylike acting … [she] proved herself an accomplished actress easy and graceful of carriage, with a fine face and figure, and thoroughly understanding of the art of dressing” (National Republican (NR), 1883). Lillie’s fashion sense, honed among the clothiers on the Comstock, was one of her most impressive theatrical talents. Her outfits were praised in many critics’ columns, and, as “featured actresses were expected to supply their own costumes which could cost between three and four hundred dollars a season”, this was one area where Lillie proved her dramatic worth (Auster, 1984, 54). Other critics concurred. According to the St. Joseph Gazette-Herald: “Lillian Edgington … created a pleasant impression, and dressed superbly” (St. Joseph Gazette-Herald (SJGH; St. Joseph, MO), 1883). Gushed The Topeka Daily Capital, “Miss Lillie Edgington … made a magnificent appearance, and through sheer force of talent made a prominent part of Arabella. Her dresses were among the finest seen here this season” (The Topeka Daily Capital (TTDC), 1883). Mr. Meyers, that seller of striking jabots back in Virginia City, would have been unsurprised. Yet even as Lillian Edgington, lauded actress living in New York, thousands of miles from the Comstock and five years after her divorce from Mark Strouse, local Nevada papers continued to identify her as the daughter of the late Abe Edgington and the former wife of Mark Strouse. In nearly every notice, those who praised her acting and those who panned it, she was inevitably identified as “the former wife of Mark Strouse” or “formerly Mrs. Mark Strouse of Virginia” (NSJ, 26 July 1883). It may have been a way of calling to the reader’s attention one of Nevada’s own, but it also kept the scandal alive.

Lillie’s dramatic career, born of scandal, ended in the same way. One of the premier male actors of the day, William De Wolf Hopper (1858–1935), had an unhappy marriage and a roving eye. Standing 6’ 5” with a commanding voice, Hopper starred in drama, musicals, and comedy. He also saw himself as a star in the bedroom, and in April 1885, his wife, Helen, sued for divorce on the grounds of adultery. “When the suit was first brought,” revealed the New York Herald, “the name of a well-known actress was mentioned as correspondent, but, on second thoughts, this suit was abandoned and the name of another actress, Lillian Edgington, was substituted” (New York Herald (NYH), 1885). Who the well-known actress may have been was not divulged, but, in addition to his alleged correspondent, Hopper was simultaneously carrying on an affair with aspiring singer Ida Mosher, whom he had met the previous year and whom he would marry in 1886. The insinuation in the Herald article, that Lillie’s name had been substituted in the divorce complaint in place of someone whose reputation stood in greater peril from the notoriety, did nothing to preserve Lillie’s own reputation. When she left Mark Strouse for Julian Janes, there had been sympathy for her, particularly in the Nevada newspapers, as it was generally understood that the marriage she abandoned had been forced on her. There was little sympathy for the adulterous correspondent in the divorce of one of Broadway’s most popular performers. Whether she was an innocent victim or an actual party to the Hopper divorce, or whether she had simply grown tired of stage life, Lillian Edgington’s acting career was effectively over.

Notoriety, however, continued to follow her. She returned West, remarried, and according to her mother, “settled down to a quiet, domestic life” in Southern California, a choice that seems thoroughly out of character for the reckless, restless Lillie. But in August 1889, on the 11^th anniversary of her first divorce, the Daily Nevada Tribune in Carson City resurrected the Strouse scandal and published an article called “Smart and Smooth” about the Edgington-Janes elopement, an article picked up by the Nevada and California papers (RGJ, 1889). Mary Edgington, who had left Montana and was now teaching art in Grass Valley, California, wrote an angry rebuttal published in the local paper, stating that “Every word … is a lie.” The response from Carson City was waspishly legalistic. “Will Mrs. Edgington deny that her daughter Lily (sic) ran away with Janes? That she and Janes afterwards separated, she going on the stage? … The Tribune is prepared to substantiate everything in the article referred to.” The Virginia Evening Chronicle jumped on the press bandwagon by highlighting the “sensation” caused by the elopement and announcing with ironic glee that the prodigal Janes, “handsome, smart and smooth … is now one of the most popular Episcopalian ministers in the city of Philadelphia”, a wildly unlikely outcome that stunned even the most cynical readers (Virginia Evening Chronicle (VEC), 1889). Marriage number four like those that preceded it ended abruptly.

Rumor had it that Lillie married a fifth time in August 1891 to the proprietor of a bookbinding company in Portland, Oregon, Thomas M. Howe, and if she did then her introduction to him may have been through his relative John P. Howe, a theater manager who had recently opened “a first class theater” in Portland (The Oregonian (TO; Portland, OR), 1891). This marriage did not last either. But it seems to have been in Portland where she met her final husband. In 1908 at fifty-two, she married for the sixth and last time. Her new husband was a divorced father named William H. Sanders, with a 7-year-old daughter, Violet. Sanders was six years younger than his wife, but Lillie Edgington, actress, fashionista, trendsetter, adulterer, victim, survivor, lied to him about her age, telling him that she had been born on 14 March 1871, not 15 years earlier in 1856. Scandal had launched her career, giving her independence and an income, but in her final years she had come full circle. Having spent a lifetime escaping from the Comstock culture of the mines and searching from San Francisco to New York for glamour, adventure, and excitement, Lillie’s last husband was ironically and prosaically a mining engineer from Nevada.

The Belle of the Comstock died of uremic poisoning at 3:30 a.m., appropriately enough on April Fool’s Day 1917 (NV Death Records, 1911-1965). She died in the tiny mining town of Mina, Nevada, only a hundred miles or so southeast of Virginia City, where less than 1,000 people still held out on the nearly deserted Comstock. Outside her window were the scenes of her childhood, the houses of miners and amalgamators, carpenters and machinists sitting lightly on an arid plain of desert. In the nearby hills were silver mines, gold mines, lead and cinnabar mines, and hard, hopeful men speaking a dozen different tongues who had come from all the corners of the earth to dig beneath the ground looking for treasure. On her death certificate, Lillie’s occupation is given as “Housewife”, a role that for most of her adult life she would have scorned to play. And among the many unknowns left blank on the form, the only recorded identifier was the one to which she had clung tenaciously her entire life, the flag under which she always sailed, next to “Name of Father”, the clerk has written “Abe Edgington”. His persistent presence in her life was Lillie’s final filial tribute. William Sanders buried his wife in the Mina cemetery, her grave marked as “Lillian Edgington, wife of W. H. Sanders 1917”. Echoing the days when Lillian Edgington was the Belle of the Comstock and the toast of Topeka, carved lily flowers run along both sides of a headstone that simply says, “At Rest”.

6. Conclusion

The narrative of Lillie Edgington’s life exemplifies important aspects of the Western experience that so many women endured, particularly in negotiating the friable bonds of marriage. Her seduction at 14 by a predatory abuser, her forced marriage, and her fight for an independent agency have a psychological resonance today. Lillie’s choices and behavior describe an entire population of tough female pioneers who fought for control over their own lives when marriage, that socially mandated goal for all women, failed them (James, 2022, online). There is no record, for example, of any official divorce from Julian Janes, and Lillie’s quick remarriage to Ben Maynard was in all likelihood a bigamous one. This casual assumption of sequential spouses was not uncommon on a frontier where populations were in constant flux, movement frequent, and communications difficult. New identities were assumed, old ones abandoned, and challenges in legally shedding partners often led to desertion and bigamy. Had Lillie left Virginia City and not gone on the stage, she could easily have outrun the scandal that followed her for years. Anonymity would have erased notoriety, but for “a female who wanted to look her best in company”, anonymity was never really a choice.

Lillie’s life is a story of rule breaking, role playing, and economic determination triumphing over marital determinism. Three disastrous marriages helped launch a stage career that although short succeeded beyond expectation. Grit and resilience both in private life and on the stage brought a desperate divorcee and untrained ingénue public admiration and financial independence in an age when few women managed to achieve either. If women’s voices are to be written into the record, Lillie Edgington’s voice speaks loudly of “a free soul who was never still”, and whose bold and impassioned nature took risks to create a place for herself in a difficult profession that was moving increasingly toward a dominant role for women.

At Lillie’s death, acting opportunities for women were expanding exponentially. The booming movie industry that her father’s racehorse had helped to launch, was relocating from the East Coast to Hollywood. The silver that had once poured from the mines of her youth now literally coated the replacement “stages” of the emerging film industry, and old friends like Helen Tracy were staking their claim in the growing riches of these silver screens. Plays in which Lillie had once appeared were being visually reimagined and spread by the alchemy of film to theaters across the nation and around the globe. Actress Helen Meyers played one of Lillie’s most famous roles, Olive Skinner, in the 1919 film, The Silver King. At the same time another Lillie and mentee of David Belasco, Lillian Gish, was acting, directing and “pioneering fundamental film performance techniques”, reaching for the naturalism that Belasco had once tried to instill in the Comstock Belle (Unattributed, 2011). By 1922, average weekly attendance at movie theaters had reached 40 million, nearly half the population of the country, and it was actresses who dominated the “dream factories” (Auster, 1984, 143).

If the arrival of Adah Isaacs Menken in 1864 Virginia City had been the opening act in the rising popularity of the actress in the West, 1917 saw that popularity, once again anchored in the West, explode across the nation. One month before Lillie’s death, Mary Pickford starred in the hit film that carried echoes of Lillie’s own life, The Poor Little Rich Girl. Two weeks after Lillie’s funeral, Gloria Swanson appeared in Teddy at the Throttle. In that same year, Marion Davies was featured in Runaway Romany while Theda Bara vamped it up in Cleopatra. On Broadway, Marilyn Miller had just become a star in Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies. All these legends owed a debt to the actresses who came before them, working to expand women’s access to starring roles and theatrical employment, first on stage and now in film. By 1917, this brave new world of entertainment was flourishing, and Lillian Edgington, actress, may have been forgotten, but the profession she pioneered and the women whose careers she anticipated were just getting started.

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Additional information

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The author received no direct funding for this research.

Notes on contributors

Susan E. James

Susan E. James is an independent writer and researcher who earned her Ph.D. at Cambridge University. She has written extensively in the fields of the humanities and social sciences, publishing over 40 peer-reviewed articles on various aspects of the humanities, as well as three books on sixteenth-century English history: Kateryn Parr: The Making of a Queen (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 1999), The Feminine Dynamic in English Art, 1485-1603: Women as Consumers, Patrons and Painters (Farnham, UK & Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009, nominated for the Berger Prize), and Women’s Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485-1603: Authority, Influence and Material Culture (Farnham, UK & Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015).