The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1905-10-29

y
= The Herald for a statement on his y
purposes and experiences in writ y
Ing THE Squaw Man" and y
Moonshine," Mr.. R0yle wrote the y
y accompanying letter =
4T<T1f
THE Squaw Man" is an honest eff
fort TO write an American play. Some
people call IL a melOdFama, most
abused term, so abused in fact that it
mas lost any meaning. It is a habit to
call any play a melOdrama which mas
dramatic strength; it is also abused by
being applied to plays which have no
dramatic strength. It's old meaning, a
musical play has no present signif-
canoe. All city life. al town life even,
Is more or less alike. To get at the
heart Of nation you must get away
from the steam roller which brushes
everything TO common level, and get
out TO the frontier, to the woods, to
the solitudes, where individuality i'm
nationality is still vital So / chose
the frontier where the mountains are
big. the streams big. the men big; the
passions big.
When you want to make manifest
the bigness of st. Peters, you must
have some well known object beside il.
man or a beast. | have three racial
contrasts in juXtapositiOn in THE
SquaW Man" The English landscape,
with its cultivated beauty, the English
mau with his centuries of feudalism
behind him, the desolate beauty Of the
western bad lands. and the unsDoiied
rugged humanity of the American cow
boy. with a background of the infinite
pathos of the Indian, going swiftly TO
bis doom.
Has the Real indian.
claim to be the only man to ever
put the real Indian on the stage. The
stage Indian has been the most unreal
OF all stage unrealities. He usually
talks in third reader English, or some
staccato dialect which goes for Indian
because it is unlike anything else ever
spoken OF course the educated Indian
may not have as extensive a VoCabul-
airy as you OF /. but his English. so far
as il goes. is very like ours. I don't
suppose he ever thinks quite like us,
but he can conceal his thoughts in the
usual way. Tabywana, and Nat-u-
Titch, his daughter, in THE Squaw
Man. speak 10 English, but only in
their native tongue. / made uD my
mind that that would be the only way
10 make them absolutely real. To ac-
complish this. found to be a gigantic
task. and its accomplishment was due
almost 10 an accident.
Ideas Carried From Boyhood.
I suppose my play dates back to the
days when my brother and I used 10
ride out to the Uintah agency 20 spend
our school vacations. | absorbed a few
Ute words then, but very few. When
L determined 10 make my Indians
speak only Indian. I bethOught me of
my bOyhoOd friends on the agency,
Hon. +. b. CritchloW, DR.. John Critch-
low, and Dr. Frank BaseOm. now of
salt Lake City. The father of, the
CritchlOw boys was the agent at the
time and was our host. I thought of
course these three, who spent years
among the Utes, would be able to put
my dialogue into the Ute dialect with
out any difficulty. They met my de-
sires with sympathetic enthusiasm.
but distressingly small results. How
ever, the Hon Ed. sent my manuscript
TO Judge Hatch at Provo, out to Heber.
then out TO the agency. After months
of effort the decision was aSafnst me.
It couldn't be done.
Critchlow to the Rescae.
When l had concluded 10 abandon
the idea. 4 received a telegram from
+. B., telling me that there were at