A Bright Particular Star

Ella La Rue and the Performing Variety Women of the Old West

- CAROLYN GRATTAN EICHIN

Historian Jill Lepore recently observed that microhistories of unknown people find their lives serving as allegories for the larger American culture; the microhistory of one life takes us closer to the lives of many. The often nameless, largely forgotten women of the Old West's variety stage lived their struggles in ways singular yet representative of many.

Performing women singers, dancers, and the like came from saloon owners' needs to keep a largely male population happy. The saloon in the Old West was a male institution but found the use of waiter girls and women who sold companionship a complement to the liquid refreshment offered. Pretty waiter girls took a turn onstage in seductive costumes that encouraged male patronage, becoming the first entertainers in many a Western settlement. Coy, flirtatious behavior coupled with liquor and an environment of merriment enhanced by music, minstrelsy, salacious theatricalities, and short skits became variety theater in the mid-1800s and later in the century morphed into vaudeville. For some women, a variety of performances became an avenue to self-realization, wealth, and fame.

Ella La Rue mastered her own narrative by subverting traditional feminine performance codes and gendered expectations. She embraced the mobility needed to traverse the far-flung towns of the West, and she sold sexuality rather than sex.