By Dixie Reid
Bee Staff Writer
Published Jan. 18, 1998

Bayard Taylor and Stephen Massett spent the afternoon together at Sutter's Fort and made their way to Front Street by early evening. They arrived just in time for Sacramento City's first night of culture.

The occasion -- on Oct. 18, 1849 -- was both highbrow and historic. "The Bandit Chief"was the first English-language play ever presented in the West, and it unfolded inside the Eagle, California's first professional theater. Box seats were $5 apiece; pit seats were $3.

One newspaper wag called the Eagle Theatre an "oasis in a great desert of the mind." It was just canvas stretched across a wood frame and secured under a tin roof. The city had no river levees then and the Eagle flooded so often, even on opening night, that it was closed down two months later.

But civility was here to stay. Actors,singers, dancers, musicians, minstrels and even circus performers came to Sacramento City, as it was called then, seeking a fortune made more easily than by wresting reluctant ore from rocks. A top-notch actor, for instance, might earn $500 a week.

Spectators, mostly miners, wore heavy overcoats, felt hats and knee-high boots. The drenched canvas offered no ventilation, so the theater was stifling hot. The smelly, unwashed miners -- their pockets bulging with gold dust --sometimes left the diggings upriver to entertain themselves in Sacramento City.

Early on, the boomtowns offered them not only theater but gaming houses as well. Gold Rush Californians gambled on anything -- "in effect, everything which could be thought of to while away an idle hour or on which bets could be made," according to an 1880 Sacramento County history. Among the most popular gaming opportunities around here were bear-and-bull fights, cockfights and horse racing. The Sacramento Jockey Club, founded in 1850, maintained a quarter-mile track at Brighton, a settlement east of town.