Miss Addie Carter

I grew up on my family's plantation, Wheatland. I was rather rebellious and undermined an arranged marriage when I was 15. When I fell in love with the blacksmith's apprentice at 17, my father, in frustration, sent me to New York to live with his mother, my grandmother, Mary Carter. It was there I fell in love with the theater and set my mind to act and sing on stage. I joined a small theater company without my Grandmother knowing. I thought everything was going to be perfect. In 1849, my grandmother passed away and my father demanded I return home. He did not consider it proper for a woman to be living alone. I refused to return and instead took my grandmother's last name and used my small inheritance to join five other members of my troop on a wagon train going west.

We started off in May of 1949 with 50 wagons from Council Bluffs, Iowa. We performed at Ft. Laramie in June and some evenings for the train. We followed the Platte River all the way to Emigrant Pass reaching it in July.

In Late October we went through Donner Pass just as the snow was beginning to fall. On December 2, 1849 we arrived in Sacramento. We opened at the Eagle Theater the first week of January 1850 with King Lear. When I heard the audience applaud that night I knew my dreams had finally come true. But the second night it began to rain. When the Sacramento River swelled its banks and sank the town, the Eagle Theater was lost. That was the last time I played Shakespeare, or any other play for that matter.

My fellow troop members moved on to try mining and I was left with virtually nothing and no way to make a living. There was an opening at the Stinking Tent Saloon for barkeep. I remade one of my last costumes and asked Mr. James Lee, owner and proprietor for a job. He hired me.

I may tend bar but I am an actress. Someday I will save enough money to travel to Yorba Buena and perform in the Metropolitan Theater. And who knows...maybe my parents will come see me and tell me how proud they are I'm their daughter.