Tales of Tombstone's Bird Cage Theatre

BILLY HUTCHINSON'S RIBALD BIRD CAGE THEATRE

IT STARTED IN JULY, 1880, WHEN AN OPERA HOUSE

MANAGER PAID $600 FOR A PLOT OF LAND AT THE

SOUTHEAST END OF TOMBSTONE'S ALLEN STREET. BILLY

HUTCHINSON'S DREAM WAS TO BUILD A THEATER IN

WHICH RESPECTABLE CITIZENS MIGHT FEEL AT HOME.

What he got was a cramped boxlike adobe structure, which, from its December 23, 1881, opening, and continuing nightly for the next two years, was packed to the doors with dusty cowboys, day-wage miners, and assorted drifters, droolers, and reprobates, each perfectly willing to collapse into a guzzle-and-holler frenzy at the sight of the winking chorus girls parading before them. The Bird Cage Theatre went on to become the Southwest's most famous vaudeville playhouse, and even today, more than a century later, it is still being written about, portrayed on film, and visited by tourists, who can only imagine what went on there in the roaring days. The truth of the place is often hidden behind its legend, and over time the two have become interwoven. But it's unlikely Hutchinson could've imagined tales as colorful as those told about the Bird Cage. Several were compiled by author Pat Ryan for the publication of the Tucson Corral of the Westerners in 1966. There's the one about Methodist preacher J.E. McCann, landed softly it was a dummy stuffed with straw.

B I R D C A G E T H E A T R E

The Bird Cage's wild reputation probably helped with its bookings. Whenever the stage rolled into town carrying new performers, Tombstone gathered to inspect the talent.

Famed comedian Eddie Foy played a two-week hitch there in 1882. He later described the theater as a coffin, because of its shape, but he paid the place a compliment by saying he wasn't shot at or hit with cabbage there.

Pat Ryan wrote that comedienne Nola Forrest graced the place in 1883, but it was her off-stage act that keeps her in memory. It seems that the beautiful but married - Nola took up with a bookkeeper named J.P. Wells and so turned his head that he began embezzling cash from his employer to keep his love in jewels. Alas, this did not keep her at his side, and Wells did not profit from the lesson.

After Nola reconciled with her husband, Wells took up with "another well-known woman of this burg, who completed the financial wreck begun by Nola." Ryan wrote that Wells eventually left town a broken man, and in June of 1886 was reported drowned in the Gila River.

Performer Lizzie Mitchell is remembered because of her unfortunate decision, while suffering from what The Prospector called violent pains, to swallow a dose of morphine.

"Not being an expert in pharmacy," the paper reported, "Lizzie got an overdose, and but for friends who compelled her to walk until five o'clock this morning, she would now be an angel."

Professor Ricardo, known as a wonder of wonders in feats of legerdemain, "Hindoo" juggling, light and heavy balancing, and sword swallowing, met a bad fate, too.

Two weeks after doing his act, it was discovered that the good professor was actually Edmund Don Lober, a deserter from Troop D, 4th Cavalry, at Fort Huachuca. He was given a bed at the town jail.

But even poor Edmund was better off than the girl standing on the Bird Cage stage waiting for a sharpshooter to blast an apple off her dome. In the wings stood Pat Holland, Tombstone's newly elected coroner, who thought the shooter was taking far too much time squinting down thebarrel, so he grabbed the weapon and blazed away.

Holland assumed the weapon was loaded only with wadded-up paper, according to a report in The Territorial Enterprise of Virginia City, Nevada. But he soon learned that someone had charged the gun with buckshot.

"Pat not only knocked the apple all to pieces," said The Enterprise, "but a bunch of hair, half as big as a man's fist, was carried across the stage and struck the opposite wall."

Hutchinson's ownership of the Bird Cage ended in 1883. The theater languished for three years until Joe Bignon, known as "the irrepressible showman," took over and used his considerable skills to resurrect it.

"It was a poor day if we didn't take in more than $2,500," boasted Bignon, who had been a circus and minstrel performer and was best known for a dance he did while wearing a monkey outfit.

In the finale, he hooked his monkey tail over a wire and swung above his audience. One time his tail broke, depositing him on the lap of a spectator. Refusing to let the incident force him out of character, he jumped up and scratched his head like a monkey and bounded up behind the curtain out of sight.

After buying the Bird Cage in January, 1886, Bignon renamed it the Elite and went to work doing whatever it took to keep the acts coming and the customers paying.

He even hired two men to conduct a six-hour walking match on a specially constructed track. It was a big deal, and bets were taken. "The money is up, in the hands of one of our responsible citizens," one paper reported, "and the parties mean business."

So did Joe Bignon's beloved wife, Minnie Branscombe, a pianist, singer, ballet dancer, and sometime hooker. When Minnie and Joe performed together, he billed her as "Big Minnie, six-feet-tall and 230 pounds of loveliness in pink tights.

But drunks who caused a row in her husband's business quickly learned that Minnie was no mere dainty. She would wrap her arm around a troublemaker's neck and toss him into the street.

The decline of the mines meant the same for the theater. Even Bignon's torchlight publicity parades down Allen Street couldn't arouse enough interest to keep the show going. About 1892 he sold the building and left Tombstone for the nearby gold town of Pearce, where he died in 1925.

Other owners made revival efforts, but they failed as well, and the great theater stayed silent for almost 30 years. Its doors opened again for the first Helldorado celebration in 1929. Five years later, it reopened as the Bird Cage Coffee Shoppe, then it became a souvenir stand. Today it's a popular tourist attraction.

But none of its reincarnations could erase what the old stage had been, or silence the "birds in gilded cages" who sang there over so many nights, and still do, if only in legend.

Additional Reading:

To find out more about Tombstone and the surrounding area, we recommend Tucson to Tombstone, a guidebook by Tom Dollar. The full-color 96page softcover book is jam-packed with stories and legends of the region and takes you over its trails from the desert floor to riparian canyons and alpine forests atop majestic mountains. Also included are maps and travel tips. The book costs $12.95 plus shipping and handling. To order, telephone tollfree (800) 543-5432; in the Phoenix area or outside the U.S., call (602) 258-1000.