The result of that collaboration was the widely known and admired drama of “The Girl I Left Behind Me,”--the title of which was suggested by Daniel Frohman. “We had much difficulty in choosing a title for this play,” writes Belasco; “in fact, we had none as we neared the last rehearsals. A Fourth of July celebration occurs in the First Act, during which a band plays ’The Girl I Left Behind Me.’ Daniel Frohman was in front, at one of the rehearsals, and sent me a slip of paper on which was written ’The Girl I Left Behind Me,’ and that was how our play was named.” Few persons, I believe, hear even the name of that stirring air without a thrill: the associations with it that rise in any sensitive mind,--the agony of solicitude, doubt, hope, grief, and joy,--are irresistibly affecting; it singularly arouses apprehension and exultation, and its association with this play is specially appropriate because of its relevancy to the desperate military enterprise which creates the splendid climax of the drama.
“After I had agreed to write the opening play for Frohman,” Belasco has told me, “I said nothing of my subject, because I had made up my mind to try to bring on the American Stage a phase of American life, on our Western frontiers, involving the American Indian, in a new way; I didn’t want discussion and I dreaded discouragement.” That, surely, was discreet, because it is immeasurably wiser, where works of art are concerned, to execute them rather than to talk about them. Belasco’s interest in the Indian and Indian affairs began in his childhood: one of his stepping-stones into the Theatre was his performance of an _Indian Chief_, in Hager’s “The Great Republic”: and his determination to undertake depiction, at once dramatic and veritable, of an aspect of actual yet romantic life on our frontiers displayed sound artistic taste in selection of a theme and shrewd judgment in opening a fresh field, thitherto practically untouched.
At that time, early in 1892, the Indian troubles in the West were much in the public mind. The fierce insurrections of 1876, under the leadership of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Spotted Tail, and others, and the lamentable slaughter of the gallant Custer and his intrepid followers in the terrible battle at the Little Bighorn (June 25, that year), had not been forgotten. Indeed, they could not be: the rising under Sitting Bull, in 1890, after his return from Canada; the death of that wily old Medicine Man, who was shot, December 15, that year, with 300 braves, when he sought to escape, during the fight at Wounded Knee; the resistance to disarmament and the frightful massacre at the Pine Ridge Agency, two weeks later; the vigilant and finally successful movements of United States troops under General Nelson A. Miles, against the Indians, especially the Sioux, incident to the “Ghost Dance” furor, which was inspired by Sitting Bull and which extended through 1890-’91; and the massacre at the Rosebud Agency,--all those events made the subject unusually prominent in the public mind. Belasco and Fyles labored zealously at their task and it was duly completed; Frohman enthusiastically expressed himself satisfied; and, on January 25, 1893, the Empire Theatre (thereafter, till the day of his death, that manager’s headquarters) was auspiciously dedicated with a performance of one of the most deservedly popular plays ever produced under his management: it had been acted for a week, beginning January 16, at the New National Theatre, Washington, D. C., in preparation for the New York presentment.