Colonel Sellers

Colonel Sellers (1874), a play by George Densmore and Mark Twain ( Samuel Clemens). [Park Theatre, 119 perf.] Col. George Selby ( Milnes Levick), although a married man, seduces Laura Hawkins ( Gertrude Kellogg). When she learns that he is married she kills him. Hovering not very far in the background is the character of Colonel Sellers ( John T. Raymond), a perennially impoverished dreamer, who is forever concocting schemes to make millions. He sees potential fortune in oddball steamboats, corn speculation, and, if corn speculation fails, cornering the hog market and feeding the hogs corn. The play has a complicated history. It was originally written by Densmore and presented as The Gilded Age in San Francisco in April 1874. Clemens brought suit, forced Densmore to waive his royalties, then rewrote the play. When it was presented in New York, its melodramatic main plot was generally dismissed and only Raymond's Sellers was praised. Clemens and Charles Dudley Warner rewrote it as Colonel Sellers and Raymond performed Sellers well over a thousand times in his lifetime. Twain and William Dean Howells later wrote a sequel, Colonel Sellers as a Scientist, which Raymond refused to play, considering the lead had been turned into a caricature and the play was itself untheatrical. His judgment was confirmed when the play was finally produced as The American Claimant; or, Mulberry Sellers Ten Years Later (1887) and failed.