The Danites, or the Heart of the Sierras

The Danites, or the Heart of the Sierras (or simply The Danites) is melodrama in five acts by Joaquin Miller (1837-1913)[1]

Miller was an American poet and frontiersman, nicknamed the "Poet of the Sierras", who numerous works about the West and the Sierra Nevada region, and his play was an anti-Mormon drama, telling of Danites (a fraternal organization founded by members of the Latter Day Saints or Mormons to serve as a vigilante group during the 1838 Mormon War)[2] who hunted the daughter of one of the murderers of Joseph Smith.

Miller had adapted the play from his own work, a series of prose sketches called First Fam'lies of the Sierras (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg & Co., 1876)[3]. The adaptation was apparently done with the aid of actor McKee Rankin and P.A. Fitzgerald. The play opened to surprising success on August 22 1877 in New York with McKee in the leading role, and would remain popular through the 1880s, especially in the American West. In London it was performed in the same period, but under the title The First Families of the Sierras.

In 1887 Miller revised the play, calling it The New Danites.

It was later published as a readers' edition under the title The Danites in the Sierras by San Francisco, Whitaker & Ray-Wiggin co., 1910.[4]

1885: Performed as The Danites in the Theatre Royal, Cape Town, by H.C. Sidney and the Sidney-Fiedler company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joaquin_Miller

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danite

https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009567154

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33220

David R. Beasley. 2002. "Appendix B" in McKee Rankin and the Heyday of the American Theater, David Beasley: p.349[5] By

James Fisher. 2015. Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Beginnings. Rowman & Littlefield: p. 129[6]