If, as Professor Quinn maintains, the national dramas centering about the American Revolution held the spotlight in the United States during the period from 1825 to 1860, certainly the Indian plays featuring the noble savage rivaled them as the second most popular form of stage entertainment. Relatively little is known of the early productions of these Indian plays by American authors.
One of the earliest American productions took the form of an “operatic spectacle,” called Tammany. It was put on at the John Street Theater in New York on March 3, 1794, with a Mrs. Hatton in the lead, and is often credited as originating “that impossible type of stage Indian” which never existed in real life.