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While Sam had been away in San Francisco [May to July of 1863], the impresario Tom Maguire, a former cab driver and gambler, had built a sixteen-hundred-seat theater on D Street near Union in Virginia City patterned after his opulent opera house in San Francisco, and it was routinely crowded with folks eager to see such popular local favorites as Lotta Crabtree, Julia Dean Hayne, and Frank Mayo. Maguire reserved the front row, the ‘printers’ pew,” for reporters, and Mayo was so friendly with the staff of the Enterprise that he later claimed he based “all that is quaint and humorous” in his leading role in Frank H. Murdoch’s frontier melodrama Davy Crockett (1873) on Sam and “all that is sweet, wholesome, and lovable” in the role on Joe Goodman.