In Nevada's nineteenth-century towns and mining camps, the demand for entertainment was almost entirely filled by traveling theatrical troupes. Thinly settled and distant from major population centers, the state took well over a century to develop the sort of sophisticated stage culture necessary to incubate its own professional playwrights and theater companies. During this period, few theatrical backers would risk a production by any American playwright, let alone an unknown local one, when audiences were likely to prefer a more fashionable foreign play.