The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a golden age of entertainment. In the growing United States, hundreds of vaudeville acts traveled along multiple circuits, and nearly a hundred circuses crisscrossed the continent by rail.

What’s more, everyday folks created their own entertainment, whether through group singing or performing in the 40,000 community bands that included a million members. Four generations of one family, the Hewetts, provide an extraordinary window on this age of both entertainment and exploration.

Brothers Frank and Charles Hewett led musical family acts that toured the frontier West and circled the world, from the Klondike to London to Tasmania and South Africa, bringing music, magic and comedy to city opera houses and dusty mining towns alike. Charles split his career between vaudeville performances and leading bands—moving his family fifteen times as the community band craze swept America.

When Charles’s daughter married an acrobat, a whole new entertainment family branched out of the Hewetts, going into the circus and forming a famous trapeze act, the Flying Behees. The two Hewett sisters each had adventurous streaks that shed light on yet different aspects of that age while also exploding gender expectations we hold of those days: Nettie became the first oil speculator in El Paso, Texas, and built a stone castle for her home.

Edith became a dentist, and in 1901, at age forty-five, set out alone on horseback to explore the Alaskan wilderness, then disappeared. Edith’s story converges with that of her brothers, Frank and Charles, when they commence a multi-year quest to find her, taking their family act to the Yukon and entertaining gold miners to fund the expedition.

Though neither famous nor wealthy, the Hewetts were both immensely talented and indefatigable, and through their colorful lives we may see in a single frame the American hunger for entertainment, the seductive pull of the show-business life, and the no-safety-net economic realities that governed it all. .