In her prime, which wasn’t long
due to the corrosive effects of drink,
Calamity Jane, born Marthy or
Martha Canary, was equal in celebrity
to Wild Bill Hickock and George
Armstrong Custer. Some oldsters
still think of her as the sunny blonde
tomboy as portrayed in the movies.
A songbird, warbling of her secret
love. In truth, self-named Calamity
Jane was a rough itinerant blessed
with the uncanny ability to pump up
her exploits, real and imagined, to
all who would listen.
Well, this much is true: Calamity Jane
came by her buckskins honestly.
Born into poverty in Missouri in 1852,
oldest child, she never did cotton
to women’s role, which was far
too dull for her spirited nature.
She could ride and hunt, fish
and swear with the best of the
boys. (It’s true that oldest
daughters sometimes become
sons.) Her skills being practical,
her father did not discourage her.
Deeply in debt due to gambling,
he plucked up his family and headed
west.
Their luck wasn’t good. In Virginia
City, Montana, Martha’s mother, said
by some to be a harridan, succumbed
to pneumonia. Still seeking that elusive
success, her father died a short while
later in Mormon Territory, leaving
15-year-old Martha to raise herself
and five younger ones. With scant
support—cook, dishwasher, dance hall
girl, mule driver, sometime prostitute,
she couldn’t, so the siblings were
farmed off as orphans and
vanished from history.
Somewhere along her trajectory,
Martha Canary renamed herself
Calamity Jane. Some said the name
was a warning: any man who crossed
her was courting calamity. Calamity
herself claimed that the name was
given her by a soldier, Egan, she had
saved from the Indians. Either way it
was a brilliant stroke of invention,
tripping on the tongue. Perhaps
Calamity might have rivaled Twain,
if she hadn’t been illiterate.
As her story continues, Calamity
eked out a living at Fort Bridger and
then Fort Laramie in Wyoming. In
1875, she dressed as a soldier and
joined a government expedition.
The point of that journey was to
determine just how much gold
the Black Hills held. A minor
detail: by right of the Treaty of
Laramie, the Sioux owned the
land. In her defense, Calamity
cared not a whit for gold or any
other metal, precious or base.
She didn’t covet; her motive was
pure: adventure.
She must have had a grand time
on the march, in the wild. Wolves
snakes, storms, floods, were never
known to deter her. But when the
army brass discovered she was
female, she was ordered to leave.
Not that her sex was a secret. She
just felt freer in pants.
Calamity being Calamity, she didn’t go
far. Adept at cracking a 17-foot whip,
tall and strong, she became mule-
skinner of a supply wagon further
down the line. About a year later, in
spring 1876, she rode out as a
bullwhacker with General Crook’s
expedition to Montana to “subdue”
the Sioux. Again, Calamity was
discovered dressed as a man
and ordered to leave. This time
she did, despite her later claims.
She never saw any battles between
red man and white. Just as well.
What had Crazy Horse ever done
to her?
After she moved to Cheyenne a few
months later, it is said by some that
she found work in a low-grade bordello
known as a hog ranch. This may be
true. She wouldn’t be the first strong-
willed woman to sell herself to men.
Unsavory as it seems, fornicating
for money in low surroundings was
better than starving, and there was,
is, always a market. Or maybe she
did work as a cook. Accounts vary,
depending, perhaps, on the writer’s
agenda. The more salacious
highlight the whoring, while others
don’t.
Safe to say, Calamity Jane preferred
men’s work to lolling around in
low dives. It was more dignified.
Adventure again beckoning in 1876,
she set out for the goldrush town
of Deadwood, Dakota Territory,
stringing along with Wild Bill Hickock.
Like his, her arrival was headline news.
Even though she never met a barstool
she didn’t like and howled through
the streets like a coyote when drunk,
people sought her company because
she was generous when she had
money and for the stories she
could tell.
It was in Deadwood, Dakota Territory,
during its goldrush days that Calamity
Jane burnished her fame. By nature, she
was Coyote, a trickster, as the Natives
say. Despite her hardships or because of
them, she could enthrall. Whether she
spoke the strict truth was beside the
point. She never rode with Custer in
Arizona as she claimed. (Custer never
rode in Arizona). Nor rescued wagon
trains from marauding Sioux. Nor, for
that matter, had a love affair with
Wild Bill, who favored rich, painted
widows, while Jane was buckskin plain.
Egged on by everyone, including
gentlemen of the press, she spun
yarns based on what she wished she
had done. At a time of corsets and lace,
fainting ladies and smelling salts,
there was a surefire market for tales
of wild women, those who broke
the mold. Go figure: a thrilling release
for all the folks stuck back East
in clapboard houses and tenements,
even mansions perhaps. Like
“The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance,” legend became reality.
There is a photo of Calamity clad
in buckskins and holding a rifle.
She doesn’t look happy, exactly.
In fact, in most of her photos, be it in
buckskins or skirts, she looks
hard, sad, and lonely, the bottle
beckoning, endless horizon
in her eyes. It’s hard work being
a legend, the life of the party.
Yet she had a good heart. When a
smallpox epidemic hit Deadwood
in August of ‘76, all accounts agree
that she tended the sick uncomplainingly,
and at great risk to herself.
As news of Calamity spread, dime novel
scribes profited off her exploits, real
and imagined, while she, ever at home
in a saloon, drank up whatever fame
earned her. Never able to settle
down for long, she followed her
itch from the Dakotas to Wyoming to
Montana as far west as Missoula and
back. What she was searching for, God
only knows. Sobriety? As she traveled,
she sold photos of herself and
pamphlets presenting a brief story of
her life: fiction interlaced with fact.
She even appeared at the Pan American
Exposition back East in Buffalo, a
drink-sodden relic, a walking,
talking epitaph of the Old West.
When the end came for Calamity
in 1903 due to pneumonia, in a
cabin outside of Deadwood, the
good folks of the town took pity,
set up a collection and buried
her next to Wild Bill Hickok. He,
who in life, had barely given her
the time of day and besides, had
been married at the time of his
card-playing demise.
The burial plot was sort of a joke
and sort of wasn’t: Calamity
claimed that Bill had been her
one true love, but what she
claimed was often bunk. I don’t
think she loved any man, for
what it’s worth. She did crave
celebrity, though, and knew she
belonged, for richer or poorer,
alongside Wild Bill on Deadwood’s
Boot Hill.
Ruth Rouff is a freelance education writer and published poet and novelist. Though she lives in New Jersey, she enjoys traveling out west and this summer plans to visit South Dakota, including one of Calamity Jane’s haunts.