Everyone knows the name Calamity Jane. Scores of dime novels and
movie and TV Westerns have portrayed this original Wild West woman
as an adventuresome, gun-toting hellion. Although Calamity Jane has
probably been written about more than any other woman of the
nineteenth-century American West, fiction and legend have largely
obscured the facts of her life. This lively, concise, and
exhaustively researched biography traces the real person from the
Missouri farm where she was born in 1856 through the development of
her notorious persona as a Wild West heroine. Before Calamity Jane
became a legend, she was Martha Canary, orphaned when she was only
eleven years old. From a young age she traveled fearlessly, worked
with men, smoked, chewed tobacco, and drank. By the time she
arrived in the boomtown of Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876, she had
become Calamity Jane, and the real Martha Canary had disappeared
under a landslide of purple prose. Calamity became a hostess and
dancer in Deadwood's saloons and theaters. She imbibed heavily, and
she might have been a prostitute, but she had other qualities, as
well, including those of an angel of mercy who ministered to the
sick and the down-and-out. Journalists and dime novelists couldn't
get enough of either version, nor, in the following century, could
filmmakers. Sorting through the stories, veteran western historian
Richard W. Etulain's account begins with a biography that offers
new information on Calamity's several 'husbands' (including one she
legally married), her two children, and a woman who claimed to be
the daughter of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity, a story Etulain
discredits. In the second half of the book, Etulain traces the
stories that have shaped Calamity Jane's reputation. Some Calamity
portraits, he says, suggest that she aspired to a quiet life with a
husband and family. As the 2004 - 2006 HBO series Deadwood makes
clear, well more than a century after her first appearance as a
heroine in the Deadwood Dick dime novels, Calamity Jane lives on -
raunchy, unabashed, contradictory, and ambiguous as ever.
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