Calamity Jane

Pioneer

  • Born: May 1, 1852?
  • Birthplace: Princeton, Missouri ?
  • Died: August 1, 1903
  • Place of death: Terry, South Dakota

American frontier pioneer

Famous for being independent and determined to live as she chose in a man’s world, Calamity Jane became a legendary exemplar of the mythic character of the American West.

Area of achievement Exploration

Early Life

Born in Missouri, Calamity Jane was christened Martha Cannary (or Canary). All the information about her birth comes from her seven-page autobiography. Although she wrote her life’s story, was photographed many times, and had many witnesses to her activities, her early life, like her later life, is greatly lacking in valid documentation and is shrouded in tall tales and accounts of fictive deeds. Indeed, there is no official evidence that she was born in Missouri instead of Illinois or Iowa, that “Jane” was either a middle name or an early nickname, or that 1852 was her birth year, and not, as some biographical accounts have claimed, 1847, 1848, or 1853.

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One biographer, Clarence Paine, cites an official census that places an Illinois-born M. J. Conarray—age sixteen and living with an Abigail Conarray—in Marion Township, Missouri, in 1860. If M. J. Conarray is M(artha) J(ane) Cannary, the birth date of Calamity Jane would have to be 1844. Her mother may have been Abigail Conarray or the Charlotte Canarry who was married to a young farm-bred idler named Bob. Also, her father may have been either a heavy drinker named John Cannary or a Baptist minister named B. W. Coombs. The written statements about her early life are so variable that one must consider her own statements, however ill-informed and exaggerated they may be, to be practicable.

In her autobiography, Calamity Jane claims to have had two brothers and three sisters. Again by her account, the family moved from Princeton, Missouri, to Virginia City, Montana, in 1865. She developed her skills as a horse rider and markswoman in her teens. Her mother, she writes, died in 1866, followed by her father in the following year, after having moved his family to Salt Lake City. From Utah, Calamity Jane and, presumably, her siblings, moved on to the Wyoming Territory.

The autobiography becomes demonstrably fanciful at this point. Flouting historical accuracy, Calamity Jane claims that she joined “General Custer as a scout at Fort Russell… in 1870, and started for Arizona for the Indian Campaign.” Scholar Roberta Beed Sollid points out, however, that “Custer never was at Fort D. A. Russell” and that Custer “never in his lifetime set foot inside the bounds of Arizona, much less fought in the Indian campaigns there.” Calamity Jane dates her donning the uniform of a soldier and getting “to be perfectly at home in men’s clothes” to this period. During her year of activity in Arizona (1870-1871) at the age of nineteen, whatever the actual circumstances, Calamity Jane is seen to have perfected her skills with horses and firearms and to have matured.

Life’s Work

Men’s clothing was in accord with the masculine cast of Calamity Jane’s physique and features. The photographs of her make this clear. Those that can be authenticated show her to be plain featured and stocky with a somewhat plump oval face, high cheekbones, and a long, prominent nose. Photographs of a trim, handsome, square-jawed younger woman, one in the buckskin trappings of an armed scout and one in full feminine finery, almost seem to be a different person but are generally accepted as the young Calamity Jane; at least they are consistent with verified photographs of Calamity Jane by the grave of James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok and laid out in her coffin, in which her aged and gaunt face may recall a youthful angularity.

The striking photograph of the buckskin-clad female scout fits Calamity Jane’s purported military activities in Wyoming from 1872 to 1876. This is the period during which, in her account, she was named Calamity Jane by a grateful Captain Egan, whom she, on horseback, had rescued from American Indians. There are numerous explanations of how she gained her epithetic name, most having to do with her being either the source or the carrier of calamity and many reflecting her hard-driving activities, coarse language, heavy drinking, rough attire, and constant gun wielding. The epithet is also associated with her devoted care of a little girl who was terminally ill with a contagious disease, against whose contagions she took no preventive measures for herself. The most that can be said about her acquisition of the epithet with any approximation to historical accuracy is that it occurred during the very early 1870’s and that it was well known by the time she had moved to Deadwood City, South Dakota.

In 1876 she became a friend of James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, and accompanied him to Deadwood City, South Dakota, in June of that year. It was here, Hickok’s death within two months of their arrival notwithstanding, that the legends of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane took root, the former as gambler and gunfighter, the latter as a gun-carrying virago. The personal relationship of the two cannot be established beyond mutual regard and possible friendship. It is certain that they were never joined in wedlock, although this became part of the legend.

There were other marriages attributed to Calamity Jane. She is said to have married a railroad man named Steers in Rawlins, Wyoming, in 1874 and, in the following year, a Sergeant Frank Siechrist, whom she supposedly accompanied in disguise on an infantry escort for mineralogists who were to determine the extent of a gold find in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Sollid lists a total of twelve variously reported husbands, with three of whom Calamity Jane was supposed to have had one child each; with Clinton Burke, her husband of actual record and the only one she acknowledges in her autobiography, she is said to have had one daughter, as she herself claims, and possibly a second.

Calamity Jane’s livelihood in Deadwood was gained chiefly by prostitution, although her claim, not without some basis, was that it was gained as a Pony Express rider “between Deadwood and Custer, a distance of fifty miles.” Her distress when Wild Bill Hickok was shot in the back by Jack McCall in the Nuttall and Mann saloon on August 2, 1876, was very likely genuine, but not to the extent, as she claims, of her confronting McCall with a meat cleaver. McCall had, in fact, been arrested within an hour; a local court subsequently acquitted him, honoring the allegation that Hickok had murdered McCall’s brother in Kansas and, as Duncan Aikman surmises, probably “relieved to be rid of the peril of Mr. Hickok’s presence.”

Continuing her involvement with construction crews and military units, Calamity Jane was active in South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana after Hickok’s death. In recounting her activities, she embellished them, as was the custom of miners, soldiers, and gamblers, and she came, perhaps, to believe some of the tales herself, as they ultimately found their way into her autobiography.

History accommodates her, however, in recording her noble ministrations to the smallpox victims of Deadwood during the plague of 1878. Heedless of contagion and sincerely devoted to attending and comforting those stricken, Calamity Jane lived through her finest hour. Oddly, she makes no mention of it in her autobiography. Sollid cites three reliable commentators on this episode—Estelline Bennett (Old Deadwood Days, 1935), William Elsey Connelley (Wild Bill and His Era, 1933), and Lewis Crawford (Rekindling Camp Fires, 1926). Each attests her humanitarian efforts, although Connelley dates the plague a year late and Crawford says that this was when “the people gave her the name ’Calamity Jane.’” Sollid cites two other sources who wrongly date the christening of “Calamity Jane” to this year (1878).

During the years after 1877, Calamity Jane became the subject of Wild West data and fiction. Horatio N. Maguire’s book The Coming of Empire (1878) included an engraving of “Miss Martha Canary, the Female Scout.” Pulp fiction, five-cent pocket library weeklies, and, later, dime novels were to follow as Calamity Jane became part of the colorful gallery that included Deadwood Dick, Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill, Belle Starr, Billy the Kid, and others. Her notoriety ranged from that of selfless nursing and charitable activism to prostitution, drunkenness, and imprisonment. That she did serve time in jail is documented: Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1876; Miles City, Montana, in 1883; Rawlins, Wyoming, in 1885; Laramie, Wyoming, in 1890; and Livingston and Billings, Montana, in 1902 (the year before her death).

Capitalizing on her notoriety, Calamity Jane made public appearances on stage. She writes that her “first engagement began at the Palace Museum, Minneapolis, January 20, 1896, under Kohl and Middleton’s management.” She does not mention joining William Frederick Cody in his Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, although in various of her letters she claims to have been part of his exposition (this would be during the years 1893-1895). Her itinerary in 1896 is said to have extended to Chicago and New York. Her appearance in the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo, New York, in 1901 was not a success, owing primarily to her alcoholism. Buffalo Bill Cody himself nurtured the legend that he paid her fare as far as Chicago when she returned to the Midwest.

Calamity Jane’s health failed after the terminus of her show-business efforts. Before she died in Terry, South Dakota, in August, 1903, she asked that she be buried next to Wild Bill Hickok. In accordance with her request, she was interred about eight miles northeast of Deadwood in Mount Moriah Cemetery, next to Hickok.

Significance

There is evidence, varying in degree from slight to strong, that Calamity Jane was a markswoman, scout, soldier, Pony Express rider, prospector, layabout, prostitute, humanitarian, entertainer, author, and contributor in all of these contexts to the legends of the American Wild West.

Fictional accounts of her exploits have appeared in various printed narratives. Meanwhile, the factual biography of Calamity Jane is emerging in the scholarly research and writings of investigators such as Roberta Beed Sollid, Elizabeth Stevenson, and James D. McLaird. In film, Calamity Jane has been represented as an attractive, frequently glamorous heroine of the West, as played by Jean Arthur in The Plainsman (1936), Yvonne de Carlo in Calamity Jane and Sam Bass (1949), Doris Day in the musical Calamity Jane (1953), Jane Hamilton in the television movie Calamity Jane (1985), Anjelica Huston in the television miniseries Buffalo Girls (1994), and Ellen Barkin in Wild Bill (1995). Barkin’s portrayal is closest to the Calamity Jane of fact and legend; dressed like the Calamity Jane photographed in the trappings of a scout, she achieves verisimilitude as a lean, attractive, coarse, sexually active, and capable virago.

Bibliography

Aikman, Duncan. Calamity Jane and the Lady Wildcats. New York: Henry Holt, 1927. Reprint. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. This is a standard, entertaining story of the life and attributed deeds of Calamity Jane. Her short autobiography is included in the appendix.

Foote, Stella. A History of Calamity Jane: Our Country’s First Liberated Woman. New York: Vantage Press, 1995. Biography based in part on Calamity Jane’s autobiography and her letters to her daughter, Janey.

Lackman, Ron. Women of the Western Frontier in Fact, Fiction, and Film. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1997. This volume includes a brief but informative biography of Calamity Jane with a summary of fictional works and films based upon her character and legend. Also included are eight very good photographs.

McLaird, James D. Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. McLaird, a history professor at Dakota Wesleyan University, dispels many of the myths surrounding Calamity Jane’s life.

Mumey, Nolie. Calamity Jane: 1852-1903. Denver: Range Press, 1950. This collection of documents and photographs includes a facsimile of her autobiography, newspaper reports, and a diary falsely ascribed to Calamity Jane.

Robinson, Gillian. The Slow Reign of Calamity Jane. Kingston, Ont.: Quarry Press, 1994. This is a long, free-verse poem in which Calamity Jane recounts paying Jack McCall to kill Wild Bill Hickok, her marriage to Charlie [Burke], and her status as a “free woman.”

Sollid, Roberta Beed. Calamity Jane: A Study in Historical Criticism. 2d ed. Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1995. Sollid’s accurate, well-researched study prunes the excesses of the legend. The book includes the autobiography, excellent photographs (including one of Calamity Jane in her coffin), and a good bibliography (added by John Hakola).

Stevenson, Elizabeth. “Who Was Calamity Jane? A Speculation.” In Figures in a Western Landscape: Men and Women of the Northern Rockies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Stevenson outlines a factual approach to the life of Calamity Jane based on rejection of the romanticized legend. The book incorporates authentic information from the private papers of William Lull.

1876-1877: Sioux War.