The True Story of Calamity Jane

It is just as well that Calamity Jane really existed, as no writer of a musical would have dared to invent her. While hard drinking, rough living wild women were two a penny along the frontier of the old west, Calamity Jane was something more. Beneath the dusty buckskins there beat a sensitive and sentimental heart, capable of love sympathy and selflessness. She was nicknamed Calamity because it followed her everywhere, but when disaster preceded her, she was always the first to pitch in and help out. As a nurse, she once held up a grocery store with the promise “You’ll get paid when the folks I save can walk again”

She was born Martha Jane Cannary on 1^st May 1852 at Princeton, Missouri where her folks owned a 200 acre farm. The family moved west by covered wagon in 1863 and Jane made the final break from them in her mid teens. As civilization or at least the frontiersmen’s version of it – spread west across the continent Jane went with it selling her services as a mule skinner and out rider transporting supplies to mining camps.

Petite, blue eyed and russet haired. She quickly built up a reputation for being well able to look after herself. Unwelcome advances were given short shrift; once she shot a mans hat off with the warning “next time it’ll stay on your head” Whites were particularly unwelcome in the Indian territories but Calamity, who should have been even more worried because she was a woman, used to ride upside down on her saddle indicating that she represented no threat; “They think I’m plum loco and leave me alone.”

In her time she was the only woman worker on the Northern Pacific Railroad, a professional gambler, gold prospector and a stagecoach driver. By 1870 she had made her way to Abilene, Kansas, where she first encountered James Butler Hickok, otherwise known as Wild Bill, a big, handsome roughneck with a legendary past of his own. Within a year they were married, with the flyleaf of a bible providing them with the necessary equipment to scribble out their marriage lines on.

Bill was a bit of a dandy, relatively speaking and at first their pairing seems unlikely. But there was obviously a bond there, which subsequent relationships for both could not dissolve.

On 25^th September 1873 at Benson’s Landing, Montana, Jane gave birth to a daughter, Janey. She was soon placed in the care of a captain James O’Neil and his wife, but her mother never forgot her. Indeed when Calamity died, the good Captain passed Janey her mothers diary, which was made up of the letters written especially for the daughter Calamity seldom saw.

These letters prove that she was one of the few literate women on the frontier and also one of the most entertaining.

Jane and Bill drifted apart as quickly as they had come together, but it wasn’t a clean break as she was still in the vicinity of Deadwood the day Bill was gunned down playing poker on 2^nd August 1876. Even though she would marry again, this time to a Charles Burke in 1885, Jane never forgot Hickok and her final request was to be buried next to him.

In august 1893 she joined the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show and toured with them through the Eastern States and England, giving displays of sharp shooting and horse riding. Shortly after that she landed a similar job touring with the Palace Museum Show. This time her act consisted mainly of spinning wild tales about Wild Bill, showing off about how she had saved his life more times than she could remember. Up until the end she remained a colourful reminder of how the Wild West earned it’s name.

She eventually died of pneumonia in a hotel room in Terry, near Deadwood, on 2^nd August 1903, 27 years to the day after Wild Bill’s murder. She still lies next to him in the Mount Moriah Cemetery at Deadwood.