The Legend of Calamity Jane

One of the legends of Calamity Jane is that she was married to Wild Bill Hickok...is that true?

Martha Jane Canary, aka Calamity Jane,was a bold, loud-mouthed, vulgar woman with an obvious contempt for gender roles and social convention.  She was a  hard-drinking, tobacco-chewing, cigar-smoking, pistol-packing, buckskin-wearing woman.  She was also known to be kind and generous to a fault. 

In her life she worked as a bawd, broke horses, drove wagons, rode dispatch...riding relentless and shooting with the best of them.  She enjoyed smoke-filled bars, cursed like a trooper and was a poor gambler.  But what about Wild Bill?

Calamity Jane found her way to Deadwood, South Dakota where she worked as a teamster, transporting machinery and supplies to miners in the camps.  She carried the United States mail between Deadwood and Custer, a dangerous job because of the Indian situation. On a 50-mile run one way over a very rough trail through the Black Hills, she made her runs without complaint and in good time.

It was in Deadwood that she met Wild Bill Hickok.  Jane claimed that Wild Bill was the love of her
life, and that they were married and had a child together.  The facts disagree.  First Bill liked fine apparel and bathed on a regular basis, something that Jane didn't appreciate.  He liked his women frilly, feminine, and sweet smelling. In Deadwood, they may have drank some whiskey and played cards, but it is doubtful that they ever "played house". 

In her "official autobiography", Jane tells of how she chased down Wild Bill's killer, Jack McCall, and would have shot him if she hadn't left her Colts on her bedpost.  She says she had him trapped in a butcher shop when the townspeople took him off to jail before she could rip him to pieces.

Deadwood  had a soft spot for the drunken cowgirl - her last wish, to be buried next to Wild Bill Hickok, was honored in 1903. 

Next time...What made the horse Comanche a legend?

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On this Day in History:  On March 31, 1895,  Vardis Fisher, a gifted novelist who dealt with both the myth and reality of the American West, is born in Annis, Idaho.  Writers such as Fisher were the reason for the popular legends of people like Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. 

Pistol Packing Mamas

We are beginning a short series on some of the West's most notorious group of women - "Pistol Packing Mamas" and some of the stories that made them legends.  Whether these women were everything given to them by their respective legends remains a part of what makes them legendary.  With any fact or event handed down through generations, the tale gets richer and more exaggerated with each passing year, but no doubt we'll find some facts to whet our appetites for history.

Folklore of the Wild West can paint fantastic characters, and in reality, many of these women may never have even carried arms, let alone used them in the way it has been told.  One such legend is of Calamity Jane.  There is no historical record that Ms. Canary was indeed able to hit the proverbial broad side of a barn door on a sober day, let alone when she was intoxicated, which by the way was the way she lived most of her life. 

It is, however, recorded that she was a boozy, disrespectful woman from Billings, Montana, and Cheyenne, Wyoming, who wore men's clothing, swore like a sailor and claimed several accomplishments such as being a Pony Express rider and wife of Wild Bill Hickok.  Calamity Jane is buried near Wild Bill in Deadwood, South Dakota. It is also recorded that she was thrown out of a bordello in Bozeman, Montana, for to much "influence" on the patrons. 

In truth, Calamity Jan was more of a self-advertiser who loved publicity and talking a long yarn about the "good old days" of the Wild West.  She certainly had what it takes to survive in the rugged mining towns of the early west, and lives forever in our hearts as one of the true "cowgirls" of the West.

Next time we meet Verona Baldwin...