Calamity Jane
1848 - 1903
We have been taught to believe that women aren't supposed to either
smoke or drink, much less use vile language and chew tobacco, and the
Lord didn't make them to skin mules or work hard at pick and shovel
labor. He did not make women to go about carrying .45 Colts
either, not to shot fancy chandeliers out of ceilings and mirrors out
of saloons as one bellied up to the bar. All the same, Martha
Jane Canarray did just such things, better known as "Calamity Jane"
some 80 years ago or so.
What did she look like? Look at her portrait on
the opposite page! Calamity looked like a man but was very much a woman
as can be borne out by the army colonel who was shocked to see her in
bathing with his men in a stream.
Calamity hailed from Princeton,
Missouri, about 1848. The family came west in a big Conestoga
wagon and settled in the mining town of Virginia City, Montana.
Here Calamity looked in under the saloon doors with the ease of a
little girl, then grew up to look over them with greater ease, and went
right inside when she had on her pa's pants as any cattle driver was
entitled to do.
She joined up with General Crook in 1875 as a scout in the Black
Hills country, and a legend grew up about her that she was in love with
gunslinger Wild Bill Hickok. This is not very likely, however,
since Wild Bill only spent three days in Deadwood, slept in a tent,
too, and couldn't have possibly remained any longer since Jack McCall
took a notion to kill him, and did.
It takes disaster to bring the woman out in a female, even
Calamity, who sent around like a saint when the smallpox plague struck
Deadwood. She nursed back people close to the door of death and didn't
ask for so much as a thank you. Even old Doc Babcock had to admit
there was a little angel of some sort in this hardboiled woman, yes,
even a little bit of heaven itself when she tended children. "Oh,
she'd swear to beat hell at 'em," said the Doc, "but it was a tender
kind of cussing'."
Charles
E. Chaplin of the Montana Historical Society tells how Calamity came to
see him when he was playing with the Lard Players at the East Lynne
Opera House. Siting alongside Calamity was her rough and ready
gunslinger friend, Arkansas Tom. Jane became enraged at the
denouement in the play and stood up and let fly a long stream of
tobacco juice that hit the star square in the eye and dribbled down her
dress. Jane's gunslinger boy friend let out a whoop at this and
started to shoot out the lamps. The crowd went wild with
delight. Calamity took her gunslinging friend by the arm and they
marched up the aisle together to the cheers of the crowd. Tom,
unfortunately, did not see Calamity again because he was cut down in
the bank stick-up the following day.
Calamity
continued to drift about the western towns, made a few dollars, and in
the process got married a couple of time, then started to age so
rapidly by 1889 that few of her old friends recognized her on
sight. She earned other money by selling her tiny autobiography
for a quarter and referred to herself as the "White Devil of the
Yellowstone". When she entered a saloon everybody would yell,
"here comes Calamity Jane!" She was well known in almost every
state and territory in the Union.
She toured Minneapolis, then Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City,
bringing to the stage the rip-roaring west as she had lived it.
She always managed to get drunk and get fired without ceremony.
A little later on she showed up with a little girl of some seven
years of age and she claimed it was her daughter and whose father was
Wild Bill Hickok. This proved to be untrue as she was fathered by
a Lt. Summers who ran around with Calamity for some time.
In
1900 Calamity Jane was found in a bawdyhouse and was nursed back to
health. She was hired by the Pan American Exposition at a good
job with fine pay. But again she got liquored up, shot out the
bar glass, made Irish policemen dance the jog to her roaring guns, and
then stumbled down the street cursing the whole town. She was run
out.
In
1903, Calamity Jane was dying in a frowsy little room in the Calloway
Hotel in Terry, near Deadwood, South Dakota. Her last request was
to give her the date August 2, 1903 and then requested that she
be buried next to the great American gunfighter, Wild Bill Hickok, on
Mt. Moriah overlooking the town of Deadwood.
Her
wish was granted. The funeral was the largest to be held in
Deadwood for a woman, and a man who, as a boy, she had nursed back to
health when the smallpox epidemic took so many lives in Deadwood, closed
Calamity's coffin.
Calamity Jane | Clay Allison | Curly Bill | Dave Mather
Doc Holliday | Jesse James | Jim Courtright | Joaquin Murrietta
John Ringo | John Wesley Hardin | King Fisher | Luke Short
Old Man Clanton | Pat Garrett | Wild Bill Hickok | Wyatt Earp
OK Corral | Artist - Lea Franklin McCarty