Biography calamity jane
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The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane
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 individ 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 ung 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.
Calami
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Calamity Jane: The Life and the Legend
Calamity Jane: The Life and the Legend
James D. McLaird
South Dakota History, volume 24 number 1 (1994)
South Dakota History is the quarterly journal published by the South Dakota State Historical Society. Membership in the South Dakota State Historical Society includes a subscription to the journal. Members support the Society's important mission of interpreting, preserving and transmitting the unique heritage of South Dakota. Learn more here: https://history.sd.gov/Membership.aspx. Download PDFs of articles from the first 43 years and obtain recent issues of South Dakota History at sdhspress.com/journal.
In December 1902, an inebriated and highly offended Calamity Jane, recently released from a Billings, Montana, jail, declared Billings a "tenderfoot town" and announced that she was returning to Deadwood. Undoubtedly envisioning a repeat of the celebrity welcome she had received on an 1895 visit to the Black Hills, she procla
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Calamity Jane
American frontierswoman
For other uses, see Calamity Jane (disambiguation).
Calamity Jane | |
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c. 1880 | |
| Born | Martha Jane Canary[a] (1852-05-01)May 1, 1852 Princeton, Missouri, U.S. |
| Died | August 1, 1903(1903-08-01) (aged 51) Terry, South Dakota, U.S. |
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| Children | 2 or 4 |
Martha Jane Canary (May 1, 1852 – August 1, 1903), better known as Calamity Jane, was an American frontierswoman, sharpshooter, and storyteller.[2][3][4] In addition to many exploits, she was known for being an acquaintance of Wild Bill Hickok. Late in her life, she appeared in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show and at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition. She is said to have exhibited compassion to others, especially to the sick and needy. This facet of her char