CALAMITY JANE

Martha Jane Canary, better known as Calamity Jane, grew up amid the rough frontier of the American West. Born in 1852 in Missouri, she was the eldest of six children. Tragedy struck early: her mother died during the family’s wagon journey west in 1866, and her father passed away the following year in Salt Lake City. By her mid-teens, young Martha Jane was orphaned and responsible for her siblings. This hardscrabble upbringing forced her to become self-reliant and tough. She learned to hunt, ride, and curse as fiercely as any man on the frontier, drifting through boomtowns and railroad camps to keep her family alive. These harsh beginnings set the stage for a life between courageous generosity and chaotic misadventure.

     Calamity Jane’s legend was born in the heyday of the Wild West, and she often fanned the flames. She acquired her famous nickname by the mid-1870s, though myth obscures the actual origin of the moniker. In her colorful account, she claimed to have rescued a wounded Army captain from an ambush, prompting him to quip that she was “Calamity Jane, the heroine of the plains.” Skeptics, however, offered a more humorous tale: a friend later recalled that Calamity “was always getting into trouble… Why, if she’d got up on a fence rail, the durned thing would get up and buck,” so a newspaperman in Cheyenne dubbed her Calamity Jane and the name stuck.

     This blend of fact and far-fetched fiction would characterize Jane’s reputation for the rest of her days. By 1876, Calamity Jane had drifted into the lawless mining camp of Deadwood in the Dakota Territory – arriving grandly alongside the famous gunslinger Wild Bill Hickok.

     The local press announced her appearance with the headline “Calamity Jane has arrived!” cementing her status as a bona fide frontier celebrity. In Deadwood, she lived rough and rubbed shoulders with legends. She later boasted of daring feats like chasing down Hickok’s murderer with nothing but a meat cleaver and driving a stagecoach through a band of attacking Sioux after they had killed the driver.

     Whether or not these exploits happened exactly as told, such stories –- printed in dime novels and newspapers –- made her a larger-than-life figure. Yet those who knew the real Jane saw a more complex woman behind the wild yarns. For instance, during a deadly smallpox outbreak in Deadwood, Calamity Jane put aside her revelry to nurse sick miners back to health, an act of compassion that locals never forgot. This dual nature -– a hard-drinking hell-raiser with a tender streak –- made her story all the more dramatic.

     Life on the frontier afforded Calamity Jane freedoms that were scandalous for a woman by Victorian standards. She wore men’s clothing, chewed tobacco, and could drink and shoot with the best of the roughnecks. Over the years, she had numerous lovers she freely called “husbands,” though most were fleeting and likely common-law arrangements.

     Jane was notorious for her drunken sprees and outrageous pranks, but she laced her antics with humor –- at least to onlookers. In one 1902 incident in Billings, Montana, an inebriated Calamity burst into a store wielding a hatchet and menaced a young salesgirl for no apparent reason. A local reporter dryly speculated it “may have been only one of Jane’s practical jokes,” though the terrified clerk “failed to appreciate it.” The law was less amused: Jane landed in jail for 60 days, where she sobered up only to emerge and resume wandering. Such episodes illustrate the tragicomic pattern of her later life – a cycle of good intentions waylaid by booze-fueled chaos.

     Yet even in her decline, Calamity Jane never lost the goodwill she’d earned through earlier kindness. Old pioneers remembered how she once rode miles through a blizzard to nurse a dying miner or how no hungry stranger was ever turned from her cabin door if she had food to share. She was vulgar and profane but also big-hearted. This mix of vice and virtue endeared her to Westerners who accepted that a person could be both a sinner and a saint on the untamed frontier.

     By the end of 1902, pushing 50 and failing health, Jane yearned to settle down. She told a reporter she wanted to “lead a quiet life, earn her living in an honorable manner, and spend the balance of her days in peace.” But fate – and her restlessness – had other plans.

     In the spring of 1903, Calamity Jane returned to the Black Hills of South Dakota, the scene of her youthful adventures. An old friend, Dora DuFran, ran a brothel in Belle Fourche, and Jane stayed there doing odd jobs like cooking and laundry to earn her keep. By this time, she was physically ailing – her face worn and weathered beyond her years – yet her spirit remained as fiery as ever.

     As summer came, Jane seemed oddly determined to revisit the places of her past. She confided to acquaintances that she was “making the rounds of the hill towns for the last time” and was ready to “cash in.” Many took it as more of Calamity’s dramatic talk, but she knew her final curtain was near.

     In late July 1903, Jane traveled by ore train from Deadwood to the mining camp of Terry, a few miles away. True to form, she spent the ride drinking heavily despite her frail condition. Witnesses noted that she scarcely ate and was polishing off a bottle of whiskey during the journey. Before the train reached Terry, Calamity Jane had collapsed in a stupor, gravely ill. The train crew, recognizing the famous woman, took pity on her. The conductor, S.G. Tillett, later recalled finding Jane slumped in the coach “a bundle of rags and filth,” both drunk and sick.

     When the train pulled into Terry, Tillett gently lifted the 51-year-old frontierswoman into his arms and carried her off the railcar. Setting her down on unsteady feet, he asked if she intended to stay in Terry. Jane managed a weak grin, thanked him, and said, “Goodbye, kid,” as she shuffled toward the dusty road leading into the camp. It was the last anyone saw Calamity Jane alive on her own two feet.

     After Jane had arrived in Terry on that fateful day, Calamity was helped to a room in the local Calloway Hotel—a concerned bartender who knew her secured lodging and summoned a doctor at once.

     Jane was in bad shape – decades of hard living and hard liquor had finally caught up to her. The physician tried to treat her, but Jane’s legendary stubborn streak held strong; she reportedly “rebelled against his physic,” refusing the medicine he offered. Instead, Jane languished in bed, drifting in and out of feverish sleep.

     At times, she was lucid enough to acknowledge to friends nearby that the end was at hand. It was time to “cash in,” Calamity admitted with a rueful touch of her old humor.

     For two days, the once-indomitable Calamity Jane lay dying in that dingy hotel room. By the afternoon of August 1, 1903, her condition had deteriorated rapidly. The doctor noted she was suffering from “inflammation of the bowels,” likely a severe gastrointestinal infection compounded by chronic alcoholism. Pneumonia set in as well, leaving her gasping for breath.

     Around five o’clock in the evening, Martha Jane Canary –- Calamity Jane –- drew her final breath at age 51. In the end, the loud, boisterous woman who had roamed the Wild West died quietly in a rented room above a tavern, with only a few friends at her bedside.

     News of her passing spread quickly from the little camp of Terry to the larger towns. Locals were saddened but not surprised; Calamity had long hinted that death was looming, and her ravaged appearance in recent weeks made it plain that she was living on borrowed time.

     Almost immediately, the folk hero of old and the flesh-and-blood woman parted ways in the public imagination. Newspapers from New York to Honolulu carried sensational obituaries, rehashing her “thrilling adventures” as a scout and Indian fighter – many exaggerations or outright lies. But in the Black Hills, the community remembered the real Jane. The Society of Black Hills Pioneers, a group of respectable old-timers, took charge of her remains. Honoring what was said to be Calamity’s dying wish, they arranged to bury her in Deadwood’s Mount Moriah Cemetery next to her old friend Wild Bill Hickok. (Some of Deadwood’s wags noted that Hickok “had absolutely no use” for Calamity while alive and joked that laying her beside him was a final practical joke at Wild Bill’s expense.)

     On August 4, 1903, Deadwood held one of the largest funerals in its history to bid farewell to Calamity Jane. Hundreds of mourners – miners, madams, law enforcement officers, and business people alike – followed the hearse up the hill to the cemetery. As they lowered Calamity Jane into the earth next to Hickok, an era of the Wild West truly ended.

     She had been a peculiar mix of courage and chaos, generosity and vice; in death, she became an American legend. Her story, equal parts humor, drama, and tragedy, continues to captivate us – a reminder of the untamable spirit of the frontier and the very human woman behind the dime-novel myths.