Calamity Jane : the woman and the legend / James D. McLaird.
Call number: F594.C2 M34 2005
Calamity Jane
by James D. Mclaird
by James D. Mclaird
The Real Calamity Jane
A review by Margot Mifflin
A review by Margot Mifflin
As author James D. McLaird confesses in his conclusion to Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend, historians sure know how to ruin a good story. In this case, somebody had to do it. Calamity Jane -- 19th century gunslinger, drinker and cross-dresser -- was so barnacled over with myth that it had become impossible to see the lady for the lore. From dime-store novels of the 1870s and '80s chronicling her frontier fearlessness, to Doris Day's G-rated Jane in the 1953 musical Calamity Jane, to Jane Alexander's feminist reanimation of her in a 1984 ABC special, to Robin Weigert's blowsy portrayal of her on the HBO series Deadwood, Calamity Jane has served as a Rorschach blot for devotees of unconventional women for over a century. Then again there was Larry McMurtry's Buffalo Girls -- published in 1990 -- which trashed the myth altogether, casting her as a drunk, a liar and a hermaphrodite.
Love her or hate her, you probably don't know her at all. Nee Martha Canary, she was less -- and more -- than she's cracked up to be: She was a cook and a laundress, a dance hall girl and a prostitute, an abject alcoholic and a devoted nurse, an abused wife and a mother who said of her daughter, Jessie, "She's all I've got to live fer; she's my only comfort." She knew Wild Bill Hickok, who was newly married, for a mere six weeks before he was shot down in Deadwood, S.D. Legend has it -- wrongly -- that they were lovers. And let the record show: Though she sometimes donned men's clothes, Canary typically wore a dress.
In Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend, McLaird, a professor emeritus at Dakota Wesleyan University, sets out to correct the errors that plague Canary scholarship and, more significantly, to explain how her life was recast to fulfill a romantic vision of frontier life. Some of the tall tales about her spring from dime novels in which she was written into fabricated exploits; others were plucked from her own falsified autobiography ("I was considered the most reckless and daring rider and one of the best shots in the western country…"). But weirdly enough, a major source of misinformation about her came from her impostor daughter, Jean McCormick, who popped up in 1941 with a forged memoir, itself spun from popular fictions, that crystallized Canary's myth and went unquestioned for decades. McCormick claimed her parents were Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok, and because so little research had been done on Canary, the forgery, which McLaird debunks in a few deft and convincing strokes, was long accepted as fact.
McLaird all but apologizes for writing a book whose somewhat piecemeal narrative (chunks of Canary's story are lost to history) is further fractured by the rebuttals necessary to defending its accuracy. No family records survive, and her 1896 autobiography was propaganda. "Sadly," McLaird notes in his introduction, "after romantic adventures are removed, her story is mostly an account of uneventful daily life interrupted by drinking binges." But the myth-making (much of which Canary orchestrated herself through newspaper interviews) is as interesting as the myth, and through the host of colorful quotes McLaird has unearthed both by and about her, Canary emerges as a character worth mythologizing. (If only McLaird weren't so resistant to paraphrasing: In some passages, the book reads like a Zagat's restaurant guide, with multiple partial quotes crammed into one chop suey sentence after another.)
Born in Mercer County, Mo., in 1856, Canary was the oldest of some unknown number of siblings. Her father was a farmer; her mother was, by one account, an illiterate prostitute whose husband, taken by her beauty, tried to reform her, and failed. After some legal wrangling over land, the family sold their property and left Missouri in the early 1860s, heading for Montana gold. But they fell on hard times; her mother died in a mining camp in Blackfoot City, Mont., when Canary was about 9. After taking the children to Salt Lake City, her father died soon after.
Canary was presumably taken in by an adoptive family, but by the time she was 14 or 15, she was on her own, working at a boarding house in Piedmont, Wyo., and dancing with soldiers at night, until the owner kicked her out for appearing at a party in a soldier's uniform at a time when women could be fined for wearing men's clothes. She followed freighting teams along the railroad, worked as a laundress, dance hall girl and prostitute or "camp follower," though she later claimed she spent her teens engaged in military campaigns against Indians in Wyoming. She was one of the first white women to enter the Black Hills of South Dakota -- but not as a soldier. One wagon train captain heading there from Cheyenne recalled seeing her, then 20, driving a team and wearing a buckskin suit. "The first place that attracted her attention," he said, "was a saloon, where she was soon made blind as a bat from looking through the bottom of a glass."
