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| General Collection F594.C2 M34 2005 |
by James D. Mclaird
The Real Calamity Jane
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.
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