Calamity Jane: Frontierswoman of American The Wild West
Who Was Calamity Jane?
Born Martha Jane Cannary in 1852 Missouri, her mother passed away from pneumonia after the family moved by wagon train to Virginia City Montana, followed by her father’s passing after a move to Salt Lake City in 1866. Orphaned at age 14, Martha Jane took control of her five younger siblings, and after a move to Piedmont in the Wyoming Territory, she worked as a dishwasher, cook, waitress, dance hall girl, ox-team driver and a prostitute.
How Did Calamity Jane Get Her Name?
While the self-described origins of her nickname have been contested following her claim to have served in military conflicts during the Indian Wars, what is known for certain is that her nickname was cemented by 1876 in Deadwood’s newspaper, the Black Hills Pioneer, when a headline read “Calamity Jane has arrived!” with the Wild Bill Hickok wagon train.
Known as a frontierswoman, sharpshooter and a lurid storyteller, Calamity Jane was also known as a raging alcoholic. She also had a reputation as an on-again off-again prostitute due to her friendship with Dora DuFran, the Black Hill’s leading madam in the heart of the American Wild West. Purportedly married to Wild Bill Hickok for a time, Calamity Jane was known to have two daughters, although their father’s identity remains unknown.
In the late 1880s, Jane held a benefit in Deadwood to raise money for one of her daughter’s education at St. Martin’s Academy in Sturgis South Dakota, and while the benefit raised a large sum of money, Jane got drunk and spent much of it on a Deadwood bender before she and the child left the next day.
In 1881, Jane bought a ranch near Miles City Montana along the Yellowstone River, which she turned into an Inn. By 1983, Calamity Jane made her first appearances in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show as a storyteller, later appearing in the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo New York.
Despite a rough-and-tumble persona as a woman of the Wild West, she also had her softer side, when she saved passengers in an overland stagecoach under attack by Plains Indians. After stagecoach driver John Slaughter was felled by the Indians, Jane took control of the reins and safely steered the coach into Deadwood.
How Did Calamity Jane Die?
In late July of 1903, Jane traveled by ore train to Terry South Dakota, where she took ill after a bout of heavy drinking while on board the train.
A bartender secured her a room at the Calloway Hotel, and after a doctor was summoned, she passed away from pneumonia on August the 1st. She would soon be buried next to Hickok at the Mount Moriah Cemetery in South Dakota, and while before his death Hickok had stated that he had “absolutely no use” for Jane, the four men who oversaw her funeral buried her next to him as a posthumous joke on Wild Bill Hickok, forever cementing Calamity Jane into the folklore of the American Wild West.