From Calamity Jane
© 1999 ProofmarkPreface
Calamity Jane was called, variously, Marthy Cannary or Martha Jane Cannary or Martha Canary, depending on which writer deciphered this slender volume. Ghostwritten for her at the time of her appearance at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, it presents her own reminiscences. Born, according to her account, in Missouri in 1852, she was certainly in the West by the 1870s, by which time she was presumably in her twenties.
While much of her 'autobiography' appears to be invention, she did drive trains of oxen, hauling freight between the mining camps of the Dakota Territory. She did meet, shortly before his murder, Wild Bill Hickok in Deadwood. While some have said there was a marriage, and even a child, between she and Hickok, there is no credible evidence they were ever lovers.
That she was "considered a remarkable good shot and a fearless rider for a girl of my age" at thirteen, when she and her family emigrated "by the overland route to Virginia City", is certainly possible. Traveling overland from Missouri to Montana at the end of the Civil War would have certainly called for those skills from anyone who possessed them.
Her claim that she was a uniformed scout for George Armstrong Custer in 1870, when she would have barely been eighteen, and that she conveniently missed being at the Battle of the Little Big Horn by falling ill, thus meeting James Butler Hickok by accident and becoming his traveling companion, is less probable.
That she caught Jack McCall after he'd killed Hickok, singlehandedly forcing him to surrender, is, charitably, not borne out by witnesses on the scene.
But whether or not Martha Cannary, like Forrest Gump, was present at many of the significant events of her time is, at this late date, irrelevant.
She was a friend, if not an intimate, of Wild Bill Hickok in Deadwood, and always proclaimed her love for him. She has come down the years as the very image of the tough, pistol-packing, hard-riding 'Woman Scout' of the Old West. Having caught the fancy of some yellow journalists writing about the bad old days in Deadwood, she may well have allowed them to exaggerate her own history in order to satisfy their craving for novelty. But whether she was what she says she was, or merely a dance-hall girl or camp follower who made up the grand life she always wished she'd had, she was and will forever be Calamity Jane.
In her later years, down on her luck, she married Clinton {Charley} Burk {or Burke, again depending on whose spelling you believe}, and toured for a time with various Wild West shows in the Midwest. Her appearance at the Buffalo Exposition was cut short, it is said, by bad behavior brought on by alcohol. She died on August 1, 1903.
Following her last request, she was buried beside her beloved Wild Bill in the cemetery at Deadwood, Dakota Territory. What James Butler Hickok might have thought of that is unknown…
Mark W. Seymour, editor
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