Calamity Jane: The Life and the Legend
James D. McLaird
South Dakota History, volume 24 number 1 (1994)
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In December 1902, an inebriated and highly offended Calamity Jane, recently released from a Billings, Montana, jail, declared Billings a “tenderfoot town” and announced that she was returning to Deadwood. Undoubtedly envisioning a repeat of the celebrity welcome she had received on an 1895 visit to the Black Hills, she proclaimed that Deadwood would appreciate her “at her real worth.”‘ Thanks to dime novels featuring fictional exploits against evil-doers in the Black Hills, Martha (“Calamity Jane”) Canary had enjoyed local and national fame for nearly a quarter century. Her presence in and around memorable events of the gold-rush era had provided plenty of raw material for her own and the public s imagination to expand upon until her character achieved epic proportions.’ In reality, however. Calamity Jane’s 1902 brush with the law was far more typical of her behavior than the heroic exploits of the dime novel, and the last year of her life provides a window through which to view the real woman versus the myth. Events surrounding her death in August 1903 also offer insights into how her contemporaries dealt with the contradictions between the dime-novel image and the dissolute individual they encountered on the streets of Deadwood.
Considered one of the most famous women of her generation. Calamity Jane was paired with…
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