Uppity woman

THE notoriously foul-mouthed Calamity Jane who appears in the HBO series “Deadwood” bears no resemblance to the sassy songstress portrayed by Doris Day in the 1953 musical biopic. But this should not surprise: The mythification of Calamity Jane, which began in dime novels when she was still alive, is so complete that the flesh-and-blood woman herself is virtually invisible -- and perhaps unknowable. “Was she a frontier Florence Nightingale, Indian fighter, army scout, gold miner, pony express rider, bull-whacker, and stagecoach driver,” mused one historian, “or merely a camp follower, prostitute, and alcoholic?”

James D. McLaird, professor emeritus of history at Dakota Wesleyan University, sets out to answer that question in his definitive biography of Martha Jane Canary, the woman who came to be known as Calamity Jane. Canary was illiterate, and her ghostwritten 1896 autobiography is “so filled with exaggeration,” according to McLaird, “that it confuses as much as it explains.” As a result, much of McLaird’s account is devoted to sifting through the accumulation of legend and lore in search of the few nuggets of historical truth, a task he performs with skill and flair.

Born in Missouri in 1856, Martha was the child of Robert Canary, described by an early biographer as “an innocent and not too shrewd farm boy,” and his wife, Charlotte, locally famous for her cigar-smoking, cursing and drinking. Martha was only 8 when her family decamped for the gold fields of Montana, where she made her first appearance in the public eye. “Three little girls, who state their name to be Canary, appeared at the door of Mr. Fergus, on Idaho street, soliciting charity,” according to a local newspaper account, which describes their neglectful parents as “inhuman brutes who have deserted their poor, unfortunate children.”

Orphaned in early adolescence, Martha seems to have ended up in a Wyoming town called Miner’s Delight. Not long after, she may have taken up the life of a prostitute in the railroad towns and military posts on the frontier, but it is also possible that she was a laundrywoman. That ambiguity characterizes the most colorful of her exploits, although one hard fact is that she had a lifelong weakness for liquor.

McLaird makes it clear that the real-life Martha Canary was a victim of her own unlikely celebrity, some of it self-fabricated and the rest concocted by tale tellers who knew her or claimed they did. But he finds it plausible that Martha worked at a “hurdy-gurdy house” in Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, whose owner was known as the “Barnum of the West” -- the establishment consisted of a live theater, a museum and a zoo.

A frontier soldier who was stationed near one of the “road ranches” where Martha may have spent some time described her as an “entertainer,” although he uses the term as a euphemism for a very intimate kind of entertainment. Cuny and Coffey’s road ranch “was known to every soldier, mule skinner, bull whacker, cowpuncher, packer, gambler, and bad man for hundreds of miles up and down the Platte River,” the soldier recollected, “and it was at this place Calamity acted as entertainer -- dancing, drinking much bad whisky and in various ways relieving her victims of their coin, which she spent with a free and willing hand.”

The making of the myth started in earnest in 1875, when Canary first arrived in the Black Hills of southern Dakota Territory and attracted the attention of a correspondent for the Chicago Times, who described how she “straddles a mule equal to any professional blacksnake swinger in the army.” Here she came to be called “Calamity Jane,” a nickname variously attributed to her heroism during an Indian ambush and her exertions as a nurse during a smallpox epidemic in the Dakota Territory town of Deadwood. Here, too, she acquired a reputation for wearing men’s clothes, a habit she claimed to have acquired while scouting for Custer. But according to McLaird, it was a sign that she was indeed a camp follower, who wore the cast-off military uniforms of her clients.

Canary soon disappeared into the persona she had helped to fabricate, and she was eventually reduced to play-acting to make a living. When she joined a touring Wild West show, for example, she had to clean up her act -- “[p]erformances were kept appropriate for mixed audiences,” McLaird explains, “and words such as ‘slob,’ ‘damn,’ and ‘hell’ were not allowed” -- and polish up her skills with a Winchester and a Colt. Back home, the local paper was skeptical: “If she doesn’t get drunk and break up the whole show it will be a surprise to those who have witnessed her orgies in Deadwood and Hot Springs during the past few months.”

Canary died in 1903, a 47-year-old alcoholic who was taken by observers to be in her 70s, and was buried alongside James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok in Deadwood. “Hickok’s biographers discount any serious relationship between the two figures, suggesting he was too fastidious a man to associate with such a dissolute woman,” McLaird reports, and protests that “Martha was a far more attractive personality than critics suggest, but less intimate with Hickok than romanticists imagine.”

McLaird concedes that some contemporary historians of the West are resentful of the attention Calamity Jane commands. More worthy of study, they insist, are those unglamorous pioneering women whose lives were a compound of courage and drudgery. But McLaird insists that Calamity Jane is illuminating even if (or perhaps because) she is atypical: “Martha, like Buffalo Bill, is an anomaly in the history of the West,” he concludes. “Her importance rests not on the similarity of her life to that of other frontier women, but on the manner in which her life was reshaped to fit a mythic structure glorifying the ‘winning of the West.’ ”

Calamity Jane’s story is a case study of some enduring themes in American popular culture that were as pronounced (and as poignant) in the 19th century as they are today -- the public’s yearning for celebrities, the willingness of the entertainment industry to provide them and the terrible price paid when a celebrity grows old, odd or out of fashion. *