Calamity Jane

Calamity Jane was born Martha Jane Canary on May 1, 1852, near Princeton, Missouri, the eldest of six children. The family went west by wagon in 1865, and by 1868 both parents were dead, leaving the teenager to support her siblings around Wyoming's forts and rail camps through rough, itinerant work. By the mid-1870s she had acquired buckskins, a gift for storytelling, and the nickname "Calamity Jane" — its origin, like much of her biography, disputed and embellished, not least by Jane herself.

In July 1876 she rode into Deadwood with the wagon train of Charlie Utter and Wild Bill Hickok, an arrival the Black Hills Pioneer announced with the line "Calamity Jane has arrived!" In the gold camp she hauled freight, gambled, drank, and earned genuine and lasting respect for nursing victims of the smallpox epidemic that swept the diggings. Her association with Hickok, murdered weeks after their arrival, grew steadily in later telling; claims that they were lovers or secretly married are unsupported by evidence, and accounts differ sharply.

Jane drifted through the West for the rest of her life — ranching, performing in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show in 1893, and selling a heavily embroidered ghostwritten autobiography. She died at Terry, near Deadwood, on August 1, 1903, and was buried beside Hickok in Mount Moriah Cemetery, fixing forever her place in the legend of Deadwood.