Birth Of Calamity Jane
Martha Jane Canary was a tobacco-spitting, beer-guzzling, foul~mouthed woman who preferred men’s clothing to dresses.
Martha was also a well-known humanitarian in Deadwood, nursing Deadwood residents stricken by the smallpox epidemic.
She was well known through the Hills as Calamity Jane, but how she got this nickname is a legendary debate.
Few substantiated facts are known about Calamity Jane’s life, but much is known about the legend.
It seems her biography is a mix of wild tales, many promoted by Jane herself.
Jane’s given date of birth is on 1st May 1852, in Princeton, Missouri.
She was the eldest of as many as six children born to Robert and Charlotte Cannary.
By the time she was 12, Calamity Jane’s parents had died, and she had to make a living by any means necessary.
Jane began to find her way in a man’s world, taking on men’s work and a male persona.
It is also believed that as a teenager she occasionally engaged in pr0stitution, as it was more lucrative and always in demand.
It was during this time that the moniker, “Calamity” was given to her.
In 1875, Jane traveled into the Black Hills of South Dakota, and soon drifted to the lawless town of Deadwood.
At this point the legends surrounding her life become abundant, and the facts harder to find.
She is said to have had numerous affairs with some of the most notorious desperados of the time.
One such story was her relationship with Western legend Wild Bill Hickok, whom she met in Deadwood.
Jane’s private life is even more fabled.
In addition to her alleged relationship to Hickok, there were saucy tales, creatively recorded by Western dime novel authors, of wild sex, a child born, and even marriage to Hickok.
There are numerous stories, with varying levels of credibility, that Jane was a wife and mother at one time.
Around 1885, she supposedly married a man named Burke and gave birth to a daughter in 1887.
There are numerous accounts of her seen with a young girl in several small towns throughout the West in the 1880s and 1890s, but no marriage license or birth certificate exists.
In 1941, a woman claimed to be Jane’s and Hickok’s daughter, but was later proved to be a fraud.
Jane’s fame grew even more in 1895, when she joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.
For several years, she toured the Midwest, bringing a commercialized version of the rip-roaring west to American audiences.
The work was never steady, as she reputedly got drunk and disorderly throughout the tours.
By the turn of the century, her hard life was catching up with her.
She suffered from severe alcoholism and poor health.
In July 1903, she arrived at the Calloway Hotel in Terry, near Deadwood, where she died on August 1st or 2nd, aged 51.
She was buried next to Wild Bill Hickok at Mount Moriah Cemetery in South Dakota.
In 1953, the musical ‘Calamity Jane’ starring Doris day, bought Jane’s life to the big screen.
