1 May 1852
The birth of disguised Calamity Jane

On this day, the adventurer and performer Calamity Jane was born near Princeton, Missouri. Her real name was Martha Jane Canary, and the origin of her nickname is obscure.

In 1865, she and her family moved west to the booming gold rush town of Virginia City, Montana.

There she grew into a tall and powerfully built young woman who liked to wear men’s clothing and spend her time in the company of men.

Like many young frontier women, Jane learned to ride and shoot at an early age, and she apparently bridled at the narrow limits placed on women in her era.

Given to hard drinking and carousing, she attracted public attention with stunts like riding a bull down the main street of Rapid City, South Dakota. By the 1890s, many Americans were already fascinated with the rapidly fading days of the Wild West, and a wild woman like Jane was extremely interesting. Jane catered to this fascination with boasts of her supposed exploits, claiming to have been a uniformed army scout for General George Custer, for example, though there was no evidence this was true.

Ultimately, Jane was a performer, providing the public with the appropriately grand and mythic image of the West. By 1896, Jane was suffering from the debilitating effects of severe alcoholism.

Nonetheless, she accepted an offer to appear on the stage in Minneapolis in her self-created persona of Calamity Jane.

Wherever she went, Jane brought along copies of her hopelessly inaccurate autobiography, which she sold to credulous fans for a few pennies.

One of the most persistent legends has been that Jane was married to the famous gunslinger and lawman Wild Bill Hickok, and that she might have given birth to his child.

There is some evidence Jane might have given birth to a daughter, but if the child existed at all, its paternity was uncertain.

Two years before she died, she seemed to have finally tired of living the self-created persona of Calamity Jane.

Found sick and drunk in an African-American bordello in Horr, Montana, she grumbled an uncharacteristic wish that the world would “leave me alone and let me go to hell my own route.” She died at the age of 51 on 1 August 1903, in Terry, South Dakota.

Calamity Jane

 

 

Quotable quotes Deeper understanding of women “What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.” —Susan Sontag (1933-), American intellectual and writer and a leading commentator on modern culture. “I hate women because they always know where things are.” —James Thurber (1894-1961), American author, cartoonist and humorist who graced the pages of The New Yorker for three decades. “If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.” —Plato (427-347 BC), Greek philosopher. “Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.” —Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Irish playwright, novelist and critic and a leading literary figure of the Aesthetic Movement in England. “There’s nothing sooner dry than women’s tears.” —John Webster (1580-1625), English playwright best known for his two tragedies, The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1623). “Women are cursed, and men are the proof.” —Rosanne Barr (1952-), American television personality known for her razor-sharp rebuttals to offensive jokes about women.

Home