This gusty female, who rolled around the West for nearly half a century, has been the subject of more controversy and speculation than almost any other early-day character. In her lifetime she circulated a brief autobiography which successfully managed to hide the truth about practically every aspect of her history. In addition, she manipulated her drab story in such a way that a whole generation of legend-mongers accepted her as the “true love” of Wild Bill Hickok, and thus by no means to be thought of as the drunken harlot she most certainly was.
By dint of careful searching, however, some few definite facts of her early life and adventures have been isolated, and upon them at least the framework of her true story has been constructed. She appears to have been born in the neighborhood of 1850—add or subtract a year—in Missouri. Some accounts have it that her father was a Baptist minister, which is an unimportant sidelight, for young Martha Jane did not stay at home long enough for any such influence to gnaw its way into her personality.[2]
How she managed to get from Missouri to Wyoming while still in her early teens remains a mystery, but nonetheless her career as a camp follower started when, at the tender age of fourteen, she arrived in the roaring outpost of Rawlins. Some tales have it that she had gone west as the consort of a young army lieutenant, and that her mother, remarried to a pioneer, found her in that boisterous military town and took her to Utah. In any event she came back into circulation two years later, for in 1866 she was duly married to one George White in Cheyenne. Following this felicitous turn of affairs she and her husband journeyed to Denver, where he was able to support her in a fine, high style. Unfortunately, she did not take to this pleasant existence, but shortly began to yearn after the cavalry. Leaving her husband to his Denver duties, she appeared all during 1867 and 1868 in various forts throughout Wyoming. It was at this particular time in her career that she was supposed to have earned the nickname of Calamity Jane. Undoubtedly the title was bestowed upon her by barroom companions who had learned the sad truth that Martha Jane’s appearance on the scene boded a long and arduous night of drinking; but in her maudlin and confused autobiography she tells of assisting in an Indian fight and for her splendid services being gratefully given the name by a Captain Pat Egan. In a later interview Egan denied this, claiming that the only time he had ever seen the woman was while escorting her out of a barracks so that the men could get some sleep.
From Wyoming she went to Hays City, Kansas, still following the Seventh Cavalry, her chosen military unit. Six years later she turned up again, this time disguised as a man and marching with General Crook’s police force, which was trying to keep settlers out of the Hills. Her autobiography claims that she also accompanied Custer’s command on its famous exploratory march, but this does not appear to be true.
After the discovery of gold in Deadwood, she found the high life in that town so completely to her liking that she made it her home base. In time she fastened herself so securely among the legends of the metropolis that she was thereafter known solely as Calamity Jane of Deadwood.
Taking advantage of the high romance which surrounded Wild Bill’s name after his death, Calamity made haste to pass the story around that he had been her only true love; and although there was no evidence of any sort that he even knew who she was, her last words, when she died in 1903, were a plea to be buried next to him.
In the eighties she became restless again and forsook her beloved Deadwood for two decades, roving as far south as El Paso, and on one occasion being seen in California. Her activities at this time of her life are mostly lost from sight, but it may be presumed that as whatever charms she may earlier have had faded, her interest to and in the soldiers waned. During this period she married again, this time wedding a man named Burke, to whom she bore a daughter. She soon tired of Burke, however, and drifted slowly north again, passing considerable time in Colorado and then returning briefly to Deadwood in 1895. Even at that late date the citizens of the gold town had not forgotten her, nor had the esteem in which she had earlier been held dwindled; when it was discovered that she lacked funds to care for her daughter, the townspeople passed the ever present hat and arranged for the care of the child. This act of generosity was purportedly to repay a great sacrifice which Calamity Jane had made in the earlier days, braving the dangers of the smallpox scourge of 1878 to nurse whoever was ill and without help. This particular legend has had wide currency in the West, its closest variant being the tale of Silver Heels, a dancing girl who visited the mining camps of Colorado’s South Park in the sixties. Silver Heels is popularly supposed to have ministered to the miners during a similar plague, for which bravery a near-by mountain was named for her.
After placing her child in a school, Calamity, who was destitute, betook herself to the vaudeville circuit. Inasmuch as through the dime novels she had already become a well-known national figure, she was able for a while to draw large crowds. Had it not been for her unfortunate habit of getting dead drunk before show time, she might well have amassed a competence over the years. But her first contract was not renewed, and after a brief whirl at the Buffalo Exposition she returned to the West, spending the next several years in Montana.
At last she came home to Deadwood, a sick and broken old roustabout. By this time she was nothing more than a bar-fly, and she lived out her last days panhandling food and liquor money from strangers. At last, on August 2, 1903, she died of pneumonia.
Deadwood turned out in force for her funeral. As she had requested, she was buried near Wild Bill Hickok on Mount Moriah, overlooking the town. That she had never really known Wild Bill was quite beside the point, and anyway, there was none present who knew whether she had or not. The shoddy story of her “love” for Hickok was nothing that interested the old timers, but was saved for historians to untangle. That she was no more than an alcoholic old harlot was of no consequence, either, to the good citizens, for with her passing the last of the great names of the frontier was coming home to rest. That the townspeople were proud of her, and genuinely so, was not to be denied, although there was most certainly nobody present at that melancholy service who could have told why. The truth of the matter was that they were burying not a broken old woman, but the last of the Black Hills legends.