Calamity Jane died on August 1, 1903, in a hotel room in Terry, South Dakota, just a few miles from the rough-hewn town of Deadwood that had made her famous. She was fifty-one years old, worn down by decades of hard living, severe alcoholism, and the relentless poverty that had chased her since childhood. The following day, she was buried on a sunbaked hillside in Mount Moriah Cemetery, laid to rest beside the man whose legend had become permanently entangled with her own: Wild Bill Hickok. The woman who had spent her life defying every convention of what a frontier woman was supposed to be had finally come to the end of her road, and the story of how she got there was as wild and unreliable as the territory she had roamed.
She was born Martha Jane Cannary on May 1, 1852, in Princeton, Missouri, the eldest of as many as six children born to Robert and Charlotte Cannary. The family reputation was not a good one. Her parents were described by those who knew them as unsavory characters, involved in petty crime and perpetually short on money. There was no stable foundation for a young girl growing up in that household, and the instability only deepened in 1863 when the family packed up and headed west to Virginia City, Montana, chasing the promise of gold.
The journey was brutal, and along the way her mother fell ill and died, most likely from pneumonia. The family pushed on to Salt Lake City in Utah Territory, but her father did not survive long after the move. By the age of twelve, Martha Jane Cannary was an orphan and the head of a family of younger siblings, with no money, no education, and no one to turn to. She was tall for her age and powerfully built, with a coarse manner that set her apart from other girls.
Illiterate and destitute, she moved from place to place, taking whatever work she could find just to keep herself and her brothers and sisters alive. The world around her was filled with desperate people scraping out a living on the margins, hardly a nurturing environment for a young impressionable girl. To survive, she began to take on men’s work and adopt a male persona, dressing in men’s clothing and doing jobs that most women of the era would never have been permitted to attempt. It is also believed that as a teenager she occasionally turned to prostitution, a trade that was both more lucrative and always in demand in the boomtowns of the West.
During these hard years, the nickname that would define her life was given to her: Calamity Jane. The exact origin of the name is disputed, and Jane herself told different versions of the story over the years, but the label stuck and became the identity she would carry for the rest of her days. In 1875, Jane traveled with a U. S.
Army troop into the Black Hills of South Dakota, and from there she drifted into the lawless, gold-crazed settlement of Deadwood. It was here that the facts of her life become harder to separate from the legends. Deadwood in those years was a raw, violent boomtown, a place where outlaws and prospectors mingled freely and the law was whatever a man could enforce with a gun. Jane reportedly had numerous affairs with some of the most notorious desperados of the time, and the most famous of these alleged relationships was with Wild Bill Hickok, the legendary gunfighter and gambler who arrived in Deadwood in 1876.
It is likely that Jane did meet Hickok in Deadwood, but nearly all historians discount any intimate relationship between the two. The romantic stories that linked them were mostly the inventions of dime novel authors and Jane’s own colorful imagination. Even the tale Jane told in her autobiography of single-handedly capturing Jack McCall after he shot Hickok in the back during a poker game is contradicted by the local newspaper accounts of the time, which reported that McCall was quickly captured by the townspeople themselves. The truth was less dramatic than the legend, but the legend was what endured.
Jane was also remembered for a softer side, though even those accounts are clouded by exaggeration. In her autobiography, she claimed to have rescued a runaway stagecoach from a Cheyenne war party, courageously driving the vehicle to Deadwood with six terrified passengers and a wounded driver aboard. Several sources also described her helping to nurse patients during a smallpox epidemic that swept through Deadwood. The documentation of her role in these events is suspect, and the accounts vary widely in their details, but the stories are considered plausible because the events themselves did occur.
Whatever the exact truth, she gained a reputation as a woman who could ride, shoot, and drink with the roughest men in the territory, and who would also sit by the bedside of a sick stranger when no one else would. Her private life was even more fabled. Beyond the alleged romance with Hickok, dime novel writers spun saucy tales of a child born to the couple and even a secret marriage between them. There were numerous stories, with varying levels of credibility, that Jane had been a wife and a mother at various points in her life.
Around 1885, she supposedly married a man named Burke, and in 1887 she reportedly gave birth to a daughter. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, there were multiple sightings of Jane traveling with a young girl through small towns across the West. But no marriage license has ever been found, and no birth certificate exists to confirm the child’s arrival. In 1941, a woman came forward claiming to be the daughter of Jane and Hickok, but the claim was later proved to be a fraud.
The truth of her personal life remained as elusive as the woman herself. Her fame reached new heights in 1895 when she joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, performing sharpshooting skills astride a horse for several years as she toured the Midwest, bringing a commercialized version of the rip-roaring West to American audiences. But the work was never steady, as she reputedly got drunk and disorderly throughout the tours. Wherever she performed, she carried copies of her greatly exaggerated autobiography, which she sold to fans for pennies a piece.
The book was part confession, part fantasy, and it cemented her place in the popular imagination as one of the most colorful characters of the frontier. By the turn of the century, her hard life was catching up with her. The alcoholism that had long been a companion had become a master, and her health was failing badly. In July 1903, she arrived at the Callaway Hotel in Terry, near Deadwood, too ill to continue her wandering ways.
She died there on August 1 or 2, at the age of fifty-one. The woman who had once bragged that she could outride, outshoot, and outdrink any man in the territory was finally stilled. Her burial beside Wild Bill Hickok in Mount Moriah Cemetery ensured that, in death, the legend she had helped create would endure long after the frontier itself had faded into memory.