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  • The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane by Richard W. Etulain
  • Brett Westbrook
Richard W. Etulain, The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2014. 416pp. Cloth, $24.95.

The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane is the culmination of over twenty years of research on Calamity Jane. Expanding the definition of biography to include not only the historical figure but the legends made of that figure, Richard Etulain’s book covers a staggering amount of ground: from Mercer County (Missouri) probate records to Deadwood (South Dakota) journalism, to dime novels, dime museums, Hollywood, and even the “Calamity Jane Saloon in the Basque area of Southern France” (335).

Etulain’s Calamity Jane is the twenty-ninthentry in the Oklahoma Western Biographies series from the University of Oklahoma Press, of which Etulain is the editor. Because the series intends to [End Page 266] make rigorous scholarship accessible to the general public, there are no footnotes in any of the volumes. The author does include a helpful “Essay on Sources” and a bibliography. For those determined to wade into the Calamity weeds, copies of the manuscript with footnotes have been deposited with the Montana Historical Society (Helena) and the South Dakota Historical Society (Pierre). In addition, Etulain’s Calamity Jane: A Reader’s Guide is due out from the University of Oklahoma Press late in 2015.

Despite Etulain’s exhaustive research, there are still sufficient gaps in the historical record to engender controversies over what seems like basic information, such as where Calamity Jane was born or how many times she married. Readers are spared the conflicting details as Etulain offers what he believes to be the “most defensible position on these contested subjects” (xv). Th is reader, for one, is grateful and most willing to rely on the prizewinning author’s historical acumen.

Calamity Jane was born Martha Canary in Mercer County, Missouri, in 1856, to Robert and Charlotte Canary. Likely in order to avoid a probate fight with his siblings over their father’s will, Robert moved his family out of Missouri sometime before the start of the Civil War. Details are hazy, but by the end of 1864 the family was destitute in Montana. By 1868 Robert and Charlotte were both dead, leaving an eleven-year-old Martha to care for her two siblings. The special 1869 census in Wyoming located her in Piedmont, listing her age as fifteen instead of thirteen. She then virtually disappears from the record until around 1875 when she turns up in a government-sponsored expedition to the Black Hills. Only two years later Martha Canary had become Calamity Jane and a “nationally known character” (53).

Etulain details the speciation and dissemination of the Calamity Jane legends (note the plural) through dime novels such as the Deadwood Dick series, local and East Coast journalists eagerly printing sensationalized stories about the Wild West, and through Calamity Jane herself, who embellished her own life, sometimes with flat-out lies and in interviews and a short ghostwritten autobiography. Calamity was certainly a hard-drinking woman who smoked cigars, sometimes wore men’s clothes, and earned a sporadic income sometimes in men’s occupations. Reporters might [End Page 267] smooth over these affronts to traditional femininity: “‘Calamity may not be possessed of all the feminine graces,’ one reporter admitted, but ‘she is a better citizen than Emma Goldman any day in the week’” (186). Other reporters focused on her public drunkenness and alleged prostitution, refusing to romanticize anything about her.

Etulain provides a solid foundation for a more complex Martha/Calamity than either end of the pole. She was often drunk, chronically peripatetic, and possibly engaged in prostitution. She nursed the sick, had two children, was married once legally. A ranch hand summed it up this way: “She was a good woman only she drinked” (123).

The final four chapters of the book detail the ways in which the Calamity Jane story spun out in Hollywood movies, plays, novels, and nonfiction books, including the emergence of a woman claiming to be the daughter of Calamity Jane and Bill Hickok (thoroughly debunked).

The combination of James D. McLaird’s Calamity biography (University of...

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