The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane by Richard W. Etulain (review)

Richard W. Etulain’s The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane represents an attempt to read the “silent spaces” of Martha Canary’s, later Calamity Jane’s, life in an endeavor to untangle fact from fiction and reveal her in flesh and blood and in popular culture and imagination (31). The author offers measured and “educated guesses” based on historical research as well as lore, myth, admittedly sketchy biographies, and fanciful writings of popular culture to fill in these spaces with mixed results (xv).

Problematically, but unabashedly and purposely offering no “specific thesis” or framework, Etulain divides his work into two parts (xvi). The first half of his work focuses on piecing together a biographical narrative of Martha Canary’s life from childhood through to her transformation into Calamity Jane and ultimately her death. With a sharp eye that carefully sorts and chronicles the vast amounts of circulating misinformation, Etulain attempts to unbraid the strands of truth from the strands of fiction, which have obscured the life of Martha Canary. He details the Canary family’s migration west, Martha’s birth, her parents’ death, and her ensuing abandonment and migratory lifestyle around the West. Martha emerges as a desperate, sometimes vulnerable, and often needy woman “adrift in a pioneer man’s world, without home, family, or occupation,” which leads to her masculinization in appearance, attitude, and occupation (4). Here Etulain misses a golden opportunity for a fruitful engagement with Peter Boag’s brilliant 2011 work Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past, an engagement that would have no doubt added a depth and understanding to Calamity Jane’s domination of Martha and perhaps her popularity in the eyes of the public.

How and when the created and evolving myth of Calamity Jane digested the realities of Martha’s identity in popular imagination are unclear. Perhaps owing in part to rampant rumors of her serving with General Custard, participating in Crook’s expedition, and romancing Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, by 1876, emerged as the “notorious woman of a frenetic frontier” (114). She appeared as a staple in sensationalistic dime novels and embellished newspaper accounts. Calamity Jane seemingly embraced and cultivated her growing outrageous reputation. Her private persona as Martha continued to struggle in the face of her thriving public persona as Calamity Jane. The 1880s and 1890s witnessed a marriage or marriages and the birth of Martha’s children, yet it was “her masculine dress, drinking, and errant behavior” that grabbed the nation’s attention (128). While Calamity Jane dominated the public sphere, in private Martha wandered restlessly in search of elusive stability. The twentieth century witnessed Martha’s decline, ending on August 1, 1903, with her death, most likely related to her alcoholism.

Death, however, did nothing to dampen the public’s already wetted appetite for the adventures—real, imagined, and fabricated—of Calamity Jane. The second part of Etulain’s work traces the emergence and evolution of Calamity Jane in popular culture from roughly 1877 into the twenty-first century and offers a kaleidoscopic view of Calamity Jane’s incarnations. During her lifetime, local, regional, and national newspapers as well as Calamity Jane’s own words shaped and reshaped her image into legend. Writers trumpeted her Wild West shows, and as she aged they “castigat[ed] her as an increasingly destitute, drunken, wretched wreck of a woman” (204). In death, her identity remained obscured, for Calamity Jane, or Mrs. M. E. Burke, not Martha Canary, lies buried under an error-riddled tombstone in Mount Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood, South Dakota. Even her obituary in the nation’s leading newspaper, the New York Times, mischaracterizes and erroneously romanticizes her life by declaring her, among other things, the “Woman Who Became Famous as an Indian Fighter” (205). The national mythologizing of Calamity Jane curiously fell out of vogue between 1905 and 1930 only to fiercely reemerge. Dime novels, films, radio broadcasts, television productions, musicals, novelists, and biographers...