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Our Heroine Bad-Girl: The Life and Legend of Calamity Jane |
| Section: CULTURE / HERITAGE |
| Author: Helen Mondloch |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 4/1/2003 |
| Size: 3,543 Words, 23,039 Characters |
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Ever since the era when vast numbers of Americans loaded covered wagons and began pressing westward, American popular culture has struggled to create a proper legacy for the Wild West. Notions of rugged frontier folk braving the wide-open plains--true grit forging their manifest destiny--stand starkly at odds with imagery of a less romantic sort: that of rowdy drunks tumbling from saloons, shifty poker games, and endless shoot-outs in a society of uproarious lawlessness.
This legendary landscape features a cast of characters who share in a mixed legacy. Among western women, perhaps the most motley career belonged to Martha Cannary, alias Calamity Jane. Cannary is an elusive figure who has gone down in the margins of history as both a lowlife and a heroine of the hills.
Born in Princeton, Missouri, around 1852, Cannary migrated west with her large family at the age of thirteen. Orphaned and permanently separated from her siblings within the first couple years, she set off on her own. She spent time in various locales across the western territories, but the Black Hills mining town of Deadwood, South Dakota, became her principal domain. After infiltrating the world of frontier men, Cannary earned notoriety and her colorful nickname because of her choice of rugged occupations and preference for raucous pastimes. Her buckskin trousers, like her taste for whiskey, evoked shock and fascination among her contemporaries. In later years, even as her carousing continued, Cannary earned distinction for ministering to Deadwood's sick and dying.
In frontier lore, Calamity Jane became a revered gunwoman. This was a role she also enjoyed in print materials that spread her fame to the east. In an autobiographical pamphlet titled "The Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane by Herself," probably ghostwritten in 1896, Cannary tried to perpetuate this valiant image. She boasted of saving a stagecoach from Indian attack and a host of other fantastic feats. She never mentioned her chronic drunkenness, prostitution, or frequent lockups at the local jail, darker realities exposed by twentieth-century chroniclers.
All but forgotten for two decades following her death in 1903, Calamity Jane resurfaced in the 1920s in a cycle of romantic distortions. Biographer Duncan Aikman ushere...
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...ublishers, Springfield, N.J., 1996.
Roberta Beed Sollid, Calamity Jane: A Study in Historical Criticism, Historical Society of Montana, Western Press, Helena, 1958 (republished in 1995).
Kent Steckmesser, The Western Hero in History and Legend, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1997.
Elizabeth Stevenson, Figures in a Western Landscape, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1994.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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