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Loading... The Life and Legends of Calamity Janeby Richard W. Etulain
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Everyone knows the name Calamity Jane. Scores of dime novels and movie and TV Westerns have portrayed this original Wild West woman as an adventuresome, gun-toting hellion. Although Calamity Jane has probably been written about more than any other woman of the nineteenth-century American West, fiction and legend have largely obscured the facts of her life. This lively, concise, and exhaustively researched biography traces the real person from the Missouri farm where she was born in 1856 through the development of her notorious persona as a Wild West heroine. Before Calamity Jane became a legend, she was Martha Canary, orphaned when she was only eleven years old. From a young age she traveled fearlessly, worked with men, smoked, chewed tobacco, and drank. By the time she arrived in the boomtown of Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876, she had become Calamity Jane, and the real Martha Canary had disappeared under a landslide of purple prose. Calamity became a hostess and dancer in Deadwood's saloons and theaters. She imbibed heavily, and she might have been a prostitute, but she had other qualities, as well, including those of an angel of mercy who ministered to the sick and the down-and-out. Journalists and dime novelists couldn't get enough of either version, nor, in the following century, could filmmakers. Sorting through the stories, veteran western historian Richard W. Etulain's account begins with a biography that offers new information on Calamity's several "husbands" (including one she legally married), her two children, and a woman who claimed to be the daughter of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity, a story Etulain discredits. In the second half of the book, Etulain traces the stories that have shaped Calamity Jane's reputation. Some Calamity portraits, he says, suggest that she aspired to a quiet life with a husband and family. As the 2004-2006 HBO series Deadwood makes clear, well more than a century after her first appearance as a heroine in the Deadwood Dick dime novels, Calamity Jane lives on--raunchy, unabashed, contradictory, and ambiguous as ever. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)978.02092History and Geography North America Western U.S. 19th Century BiographyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3)
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Wikipedia in English (1)
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Establishing the correct details of Calamity Jane's life remains a challenging prospect, largely because the paucity of reliable sources and the challenges in verifying them. This leaves gaps in Richard Etulain's coverage of Jane's life, as he freely admits. What is left, though, provides an account of a tough, hard-living woman whose peripatetic life was often defined by her alcoholism. Born in Missouri, she was orphaned at an early age and left to tend to her younger brother. A fortuitous journey to Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876 brought her into the national spotlight, as her brief association with Wild Bill Hickok and her own remarkable behavior drew the attention of several writers at a time when Americans were becoming fascinated by events on the frontier. Though she benefited from the fame in a number of ways, her legendary reputation did not alleviate her problems with alcohol or poverty, and she died at the age of 51 in 1903.
Etulain's book would be worthwhile reading just for his effort to separate the truth of Martha Canary's life from the legend of Calamity Jane. Yet its greatest strength is his coverage of the construction of that legend, Starting with the Deadwood Dick novels of Edward Wheeler, he chronicles the fictional depictions of adventures, both during her life and in the decades that have followed since her death. His analysis shows the evolution of her image, one that often reflected more the mores of the times than any effort to recount the truth. Together they make for a solid study of the life and legend of a woman whose fame has far outlasted the short and often tragic life that she lived. (