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Calamity Jane: life of the week
00:46:15
Karen Jones takes a fresh look at the rootin’ tootin’ frontierswoman of the American West
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- [00:00]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [02:59]
Professor Karen Jones
Her apart, for me at least, and hopefully for many other people too, is the fact that she is a legend now. She's a myth, she's an image, and she's a real person. So you've got that collision between her own life, her biography, the things she did in the actual west, and then you've got her profile in books in Hollywood, and the way that messes with her folklore, the way it develops her folklore. So I think it's that life and legend which is part of the story. And the other thing that marks her is where she sits in that broader landscape. This is a place under transformation, the late 19th century. This is a region, the American west, which has, in a hundred years, gone from being a blank canvas, at least in the American mindset, to a settled space. So it's America's creation story. It's about patriotism and glory and individualism and cowboys and all of that kind of stuff. She sits in that world, and I think that is what makes her a fascinating character.
- [04:19]
Ryan Reynolds
There is such a mythos that has grown up around her. But before we uncover how she rose to this historical stardom in our popular culture, introduce us to the woman behind the name. And we should probably start by asking what actually was her real name?
- [04:37]
Professor Karen Jones
So her real name was Martha Jane Canary. That much we know, interestingly, and I think this is why she captivates people and has captivated people for so long. The details of her actual life are really fuzzy. There's so many stories and counter stories about where she was from, her upbringing, and that runs all the way through her life. So she's a perennial mystery, which I think keeps people guessing about who she is and what she is. And that's part of her allure. And it's been the job of historians and commentators over a long period of time to articulate the fragments of her life as much as that is possible. And that has taken a long time to build up and construct. What we know from little bits and pieces of census and records in local newspapers and such like, is that she was born in, in all likelihood in 1856. She says in her autobiography that she's born in 1852. So that further Muddies the waters. But she's born in 1856 in Princeton, Missouri, to James and Charlotte. Again, there's counterclaims about her being born in one of the military forts and being looked after by a soldier, being born in Iowa to a Baptist minister. But the most likely origin story is the Missouri one with James and Charlotte. James is a farmer, not very good at being a farmer. Charlotte has a reputation for being quite a fiery person. So obviously that la lays the groundwork for thinking about how her daughter developed this sort of early reputation. And the family, they are very typical of American families of the time. And they keep jumping from place to place, you know, looking for their prosperous home, looking for their free land, looking to strike it rich. And inevitably that means jumping further and further westward. So the family moves from Missouri in the early 1860s to Montana. Montana to the gold fields, to Virginia City, where James reckons he's gonna strike gold. He doesn't. He's a gambler. He's not really very good as a miner, so things don't go super well. But yeah. So in a way, her early life is really typical of the family story, of the frontier, of people moving west to find a better life.
- [07:15]
Ryan Reynolds
We definitely need to talk about her autobiography. We have this image of her as this hard drinking, gun toting, routine, tooting frontiers woman. Does this image all stem from that autobiography or is it actually grounded in truth?
- [07:32]
Professor Karen Jones
It's a mixture of things. You know, her story is one of great complexity in the sense that her parents, they both die in the mid to late 1860s. So as a young teenager, she's on her own, she's destitute, and she does what she can to survive. She's a young woman who moves between railway camps, military forts, mining camps, trying to do what job she can to survive. So she's a cook, she's a dancer, she's probably a prostitute, she's a freighter. She does all kinds of things which you wouldn't expect women at the time to be doing. So she's living very much a hand to mouth existence. And as part of that, she operates in male environments, in homosocial worlds. So she does develop a reputation as somebody who can drink and swear with the best of them, who's got really good skills with gun, you know, who's an itinerant character of which there are many in the west at the time. So this reputation we have of her is rooted in the fact that she's operating way beyond the boundaries of typical female behavior of the time. And she talks up this legend. She talks up her, you know, her profile, if you like. And other people start to talk about her because she's unusual and she's different and she. Yeah, she is fiery and she is.
- [09:06]
Ryan Reynolds
Different as part of this early existence, this itinerant existence. There's also the military service. But there seems to be some conflicting stories around this. What's the historical consensus on that?
- [09:21]
Professor Karen Jones
This is an interesting one. And this is really, at the moment where she makes her name, is while she's traveling with the military in the early 1870s. This is in the throes of the Indian wars, in the time when the U.S. army is surveying the plains. They're the ones who discover gold in the Black Hills, for instance, as part of a survey team. They are obviously engaging with and also pacifying and warring with local native tribes in the region. So it's a time of colonial exchange and encounter and assimilation. She travels with the army. She says that she's a scout, you know, and she has these daring raids in which she carries dispatches between famous generals, and she plays her part in the winning of the West. What we know, however, is rather different. We know that she travels with the army. She's never officially on the payroll, and she always is about the margins at the campfires as part of the storytelling tradition. But also she more typically is likely to have, again, being a cook or a laundress or just what they call the camp follower, which is a prostitute. She's in the realm of the army, but she's not in the army. So we see her visually first in a photograph taken at French Creek in the Black Hills, where she's wearing a tunic, she's wearing trousers, she's lounging on a rock. She communicates a very different image of the female frontier in that encapsulation. The other thing about her military, well, service in inverted commas is that's the time when she starts to be talked about by diarists and around the campfires and such like. And that is the time when she quires her name. And I guess this is the next part of the fuzzy story of truth and fakery in her world. She says in her autobiography that she's named Calamity Jane, heroine of the Plains by Captain Egan, who is a military officer that she supposedly saves during an ambush. There's a Nez Perce ambush on the cavalry unit, and he's about to be thrown from his horse, and she saves him and carries him to a nearby fort. And there he's sort of recovering. He names Her Calamity. Later on, he denied that this happened. So that's another complexity here. But she speaks frequently about this origin story of her name. Others, though, lay claim to have christened her. While Bill says I called her Calamity, journalists say they called her Calamity, Others say she was known as Calamity because trouble seemed to follow wherever she went. So, yeah, again, those sort of textured layers of folklore around even just her name itself. But that is the name by which she became known. It was very clear in the regional press that became her identity, a sort.
- [12:49]
Ryan Reynolds
Of performance identity, I suppose, from her supposed military service. We'll say she then came to Deadwood. Deadwood has remained an integral part to Calamity Jane's legend, from the rescue of the Deadwood stage to the capture of Wild Bill Hickok's killer. How did she come to Deadwood? And what was frontier life like there?
- [13:15]
Professor Karen Jones
So she arrives in Deadwood in May 1876. She arrives with a group, a caravan of people who've traveled from Fort Laramie, including Wild Bill Hickok and a few other characters, shall we say. So she arrives in a sort of a flurry of theatrics, which again, helps with her legendary profile. And the place she arrives in is in chaos. It's a ball of energy and activity. Gold is discovered, as I mentioned earlier, in the Black Hills as part of this government survey, which leads many, many Euro Americans to flock to the space to seek their fortunes. The mining camps here and elsewhere in the American west have a particular kind of identity as lawless, vibrant, rowdy spaces which grow really, really fast and are quite transient. They're very, very male dominated, because miners typically go to a camp, want to make their money, and then go home again. They have a reputation for being violent, for being. For having sort of colorful drinking cultures, and for being places which I think very much represent what the Old west is meant to be in its wildest dimensions. And so she arrives in this ramshackle place which is exploding, which has about 5,000, at least 5,000 people by the mid-1870s. I should say that this is an illegal encampment. You know, it's on Lakota land. The Lakota are given the Black Hills by the Fort laramie Treaty from 1868. That is still contested space, their sacred space, which the complexities of that sovereignty is still unresolved today. So this place that she appears in, it's really fitting for her character. These mining towns are places where you can talk up your legend, you can say what you want about yourself. This is a new space no one knows you, and they are places where there's a lot of enterprise and entrepreneurship and a lot of jockeying for power and position, gunfights, all of that sort of stuff. So we know Hickok was there. We know that he is killed while playing cards. Calamity Jane says she apprehends the killer with a meat cleaver. That's unlikely, but there are all these tales and frontier nuggets going on which resonate in Deadwood in its heyday in the 1870s period. She fits in that landscape really well.
- [16:19]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [16:51]
Professor Karen Jones
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- [17:25]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [18:27]
Professor Karen Jones
Yeah, well, I hate to say it, but the wonderful Doris Day film, it has a smattering of truth to it. But that is not really one of those aspects. What you have to remember, I think, is that this caravan that comes into Deadwood in May 76 from Laramie, Hickok and Calamity Jane met on that journey. Hickok gets gunned down in August. So, you know, the entirety of this supposed romance is it's short lived and it's a summer romance, if anything. And the if anything part is salient here. We know from what Canary says later, what Calamity Jane says later, that she says that she has a romance with Wild Bill. She tells journalists they are engaged to be married, visits his grave. The local press pick this up and they say, oh, yes, you know, they lived in Deadwood as a married couple. None of this is corroborated, though, so it's highly unlikely that there was romance between them, although she certainly fans the flames of possibility. She's abetted in this, though, by the Society of Black Hills Pioneers who preside over her funeral. She apparently says on her deathbed that she wants to be buried next to Wild Bill. So, dying wish. The Society of Black Hills Pioneers adhere to that wish and bury her in Mount Moriah Cemetery in a grave next to him. And you could buy postcards with the two graves, the two lovers side by side for eternity and all of that. Now, we don't really know why the society did this. However, it did seem to them at least, that this was a great tourist gold mine, a cemetery gold mine in the making, because by the time she dies in 1903, the Old west has passed into history and people are beginning to have a nostalgia and interest in it. So by then, Deadwood has settled down considerably and wants, on one hand, to distance itself from the excesses of the Old west and the gunplay, to sell itself as a prosperous place to make money and to settle and all of that. But there is also tourist dollars to be made from the mythology of the Old west. And we see that in other places. Dodge City is one in the 1920s, creates a fake version of its Boothill Cemetery with gravestones that have comedy inscriptions on them. They died with their boots on, and all that kind of stuff to capture a tourist market. So it's quite possible that the placement of Calamity next to Bill fits with this commerc possibility. In subsequent years, though, this story rumbles on in different ways in the afterlife of Calamity Jane, not least in the early 1940s, when a woman called Jean McCormack from Billings, Montana, announces to the world that she is the Long Lost daughter of Hickok and Calamity Jane. To verify her story, she produces a suite of historical materials which are really, really fascinating. A diary, a last will and testament. And all these are dog eared and they look old and they contain really interesting, I guess, deeply personal reflections from Calamity Jane to the daughter that she had to give up. And that communicated on the page, what Cormac says is the. Is that Calamity Jane gave her up because she had to. She couldn't support her daughter. And that British sea captain looked after her, found her foster parents, she spent some time in Liverpool and then gravitated back to Montana, became a schoolteacher. And she, in this early 1940s period, she tours rodeos, she gives talks, she appears at museums. As, you know, long lost daughter of Calamity Jane. So she has her 15 minutes of fame and people really like this. They really get on board with this. This hits a nerve and captivates a population which is, you know, enthralled by the Old West. This is the golden age of the Hollywood Western. The thing is that MacCormack's story was hokum. She, as James MacLeod uncovers much, much later. Actually, this is all made up. But the problem is, or the enticement is, or the wonderful thing is, in many ways there's enough complexity in Calamity's story and so much mystery that there's just enough seas of possibility to give credence to her story. Because there's evidence from the time that Calamity had children. A boy called Little Calamity that's mentioned in the newspapers who supposedly died. And then a daughter called Jessie, who is again mentioned in the local press and who is sent to an orphanage. And it's this character, Jessie, who becomes Janie in the diaries, who Jean MacCormack is able to inhabit the personality of. And there's very little detail around this character. So it sort of enables her to step into the shoes of Calamity's daughter. And the diary entries, although they're constructed much later, they're really interesting in the way in which the author, whoever that was, constructs a narrative of an older Calamity Jane reflecting on her life and reflecting on perfoibles. And so as a piece of writing, as an imagined history, it's really quite an interesting one.
- [24:39]
Ryan Reynolds
If we maybe set some of those complexities aside about this relationship. Do we know of any other really prominent relationships either with partners or other family or children?
- [24:54]
Professor Karen Jones
Well, again, it's shadowy figures who move into view and then Move out of view. We know a little bit about her siblings when she was destitute in Virginia City, but then they disappear from the historical picture again. Her daughter Jessie appears in the late 19th century in a few places, and indeed through the 20th century. A couple of other people claim to be her, one of which probably was, who dies in 1980. And on her death certificate, her mother is listed as Martha Jane Canary. The evidence is so patchy, it's really hard to see a clear pathway of biography in terms of partners. She is known to have had several partners or husbands who she lives with for a bit, but then she leaves. She goes somewhere else. So her life is very much an itinerant one around which people appear as part of her story for a bit, but nothing substantive, nothing long term. So she's very much a loner in many ways. And I think her, you know, her everyday story is. It carries a sort of a heroism in the sense that she's resilient, she's a survivor. She's stretching the boundaries of orthodox behavior. She's subversive in that way. But she's also living a very precarious, very challenging existence on the frontier.
- [26:40]
Ryan Reynolds
So Martha, Calamity Jane, she acts like a man, she dresses like a man, she takes on traditionally masculine roles. What do you think this can tell us about her existence and the existence on the frontier more broadly?
- [26:56]
Professor Karen Jones
Again, this is where aspects of her legend have developed in the 20th century to take her heroism into new spaces, to think about different kinds of gender identities, different sorts of possibilities. What she represented, what we know in the American west, is there's actually quite a lot of women who pass as men. And they do this for lots of reasons. They do this to fight in war, to make mineral claims. So for reasons of commercial possibility that were not open to women at the time, we know sometimes that women dressed as men to be bandits. So to conceal their identities also in terms of safety and security. A woman traveling alone in the American west, that was quite a tricky thing to do, a dangerous thing to do. So this was about concealing your identity, to pass unnoticed. In other cases, women passed as men to enact revenge on husbands and partners. And for gay women or trans men, this was a way to inhabit different gender identities, to be the people they were, to have relationships, or to move into a space of the west that had more of an allowance because it was less bounded by the strictures, because it was a society in formulation. I suppose when it comes to Martha, to calamity, we don't really know which of these she fits into. We know that she, in some of her articulations, in her autobiography, she says, you know, I was a regular man in them days. So she uses masculine language. She dresses like a man. She has a sort of a swagger about her. We know that physically she was quite tall, she was broad. So she carries what Jack Halberstam has called a female masculinity in her. I guess, in her Persona. We also know that she continued to refer to herself as a woman. We don't know that she had relationships with women. So she's quite an enigma in terms of what to make of her, especially in a time where the free expression of who you were in terms of sexuality and gender identity wasn't really a possibility. She's regarded in various terms. I think some people regard her as quite an empowering figure at the time, that she's sort of captivatingly different in her way, that she is brave and doing what maybe other people wanted to do but didn't feel as able to. She's regarded curiously as. Well, she's also regarded as an eccentric, as a kind of a freak, I suppose so. Not as a sort of a model of what the Western citizen or the Western woman of the future should be. So she's hard to position in terms of what her personality meant at the time, in terms of what her personality has meant subsequently. There are certain things that have remained constant. So her costuming is a constant, but what her costuming means has changed. So you still have biographers, comparatively recently, who talk about her aspirations just to be a wife and a mother. I'm not personally so convinced by that. I think she, as someone who lived on the margins of society and who was unorthodox and who did move in, was very comfortable in these other spaces. I don't see that as part of her story. But she struggled to reconcile, I think, her performance identity and her everyday identity. So there are many photographs that depict her as a conventional homesteading woman, dressed accordingly. But I think rather like, as in Calamity Jane the Musical, I think she looks most at home in her performance garbage, with that swagger, that more subversive style.
- [31:26]
Ryan Reynolds
This is all presenting us with quite the extraordinary picture of Martha, of Calamity Jane from the sharpshooter, the daredevil, the scout, the cook. We've seen an extraordinary range of different aspects of her life, and today she has this reputation of this sort of fearless feminist heroine. We need to talk about how this legend was crafted around her. How did things like dime novels, Wild west shows the Pan American exposition influence public perception of her.
- [32:03]
Professor Karen Jones
They all influenced public perceptions of her a great deal. While she's cultivating her story as sort of a character of the west, these other medias, I suppose, are texturing that and embellishing that. So I guess the first two iterations of her legend are the stories from the military and the local newspapers which create this profile of this regional character, this strange, eccentric wild woman of the West. The dime novel leaps into that world in a big way. So dime novels have their origins in the 1860s. They are cheap pieces of pulp fiction which are written really, really quickly by authors to appeal to the urban east coast mass market, predominantly young men. So they're often in installments. They cover a raft of different topics. But the west is a really, really key genre in the media. And calamity appears in a series of books by Edward Wheeler, whose hero, Deadwood Dick, has calamity as a sidekick, lover, savior, you know, comic foil, all of those things. So she appears in about 22 novels in this series in the 1870. This takes her from being an object of regional chatter to a national name. What's quite interesting is the things that she talks about in her autobiography, the things that she becomes famous for, don't appear in the dime novel. The stories there are different. They're all about Deadwood Dick and hers adventures. As she dies, she's resurrected, they get married. There are all sorts of nefarious characters. It's a circuitous and quite complicated tale. So what the dime novel does is it puts her name out there and the image of her as a buckskin clad, armed frontiers woman. From there, people start to get interested in her story nationally. And this encourages Wild west show organizers to want to put her on the stage. When she appears on the stage in Wild west shows in the 1890s, it's the stories of her being a scout, the stories of her saving the Deadwood stage, the stories of her racing across the plains with the mail, all of that which is transplanted to the World west show and that continues to furnish her legend through the 20th century. Really. The autobiography that I've mentioned a few times comes from the Wild West Show. It's a souvenir booklet that is produced to accompany the show so that you can go and watch her on stage talking about her exploits. And then you can buy the souvenir story of her life. The Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane by herself, it's called. Even this artifact is intriguing though, because of course, she was illiterate. So this is ghost written probably on the basis of listening to her oratory on the stage. So the Wild Wish show and the dime novel take her story nationwide and give her that new platform for her adventures to extend way, way beyond the frontier itself. She appears in a few Wild west shows, but she struggles to keep up the momentum of appearing in these different cities across the East United States. I should say here one of the challenges she faces is alcohol. She's an alcoholic, so whenever she gets some money from the shows, whenever she's doing quite well, she tends to drink all the profits and then she'll just disappear off somewhere. Midway through the season, while she's appearing as part of the Wild west show, she disappears off some back to the West. She's always caught in this really complicated relationship with alcohol and getting by and this sort of itinerant existence, the legend demands a sort of performance from her, but that performance also is exhausting and not really sustainable as a lifestyle, I guess.
- [36:56]
Ryan Reynolds
And this is something that we see stretching into her later years. Could you tell us about how she lived in her final years and what became of her?
- [37:05]
Professor Karen Jones
Sure. So she continuing to try to eke out an existence from her story. She has postcards made of herself in a studio in Deadwood and she wanders around the west selling these. She'll tell a story to anyone who wants to listen. In a bar, she winds up in poor houses in various places, she gets sick. She receives donations of money from people who feel sorry for her or see her as an old relic of the West. Newspapers talk about her demise in sort of nostalgic terms and sorrowful terms, I suppose. She dies age 47 of complications really, of alcoholism and a nomadic hand to mouth existence. She's lived for her whole life. She dies of pneumonia. Yeah, it's a tragic tale really, of somebody who didn't fit in and couldn't really choreograph her legend in such a way as to support her effectively.
- [38:14]
Ryan Reynolds
Her name does live on in popular memory. And with so many popular interpretations of her lifetime and her legacy from musicals, as we've said, to books, to music and films, what do you think are some of the best interpretations? And do you have a personal favourite?
- [38:33]
Professor Karen Jones
I think the way in which her story has transformed itself through the 20th century through into 21st is amazing. You know, so you've got biographies of Westerners who like to talk about the time they met Calamity Jane, which gives them a sort of a kudos as proper frontier people and I enjoy those equally. Some of the late 20th century reinterpretations of her in cartoon see her as a sort of a spaghetti Western anime heroine where she sort of channels a bit of Sharon Stone in the Quick and the Dead and is tough talking and solving the problems of the west, working on behalf of the Lakota, you know, those sorts of creations of her as a revisionist heroine. There's so many possibilities and so many textures to her tale. But my two favorites are the 1953 musical with Doris Day, which is just amazing and endlessly watchable for its vibrancy and the sheer distance between Doris Day's Calamity Jane and the period photographs of Martha Jane Canary, that itself warrants it. I think the backstory of that film, which has this, you know, 1950s gloss to it, calamities there, drinking soft drinks. And her story gets resolved at the end, being transformed into a proper woman and a sort of domestic resolution that was, of course, befitting the conformity of the 1950s, but that underneath there's this subtext, the secret love between her and Katie that sort of communicating another possible direction for the tale. So, yeah, I really like that. The tunes, how the West Was Sung and all of that.
- [40:32]
Ryan Reynolds
That.
- [40:33]
Professor Karen Jones
So, yeah, that is for sure my favourite. But I also really like David Melch's Deadwood series, which is, yeah, gritty and violent and presents a highly problematic west and calamity there, played by Robin Weigert. She's much more of the calamity of the 19th century. You know, she's a sort of grubby, butch, marginal woman who's there on the edge of the story, but she's very much the raconteur and she's the storyteller. And I think that that is quite a. An apt way to think of her as a folkloric character, as a frontier celebrity, that she's. Yeah, she's a very accustomed storyteller.
- [41:28]
Ryan Reynolds
You've given us so many hints already. Sum it up for us. Why do you think she continues to capture the imagination today? And how would you like her to be remembered?
- [41:39]
Professor Karen Jones
Oh, that's a great question, or set of questions. She continues to captivate us, I think, because she speaks of that time, that frontier time that resonates with a sense of adventure and escapism on one hand, but is also about a colonial story of loss and tragedy when you're thinking about indigenous communities and landscapes. And I think because of that, that world, you can tell her story in so many different ways. And so she can be endlessly reconfigured and reinvented within the contours of her perennial identity. So I think that's why we continue to be fascinated with the west and with her as a really strong character, but also an ethereal character at the same time. One of the things that really intrigues me, that there's a quote that you can find on posters and mugs and all over the Internet which says something like, I figure if a woman wants to be a legend, she should just go ahead and be one, or something like that. I'm paraphrasing here. And there's no evidence that Canary ever said this, and yet it appears as a sort of a tagline with the attribute of her name underneath it. And although it's completely fake, I kind of quite like that there's a quotation attached to her because for all the messiness in her life, that story of resilience and storytelling and the sort of everyday heroism of someone who did what they could in that space and sort of stretch the boundaries of conformity, I think that's a good message, you know, to strive to be the person that you want to be and to challenge what's acceptable, challenge assumptions about what women should and could do. That's a good message.
- [43:45]
Ryan Reynolds
That was Karen Jones, professor in Environmental and Cultural History at the University of Kent, and she was speaking to me. Emily Brifitts. Karen's book on the life of Martha Canary is Calamity the Many Lives of Calamity.
- [44:01]
Professor Karen Jones
Jane.
- [44:07]
Emily Brifitts
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