Calamity Jane

Calamity Jane is one of those historical figures whose reputation has in many ways eclipsed the real story. But she was, without a doubt, a unique character who in many ways lived outside the social norms of her time.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from works
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast from tracybe Wilson.
And if any of you, I know some of you do,
but maybe you hang out on our Facebook page, you've

(00:22):
probably seen the guy complaining that our episode on Calamity
Jane is inaccurate. That episode that doesn't exist. We don't
have a Calamity Jane episode, so we're fixing that today. Uh,
we're pretty sure that guy on Facebook is actually complaining
about a video that we shared that neither of us
is in that doesn't say Stuffy missed in history class
on it. But you know, he's basically the reason why

(00:43):
we're doing a Calamity Jane episode today. I was because
she's fascinating, also because she is fascinating. And the other
thing is the guy who gave us a one star
it Tunes review for talking about too many women when
at that point less than a quarter of the women
in or less than a quarter of the most recent
episodes were about women. That guy gets partial credit for
our recent uptick and women because less than of women

(01:07):
is the opposite of too many women. So we're fixing
that balance a little bit right now apparently it's too
many for him. Yeah, but it's not a good representation
of humankind or history. Now. My favorite response in that
whole discussion was was when I pointed out that only
five of the last twenty episodes had been about women,
and one of the women was a supontified corpse, and

(01:30):
somebody responded and said, I think suppontified corpses are overrepresented
in the podcast. It was fantastic anyway. Calamity Jane, Yeah,
so we're gonna talk about her. Uh. Calamity Jane's grandparents
were farmers who lived in Ohio, not far from the
border with West Virginia. In the eighteen fifties, her grandfather,
James Canary, started selling off the family's land in preparation

(01:53):
for a move west. First, he and several of his
children and their families moved to Polk County, Iowa. One
of these children was his son Robert, who married Charlotte
Burge in Iowa on June fourteenth, eighteen fifty five. He
was thirty at that time and she was fifteen. About
a year later, on May one, eighteen fifty six, they
had a daughter named Martha Jane Canary, who would later

(02:15):
grow up to be Calamity Jane. Calamity Jane would eventually
have at least three siblings, possibly others who didn't survive childhood,
but we only have a lot of information about really
two of them. People talk about in a bit. Just
before the future Calamity Jane was born, James Canary resettled
the family a second time, this time to Mercer County, Missouri.

(02:38):
He bought a bunch of land for less than he
sold the Iowa land for, and then he turned around
and sold it to his children for a steep discount.
Once again, most of the extended Canary family lived near
to one another. Calamities parents really made and we are
going to call her Calamity this whole episode because that's
fun to say. Calamities parents really made an oppression, an
impression on the residence of Mercer County. Charlotte Canary in particular,

(03:01):
was remembered for being the cigar smoking, foul mouthed woman
who was known to get drunk in public and we're
really flamboyant clothing. Robert, on the other hand, was remembered
for being kind of lazy and people looked down on
him for not being able to quote control his wife,
plus he allowed her to brow beat him for not
being a very good husband or provider, so they made

(03:22):
an impression. In eighteen sixty two, James Canary, who had
apparently been living with Robert, Charlotte and their children since
the death of his wife some time before, also died
shortly thereafter, when Calamity was six or seven, Roberts sold
the farm and the family moved again, this time away
from the rest of the Canaries, and it's a little
unclear as to why, although two prevailing theories are the

(03:44):
Civil War and the need to dodge some issues with
the late James Canaries estate. Yeah, it seems like Robert
pretty much withheld something from James Canary is the state
that he needed the handback over to then be divided
up among his heirs, and instead he moved away from Ohio.
The family went west, and they eventually wound up in
Blackfoot City, Montana, in December of eighteen sixty four. That

(04:07):
winter was a really hard one and a lot of
settlements in Montana were straining under a huge influx of
people who had moved west, basically all at once. A
story in the Montana Post, which came out on December
thirty one of that year talked about three children who
were begging for aid from one of the commissioners of
Madison County, Montana. The article described their mother as quote

(04:28):
a woman of the lowest grade, and their father as
a gambler. The children in this story gave their last
name as Canary, and most historians believe that this news
article was about Calamity Jane's family. It's not exactly clear
what led the family to fall in these hard times,
but things only got worse from there. Charlotte died in

(04:49):
eighteen sixty six. Then Robert reportedly took the children's south,
having heard that the Mormons would take in and care
for needy children. Unfortunately, he also died in eighteen sixty seven,
somewhere near Salt Lake City. Calamity at this point was
about eleven, and as the oldest, she needed to take
care of her surviving younger siblings. According to her nephew,

(05:12):
she arranged holmes for her sister Lena and her brother Elijah,
who was known as Lodge. Lena later went on to
marya farmer, and she had seven seven children that then
died in a farming accident in eighteen eighty eight. Lije
became an itinerant farm hand, including at some points in
places where Calamity also lived, and he did spend some
time in prison. Sometime between the death of her father.

(05:35):
In the summer of eighteen sixty nine, Calamity Jane made
her way to Piedmont, Wyoming, which we know from census records,
on which she listed her age as fifteen, not thirteen.
From there, the age she told people is consistently different
from her age the first time her parents reported her
on the census. She consistently told people she was older
than she actually was. According to census records, Piedmont was

(05:59):
one of the many towns that had sprung up along
the Transcontinental Railroad as it was being built. It had
about a hundred residents at this point, and most of
them were male laborers. By the time of the eighteen
sixty nine census, most of its buildings had recently been
upgraded from tents to shacks. In Piedmont, Calamity lived and
worked at a boarding house, and she sometimes earned money

(06:19):
as sort of an in house babysitter. However, Calamity Jane
bucked expectations for what a fifteen year old girl should
be like she flirted, and she danced with soldiers who
came through the area. She cross dressed in soldiers clothing.
Her behavior was considered to be wild, so much so
that she was fired from the boarding house, and Emma Alton,

(06:39):
its owner, insisted later that she had had nothing at
all to do with Calamity Jane, in spite of many
witness reports to the contrary. We're not sure exactly how
long Calamity Jane stayed in Piedmont, or exactly where she
went when she left. It's not really in the newspapers
or census reports in eighteen seventy, and various other accounts
like interviews people later contradict one another. It's really the

(07:02):
early eighteen seventies before there were reliable reports on her whereabouts.
We have kind of a general sense that she traveled
from one wyoming boomtown to another, finding worked where she could,
doing anything from odd, odd jobs to almost certainly prostitution.
There's a brief gap here in what we know about
Calamity Jane's story, So we're going to take a brief
pause and have a word from one of the sponsors

(07:25):
who helps keep our show going. Calamity Jane still known
as Martha Jane Canary, traveled around various Wyoming frontier settlements
in the late eighteen sixties and early eighteen seventies. She
made a number of short stays in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and
traveled back and forth between there and the nearby forts
of Laramie and Russell, working as both an entertainer and
a prostitute. The first written account that we have of

(07:48):
Calamity Jane that's actually substantiated by multiple sources and is
also when she became known as Calamity, is from her
time in the Black Hills in Dakota Territory, and to
talk about that part of her life, we're going to
need to set the stage a little bit. The Black
Hills of South Dakota had been set aside as part
of a reservation for the Sioux Nation and the Fort

(08:09):
Laramie Treaty of eighteen sixty eight. According to the terms
of this treaty, fighting between the U. S. Army and
the Sioux Nation was going to end, and the Sioux
would have exclusive rights to the Black Hills, which were
and are sacred to the Sioux. However, in eighteen seventy four,
in defiance of the treaty's terms. General George Custer led

(08:31):
an expedition through the Black Hills to look for gold
and found it. Words spread, leading to a gold rush,
and the miners and prospectors who flooded the area demanded
that the U. S. Army protect them from the native population,
even though they were all there illegally. As the government
started to waffle on upholding the terms of the treaty

(08:51):
and instead protecting non native miners and prospectors from the
Native Americans, the Office of Indian Affairs and the Department
of War spawned through the Newton Jenny Expedition into the
Black Hills. This eighteen seventy five expedition was meant to
survey the area and to evaluate the reports of mineral
deposits that were there. This expedition departed on May seventy five,

(09:14):
and Calamity Jane tagged along. This is where real written
documentation of Calamity Jane's life, rather than just things gleaned
mostly from census records and interviews conducted much later, really
get started. Three different writers chronicling the expedition not only
talked about Calamity Jane but also called her by that name,
so it's clear that Martha became known as Calamity either

(09:37):
before or very early in the process of this expedition.
She became so consistently known as Calamity that it wasn't
until later historians pieced her story together that people actually
figured out that she had once been called Martha. Calamity
seems to have joined this expedition in disguise. After asking
both Colonel Dodge, who was commanding it, and the doctor

(09:57):
who was going to be in charge of medical services
for the expedition, if she could come along, both of
them told her no, so she disguised herself as a soldier. Unfortunately,
this disguise is reportedly what got her discovered. She saluted
an officer who returned her salute, and the soldiers who
were standing around and knew what was up started laughing
about it. When they were made to explain themselves, the

(10:19):
officer was quite angry and threw her out of the expedition,
but at this point they were more than sixty miles
away from the fort. Calamity Jane was certainly resourceful. She
was now nineteen years old, and she had been essentially
living on her own since she was eleven, but this
wasn't something she could easily survive on her own. She
was in understandably hostile territory. The written accounts of the

(10:42):
expedition do very a little on exactly what Jane did
at this point, whether she kept sneaking back in dressed
as a soldier and falling in with men who were
sympathetic to her, or whether she rode along with the
teamsters instead of instead of with the soldiers, or some
of both. Either way, the expedition doctor described her as
quote crazy for adventure. It's not entirely clear whether Calamity

(11:05):
stayed with the expedition throughout its entirety, but afterward the
U S ordered that all Native peoples in the area
in and around the Black Hills needed to move to
a reservation or be considered hostiles. Many refused, and the
army began sending troops to round people up and move
them by force. General George Crook commanded one of the

(11:26):
units being assigned this task, and on March one of
eighteen seventy six, he departed Fort Fetterman, which was about
eighty miles northwest of Fort Laramie. His force included nearly
nine hundred men and Calamity Jane. Calamity Jane's own account
of this expedition is highly highly embellished, and in all
likelihoods she came along as either a teamster, or a prostitute,

(11:49):
or just a camp follower. However, this expedition went terribly.
The weather was awful the whole time, and they had
an encounter with the Cheyenne. Went so bad badly that
Krook wound up filing charges against one of his officers
once it was all over. Reports placed Calamity all over
the general area following the failed expedition, often driving teams

(12:12):
of animals and dressed in clothing more associated with men.
People described her as tough and brave, and she developed
a reputation for being an excellent shot. In May of
eighteen seventy six, Calamity, having given a false name in
the matter, was invited at Laramie County for stealing a
bundle of clothing and other personal items. She was temporarily

(12:33):
put in jail before being declared not guilty and freed. Reportedly,
she celebrated her freedom by riding a horse all the
way to Fort Laramie, which was ninety miles past her
and intended destination of Fort Russell. Drinking heavily. The entire
way you might explain the Whoopsie Daisy and where she
landed right The next month, she joined up with General

(12:55):
Crook again on another mission to try to round up
sue resistance, this time falling in with them after their departure,
dressed as a man and working as a teamster. When
she was discovered, she was arrested. She was a given
woman's clothing to wear and kept the guard until they
were back in town. Her own version of this story
is that she was a scout for General Crook, but
that can't be substantiated, and after her death, Captain Jack Crawford,

(13:19):
who was also part of the mission, flatly dismissed it.
This next phase of Calamity Jane's life is by far
the most famous and notorious. In June of eighteen seventy six,
she met up with James Butler Hiccock, also known as
Wild Bill, and Charles Utter known as Colorado Charlie. They
were on their way from Cheyenne to Deadwood. They made
a number of stops, including outside of Fort Laramie. We

(13:41):
are about thirty wagons and roughly a hundred people were
waiting to join them. Calamity Jane joined as well after
the officer of the day at Fort Laramie asked him
to please take her off his hands. She was being
detained there and she was quite drunk. Fortunately, Steve Utter,
brother to Colorado Charlie new Calamity, and he said that
he would take care of her. She's been a lot

(14:03):
of this journey, drinking and entertaining the travelers with really
tall tales about her exploits around the campfire. These were
peppered with lots of profanity. They finally arrived in Deadwood
around July twelfth, and they paraded into town with wild
Bill Colorado, Charlie, Calamity, and the others closest to them
so their little click all wearing new buckskin clothes just

(14:25):
covered in fringe. Calamity had actually borrowed the money to
buy hers because she didn't have any money of her own.
A day later, the Black Hills Pioneer, which was one
of the two newspapers that had been launched in Deadwood,
proclaimed Calamity Jane has arrived. Like many of the other
places Calamity had lived previously, Deadwood was a boomtown whose

(14:47):
population was surging as the result of a gold rush.
When wild Bill's party arrived, it was still mostly a
collection of tents, with only a few solid buildings constructed.
At this point, it was also wild and virtue Lee lawless.
Saloons and theaters provided much of the town's entertainment, and
Calamity found work as a hostess and dancer. She soon

(15:07):
repaid the money that she had borrowed to purchase her buckskins.
She also, contrary to the pictures that are almost invariably
used to represent her, often dressed in more typical feminine clothing.
There are more than twenty photos of Calamity Jane that
still exists, and she's wearing clothing more typical for a man,
and only six of them. But those six are the

(15:28):
ones that are most widely used and most widely available,
so they are almost always the ones that wind up
in articles and on covers of books and things like that.
But they will also be on our website because I
can only find one of her in address. While they
are quite striking, Yeah, she she cuts a dashing figure.

(15:49):
She just you can feel attitude coming off her in
those pictures. I love it. Although wild Bill and Calamity
Jane are often presented in novels and movies as a couple.
There's really nothing to substantiate that. Calamity herself never claimed
that they were romantically involved, and most of the other
accounts of Deadwood agreed that they weren't seen together very often.

(16:11):
When wild Bill was murdered on August two of eighteen
seventy six, they had been in Deadwood for less than
a month, and they've known one another for only about
six weeks. Calamities stayed in Deadwood for two or three years,
finding steady work in Deadwood's dance halls, where she did
lots of dancing and lots of drinking and really stood
up for herself in an environment that could frankly be

(16:31):
very dangerous for the women who were working there. One
of these places was the notorious den of iniquity, the
Gem Variety Theater, managed by Al swear Engine, who we
discussed in a previous two parter. She worked as a dancer,
a hostess, and a recruiter, traveling to other towns to
bring prostitutes back to the gym. I tried to find

(16:51):
out more information about whether that recruitment was really on
the up and up, and I could not. Yeah, we
talked about some of al swear Engine's practic. This is
where he would go and like make promises of like no,
you're gonna be a dancer and a star, and then
they would get back and it was kind of like
prostitution enslavement. But we we didn't connect whether or not
Jane was on those particular recruitment missions or right. I

(17:14):
really wanted to. It's one of those things that I
really wanted to resolve for my own peace of mind,
and I could not. Although she's most famous for rowdy
body tough behavior, Calamity Jane also worked as a nurse
in Deadwood and some of the other places where she lived.
She gained a reputation for having a good heart and
for always being willing to help somebody who was sick

(17:36):
or hurt. This included during a smallpox outbreak in eighteen
seventy eight, when she worked at a pest house that
had been set up to quarantine the sick. She looked
after patients who were so sick that nobody else would
give near them. In the late eighteen seventies, Calamity Jane
became famous beyond just the area of the Black Hills.
Local newspapers had been covering her exploits for quite some time,

(17:58):
but people began writing by all Graphy's about her while
she was still living, and she became a character in
dozens of dime novels. One such series were the Deadwood
Dick books, one of which is called Deadwood Dick on
Deck or Calamity Jane, the heroine of Whoop Up. I
love that title. Uh, there are there are dozens is

(18:22):
not an exaggeration. She has a character in dozens and
dozens of cheap novels that came around. He came out
around this point, and so a lot of people became
more familiar with her as this fictional sidekick wild West
like quote cowboys and Indians kind of character than the
actual person. Right, Her caricature kind of superseded the reality
of her life. Yeah. She left Deadwood in the early

(18:43):
eighteen eighties, and she continued to travel and explore, following
the railroad to different parts of the front here and
moving from one gold strike or other mineral rush to another,
and in eighteen eighty four she started performing with wild
West shows. She had at least one child, a daughter
named Jess, and was later married to Jesse's likely father,
Bill Steers, in eighty five. It is possible that she

(19:07):
had other children, and she also described other men as
her husband, but the marriage to Bill Steers is really
the only one that's documented. Her life seems to have
really gone downhill after the disappearance of her husband and
the death of her sister, both of which happened in
She continued on in the same pattern as before. She
was still traveling and drinking and finding work where she could,

(19:28):
but it all became just a whole lot darker and
less apparently fun. She it's not really clear where her
daughter was during a lot of this time, and her
excessive drinking was really starting to take a toll on
her health and just her ability to take care of herself.
Following the panic of eightee Calamity, Jane apparently helped Guarden

(19:50):
engine that miners were trying to commandeers so they could
join the Coxey's Army protest march to Washington, d C.
A picture of this is one of the surviving photos
of her. This was a protest march where out of
work laborers from all over the West and Midwest, like
thousands of them, marched on Washington to protest. In October

(20:10):
of eight, she briefly went back to Dedwood with her daughter,
Anne Clinton Burke, who she was describing as her husband.
The following year, she went on tour as a performer
with a traveling museum, and it was for this tour
to kind of promote her and promote the tour, that
her autobiography was ghost written, which is why it is
so heavily embellished and sometimes flatly fictional. Once this tour

(20:34):
was over, she kept traveling, trying to make a living
through appearances and autographs, but her health really started to
suffer as a result of a life of alcoholism. For
a little while, she traveled East and she appeared at
the Pan American Exposition in New York in July and
August of nineteen o one. Afterwards, she joined the Cummins
Indian Congress. This was another traveling show that was modeled

(20:57):
after Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, but it whereas Buffalo
Bill's show was focused kind of on the quote cowboy
end of things, uh the commons, any in Congress was
more focused on various Native American tribes calamities. Role was
kind of an Old West character. Before long, she wanted
to go west again, so she borrowed money from Buffalo

(21:17):
Bill Cody, who she knew from briefly performing in his show,
for her tickets, and she wound up in South Dakota,
where she stayed through the winter of nineteen o two,
and then she resumed traveling in failing health, making her
way back to the Black Hills and again to Deadwood.
In July of nineteen o three, she became ill and
she refused to see a doctor. When a friend finally

(21:38):
called a doctor for her, she refused his care. She
started to tell people that she was dying, and she
did die on August first, nineteen oh three. She was
buried next to wild Bill Hiccock. It's a little unclear
whether that was what she asked for or whether part
people thought that would make a good tourist attraction. The
name on the gravestone is Mrs M. E. Burke Calamity Jane.

(22:01):
And if you're wondering what happened with the Black Hills,
fighting between the Army and the Sioux and their allies continued,
including the Battle of Little Big Horn in June of
eighteen seventy six, which was the site of Custer's last
stand in eighteen seventy seven, the US government reclaimed the
Black Hills land previously set aside for the Sioux. This
eventually made it to the Supreme Court in the United

(22:23):
States versus Sioux Nation of Indians. In an eight to
one decision, the court upheld a previous Court of Claims
decision that the Sioux were entitled to seventeen point one
million dollars, which the Sioux actually refused, wanting instead to
have the Black Hills as they had been promised. Debate
over this whole thing continues, with the United Nations Human

(22:44):
Rights Investigator recommending the return of various Native American lands,
including the Black Hills. It's kind of a I wanted
to make sure to include that, since we only included
a portion of this Black Hills story, and it seemed
like at the end of the episode was probably where
it would fit the best. It makes sense to me.
Do you have a bit of listener mail from I do?

(23:05):
I'm going to start, though, with a very brief correction
after I find my listener mail. In our recent episode
about the child migrant program in Great Britain, we missidentified
Kevin Rudd as the Premier of Australia. When he was
really the Prime Minister. I would like to thank the
Guardian for having that wrong in the article that I
was using as a source, which is a source that

(23:27):
I thought would know what it was talking about in
terms of like leaders of of countries. I don't know.
You know, everybody has a day when I use the
wrong word well, and that's I started clicking on things
to be like, did they have it wrong everywhere? And no.
Literally the next sentence after the one that I was

(23:48):
in the article that I used as a source links
to another article on the Guardian where it's right, So
clearly some people there know what's true. I have an
email from Jess and it answers a question that you
and I had talked about in our episode on Dr
Virginia Apgar about why doctors were so focused on the
mother's and not on the babies before Virginia Apgar made

(24:11):
it clear to everybody that they needed to look at
the babies. I'm waiting for you to say it because
you love that phrase so much. Just look at the baby,
just says high ladies. In your recent podcast on Virginia Apgar,
you wonder about the focus on maternal health over infant
health in early twentieth century medicine. Edward Shorter talks about
this historically shifting focus in his book A History of

(24:34):
Women's Bodies. He points to the significant danger of child
bearing for mothers who were already past the treacherous years
of childhood mortality and therefore likelier to survive generally, as
the reason for the maternal bias in early medicine. He
also suggests, however, a shifting focus toward feel outcome has
been taking place recently, sometimes to the detriment of mothers.

(24:57):
As with all when women's medicine, the social attitudes of
time often combined with knowledge to form best practice that
it can be difficult to reckon the choices of others,
even in the not distant past. Thanks for all you do,
and thanks for all the medical topics, the lgbt Q history,
and the stuff relating to disabilities death. President Now is
my all time babe episode. Cheers, Jess, Thank you, Jess. Indeed,

(25:21):
I had we sort of thought probably things along those
lines where we're why there was such a focus on
the on the mother's I did not really think about
the progressive shift to the outcome for babies that I
think we have definitely seen it even in our lifetimes,
more and more focus on on baby's health and even
fetal health rather than mother's health. Yes, yes, so if

(25:46):
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(26:08):
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(26:29):
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(26:57):
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