Calamity Jane
Calamity Jane

Author: James D. McLaird

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2012-11-27

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 080618311X

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Forget Doris Day singing on the stagecoach. Forget Robin Weigert’s gritty portrayal on HBO’s Deadwood. The real Calamity Jane was someone the likes of whom you’ve never encountered. That is, until now. This book is a definitive biography of Martha Canary, the woman popularly known as Calamity Jane. Written by one of today’s foremost authorities on this notorious character, it is a meticulously researched account of how an alcoholic prostitute was transformed into a Wild West heroine. Always on the move across the northern plains, Martha was more camp follower than the scout of legend. A mother of two, she often found employment as waitress, laundress, or dance hall girl and was more likely to be wearing a dress than buckskin. But she was hard to ignore when she’d had a few drinks, and she exploited the aura of fame that dime novels created around her, even selling her autobiography and photos to tourists. Gun toting, swearing, hard drinking—Calamity Jane was all of these, to be sure. But whatever her flaws or foibles, James D. McLaird paints a compelling portrait of an unconventional woman who more than once turned the tables on those who sought to condemn or patronize her. He also includes dozens of photos—many never before seen—depicting Jane in her many guises. His book is a long-awaited biography of Martha Canary and the last word on Calamity Jane.

Calamity Jane
Calamity Jane

Author: Richard W. Etulain

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2015-08-25

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 0806152621

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This exhaustive bibliographical reference will be the first stop for anyone looking for Calamity Jane in print, film, or photograph—and wanting to know how reliable those sources may be. Richard W. Etulain, renowned western-U.S. historian and the author of a recent biography of this charismatic figure, enumerates and assesses the most valuable sources on Calamity Jane’s life and legend in newspapers, magazines, journals, books, and movies, as well as historical and government archives. Etulain begins with a brief biography of Martha Canary, aka Calamity Jane (1856–1903), then analyzes the origins and growth of her legends. The sources, Etulain shows, reveal three versions of Calamity Jane. In the most popular one, she was a Wild Woman of the Old West who helped push a roaring frontier through its final stages. This is the Calamity Jane who fought Indians, marched with the military, and took on the bad guys. Early in her life she also hoped to embody the pioneer woman, seeking marriage and a stable family and home. A third, later version made of Calamity an angel of mercy who reached out to the poor and nursed smallpox victims no one else would help. The hyperbolic journalism of the Old West, as well as dime novels and the stretchers Calamity herself told in her interviews and autobiography, shaped her legends through much of the twentieth century. Many of the sensational early accounts of Calamity’s life, Etulain notes, were based on rumor and hearsay. In illuminating the role of the Deadwood Dick dime novel series and other pulp fiction in shaping what we know—or think we know—of the American West, Etulain underscores one of his fascinating themes: the power of popular culture. The product of twenty years’ labor sifting fact from falsehood or distortion, this bibliography and reader’s guide includes brief discussions of nearly every item’s contents, along with a terse, entertaining evaluation of its reliability.

Calamity
Calamity

Author: Karen Jones

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2020-02-04

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 0300212801

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A fascinating new account of the life and legend of the Wild West's most notorious woman: Calamity Jane Martha Jane Canary, popularly known as Calamity Jane, was the pistol-packing, rootin' tootin' "lady wildcat" of the American West. Brave and resourceful, she held her own with the men of America's most colorful era and became a celebrity both in her own right and through her association with the likes of Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill Cody. In this engaging account, Karen Jones takes a fresh look at the story of this iconic frontierswoman. She pieces together what is known of Canary's life and shows how a rough and itinerant lifestyle paved the way for the scattergun, alcohol-fueled heroics that dominated Canary's career. Spanning Canary's rise from humble origins to her role as "heroine of the plains" and the embellishment of her image over subsequent decades, Jones shows her to be feisty, eccentric, transgressive--and very much complicit in the making of the myth that was Calamity Jane.

The Deadwood Dick Library Collection - Volume Six
The Deadwood Dick Library Collection - Volume Six

Author: Edward Wheeler

Publisher:

Published: 2018-04-09

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9781987564198

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An Omnibus of Dime Novels from the Nineteenth Century. Once avidly devoured by youth across the States, these short novels are home to one of the greatest heroes in American literature, though his thrilling exploits are now sadly largely lost to time. Once upon a time, the adventures of Deadwood Dick, outlaw and Prince of the Road, were read by millions of boys, who awaited his next adventure hungrily. Originally published as weekly dime novels, these short novels are now being republished in a series of volumes, each containing 4 works by Edward L. Wheeler from the Deadwood Dick Library. The eponymous hero makes an appearance in many of the stories, though quite a few star other weird and interesting characters. Now you can own a piece of American literary history. This Volume, the sixth in the series, contains the dime novels: Deadwood Dick in Leadville; Or, A Strange Stroke for Liberty. Deadwood Dick and his companions, Old Avalanche and Calamity Jane, take on bandits, regulators, and wicked plots in this classic dime novel. Canada Chet, The Counterfeiter Chief; Or, Old Anaconda in Sitting Bull's Camp. For two boys seeking adventure, a canoe trip into the wilds of Canada leads to deadly encounters with slavers, marauding Indians, and the scheming Caspar Dayton. Can the lads escape to safety with the able assistance of the dwarf Indian slayer, Old Anaconda, the beautiful Hazel Eye, and the mysterious sorcerer known as the Demon of the Woods. Deadwood Dick's Device; Or, The Sign of the Double Cross. After the events in Deadwood Dick in Leadville, our hero considers his debt to society paid, but when he is left a rich mine in a stranger's will, he must defend his new acquisition from the evil relatives of the previous owner, while fending off regulators who do not respect his retirement Deadwood Dick as Detective. Deadwood Dick dons the disguise of a famous detective to prove the innocence of a young woman framed for murder by a scheming villain. This work is not a cheap scan or the result of copying and pasting; It contains no missing pages, areas of blurred or missing text, photocopier's fingers, coffee stains, or other scanning artifacts. It has all of the original text, reformatted in an easy to read format. These are the original, full versions of these dime novels. Note that this work contains terms and language in common use in the 19th century that some people may find offensive.

The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane
The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane

Author: Richard W. Etulain

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2014-09-15

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0806147873

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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.