The woman who would become known as Calamity Jane was born Martha Jane Canary in May 1856 near Princeton, Missouri.1 Her father, Robert, had been born and raised on a farm in Ohio, and he and his wife, Charlotte, had moved to Missouri soon before the birth of their first child.
To say that Martha had a tough childhood would be a major understatement. Based even on frontier standards in the 1850s and ’60s, it was a bad way to grow up. Robert Canary was not known as a hardworking farmer, and his wife liked to frequent local taverns and reportedly could swear as well as the most unruly patrons. “Time and again Charlotte bruised the social expectations of neighborhood wives,” writes Richard W. Etulain in The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane. “Her brightly colored and eye-catching clothing, her cigar smoking, her public swearing, and her drinking (sometimes to drunkenness) negatively marked a woman when mothers were supposed to be more innocent.”
A probable reason why the family had left Ohio was found in 1862 after Robert’s father died. It was then discovered that the younger man had pilfered a significant portion of the family’s inheritance. The executor sued Robert, but when the time came to serve the papers in Missouri, the Canarys had flown. They had gone gold-seeking in Montana.
When the family arrived in Virginia City, not all of the Canarys’ six children had been born yet. Whatever money Robert had stolen must have run out, because by the end of 1864, the family was in desperate straits. Eight-year-old Martha and her two younger sisters, who offered a plausibly pathetic appearance wearing only calico slips, were sent out to beg in the muddy, sleet-showered streets. When they had filled a makeshift wagon with food and clothing donated by sympathetic—and appalled—residents, they trudged out of Virginia City to Nevada—not the state but the slovenly mining camp on the outskirts.
One day, a reporter for The Montana Post took note of the little beggars and, after talking to them, had his story. He determined that Charlotte Canary was a “woman of the lowest grade” and that she and her husband were “inhuman brutes who have deserted their poor, unfortunate children.” Martha’s parents did not have to suffer such criticism for very long. Charlotte died in another mining camp, this one called Blackfoot City, sometime in the spring of 1866. Robert loaded up his children and the family relocated to Salt Lake City, where he died the following year. At age eleven, Martha was the head of the family.
Incredibly, for the future Calamity Jane, life was about to get even rougher. The orphaned siblings were split up, taken in by families who either had kind hearts or could use extra hands with chores. Sometime later, Martha showed up at Fort Bridger in Wyoming, and an 1869 state census had her living in Piedmont. She had been taken in by an Alton family to be a babysitter to two young boys. According to Etulain, one of the boys, when he was an elderly man living in Nebraska, recalled that Martha “spent most evenings dancing with soldiers” and she was seen “dressed in a soldier’s uniform at a party.” His mother fired her.
Martha moved about quite a bit, mostly living in mining and railroad camps and near military forts. She worked at boardinghouses and hotels, cleaning and cooking and anything else that would keep a roof over her head.2 With such a day-in and day-out hardscrabble existence, it is likely true that by her midteens, Martha was a prostitute. In a bare-bones autobiography she “wrote” over two decades later, however, she claims to have been busy as an army scout and Indian fighter.
By the early 1870s, she was living in Cheyenne. This was before the gold rush had begun, and Martha recalled that “there was not a respectable shelter in the place” and that “the proprietor of a tent was a lucky person indeed.” She was by this time known as Calamity Jane. The reason why, she contends in her autobiography, was that during a fight against Indians, she had saved the life of an army captain, and the grateful officer declared she was “Calamity Jane, heroine of the Plains.” There is no evidence to support this. (In addition, the captain apparently didn’t know the definition of “calamity.”) He also later said the story was an invention, but by then, no one wanted to spoil a good tale. More likely, the nickname reflected a dramatic personality, which those who knew her corroborated often and did not have to embellish.
What earned the former Martha Canary some measure of fame came when she was nineteen, in 1875. The year following the Custer expedition into the Black Hills saw a second one, this one commanded by Colonel Richard Irving Dodge. (Dodge City was not named after him, but coincidentally, he did command the fort there for several years.) At the request of William Ludlow and with four hundred men, Colonel Dodge escorted the geologists Walter Jenney and Henry Newton into the Black Hills. Ludlow was the chief engineer of the Dakota Territory, and after accompanying Custer the year before, he remained unconvinced that there were substantial deposits of gold in the region. If he were to prove this, the gold rush would ebb and, presumably, Paha Sapa would remain sacred land.
Embedded with the troops was Calamity Jane. (One of the teamsters driving a wagon was Harry Young, whom Hickok had helped out in Abilene.) By this time, it was common for her to dress like a man, as that made it easier to stay unmolested in the various camps, except when earning money for allowing herself to be molested was involved. That may have been her strategy on this particular expedition. However, she was not incognito for long. One day, she encountered an officer and saluted him. When he returned the salute, several other officers laughed. When the first officer wondered why, he was told the “soldier” he just saluted was Calamity Jane. Apparently, at least a few Bluebellies and officers knew who the soldier really was but saw no harm in it. The embarrassed officer did.
She would eventually be sent packing. But by this time, two Chicago reporters on the excursion who knew of her wrote stories about Calamity Jane, with a few basic facts sprinkled in among the many fictions. A photograph was taken of her at French Creek, and once the gold rush was in full swing—Ludlow’s theory having failed to restrain anyone—a peak in the Black Hills was named for her.
One of the articles about Calamity Jane, published in The Chicago Inter Ocean, claimed that she “has the reputation of being a better horse-back rider, mule and bull-whacker (driver) and a more unctuous coiner of English, and not the Queen’s pure either, than any other man in the command.” It was also said about her that she could outdrink any man. Perhaps for the latter reason and the resulting behavior, several troopers were dispatched to escort Calamity Jane from the Black Hills back to Fort Laramie.
Interviewed in 1904 about Calamity Jane by The Anaconda Standard, a newspaper in Montana, Jack Crawford, who had served as a captain under General George Crook when Calamity Jane “served” under him, said, “She was simply a notorious character, dissolute and devilish, but possessed a generous streak which made her popular.”
The next year, 1876, she was once again camp-following. Bowing to the pressure, the Grant administration essentially tore up the 1868 treaty and opened the Black Hills to settlers, prospectors, and whoever else wanted to stake a claim. Adding insult to injury, the remaining Sioux Indians, so as not to interfere with the influx of whites, were to refrain from hunting from the Powder River region to the Black Hills and to stay within the agencies, or reservations, that had been established for them. Some of the Sioux did not comply, so early that year, three separate army commands were ordered out to force the resisters to the agencies. Heading these commands were Generals Crook and Alfred Terry and Colonel John Gibbon.3
If Calamity Jane had had her way, she might have died with others in the Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn. She infiltrated Terry’s command, which included Lieutenant Colonel Custer’s troopers. Again disguised as a man, she drove one of the supply wagons. Again discovered, she was sent back, and in a way missed her chance for a different kind of immortality.
She was seen in Custer City and Rapid City, and then she was back in Cheyenne, where she was arrested for stealing clothes. On June 8, a jury found her not guilty, and she was let out of jail. To announce her release to the citizens of Cheyenne, she strolled through town wearing a gown the wife of one of the deputy sheriffs had provided so she had something decent to wear at her trial. Her next act was to rent a buggy. To prepare for whatever journey she had in mind, Calamity Jane celebrated her release “by getting speedily and comfortably drunk,” according to a newspaper account.
She claimed she was about to ride the three miles to Fort Russell. Instead, she showed up at Fort Laramie, ninety miles away, and still quite drunk. When able, she pushed on to Fort Fetterman, and from there to Sheridan, Wyoming, this time infiltrating Crook’s command. It barely survived a furious assault by Crazy Horse at the Battle of the Rosebud. Calamity Jane may have experienced some of the fighting side by side with the hard-pressed troopers, but that did not prevent her from being sent packing again, this time accompanying the wounded to Fort Fetterman.
In her version of events, which reporters eager for stories lapped up, at this time, Calamity Jane was not a persistent camp follower but a scout and messenger for General Crook. She claimed to be the “bearer of important dispatches” that had to get to Crook, and after swimming across the Platte River, she rode those ninety miles, the ordeal causing her to come down with a “severe illness.” After fulfilling her mission, Calamity was taken back to Fort Fetterman in Crook’s personal ambulance and spent two weeks lingering near death in a hospital before recovering. This puts her in a more favorable light than does a drunken buggy ride, but little of her account is true.
In any case, it was back to her calamitous ways, setting off to join up with General Crook again. This time, Calamity Jane posed as a teamster, and a wagon master, believing she was a man, hired her. She pulled her weight well enough that it was not until the command was near Fort Reno that she was discovered. She was arrested, and according to the recollection of one of the officers, she was “placed in improvised female attire.” She may not have stayed in this costume long. Crook’s chief of scouts, Frank Grouard, later maintained that after several scouts had to be dispatched elsewhere, Calamity Jane did indeed fill that role. Given her ability to ride and shoot and her by then plentiful knowledge of the territory—in an 1896 interview, she told a reporter, “I knew every creek an’ holler from the Missouri to the Pacific”—this is not far-fetched.
When Crook’s command was back at Fort Laramie, she got into a drunken row with several troopers and was offered accommodations in the guardhouse. When she was released, it was with encouragement to move on. A lot of people were heading to Deadwood, on the other side of the border in South Dakota, north of the Black Hills. The town seemed to have sprung up overnight. Calamity Jane just had to figure out getting there.
Thus, the timing was just right when Wild Bill Hickok came along.