As usual, they caused a ruckus when they came to town. Wild Bill liked to make an entrance. He led the group right down the center of Main Street, Bill riding way out front on his gleaming black horse, Jane and the rest following behind. Within minutes of their arrival the streets had flooded with onlookers, staring and pointing and exclaiming things like, “Wowee, that there’s the Wild Bill Hickok,” and “He’s the best sharpshooter in the West—no, the world,” and “A genuine hero, he is!”
Bill waved grandly to the bystanders, tipped his hat at the ladies, and swept back the edges of his billowy black coat to reveal the matching pair of engraved, ivory-hilted, silver-mounted .36 caliber revolvers strapped to his hips.
“That Wild Bill’s shot over a hundred men,” Jane overheard as they approached a gaggle of boys on the stoop of a barbershop.
Folks tended to exaggerate when it came to Bill.
“Well, I read in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine that he killed ten garou in a single fight,” said another boy. “With only six bullets in his gun!”
Jane heard an incredulous snort and glanced over her shoulder at the two men riding behind her: Charlie Utter, Bill’s business partner, and Frank Butler, Bill’s son. It was Frank who’d given the snort.
Jane crossed her eyes at him.
Frank responded by cupping his hand under his armpit and making fart noises.
Jane pantomimed vomiting.
Then Frank turned his head and pretended (at least we hope he was pretending) to slowly stick his finger up his nose.
Jane coughed to cover her laugh. Dang, he’d got her.
“Stop it, you two,” Charlie barked. “So help me I will turn these horses around.”
Jane sighed and swiveled to face forward again.
“Nellie, look!” cried a lady in a pink dress. “That’s Frank Butler, the Pistol Prince.”
“Oh! Isn’t he handsome?” breathed a second woman.
“So handsome,” agreed the first. “He’s even more handsome in real life, don’t you think?”
They must have missed the nose-picking. Jane peeked over her shoulder again at Frank, who weren’t so comely as all that, even if he did comb his hair regular and have all his teeth. Still, she’d never be able to think of Frank in any romantical way.
“You see the white dog riding on the special seat behind him?” continued the woman in the pink dress. “That’s George the Poodle. He’s part of their show.”
“I simply adore a man with a dog,” cooed the second girl.
From his perch, George gave a low growl. Jane agreed. This part was just so stupid, dandying up and promenading through town to get gawked at and fussed over.
“Hey!” a young man yelled out from the door of a bank. “Ain’t that Calamity Jane, the Heroine of the Plains?”
Well, maybe it wasn’t so stupid. That word did have a nice ring to it: hero-eene.
“Nah,” scoffed another fellow. “That can’t be Calamity Jane. She’s not pretty enough.”
Jane could instantly feel them looking her up and down. She knew she’d never be what a man would think beautiful; her shape was downright squarish, both body and jaw, her face burned and freckled from the sun, her hair dark and tangly as a stack of black cats. But a recent article in the Chicago Tribune had described Calamity Jane as “a lovely, spirited waif,” which had given folks certain erroneous expectations.
“That’s a girl wearing man’s breeches who’s riding with Wild Bill Hickok,” argued another man. “It’s got to be Calamity Jane.”
“I guess you’re right.” The first man laughed loudly. “Huh. She ain’t much to look at, is she? I can see why they call her ‘calamity.’”
Jane’s face burned. She should brush it off—she knew that—but instead she brought her horse to a stop alongside the bank and fixed the men with a stare. They fell silent.
What she wanted to do was spit. Jane was an excellent spitter, and it would be thoroughly satisfying to send a clean arc of spittle right onto the face of the rudest man.
“Jane,” came that warning voice behind her—Charlie, again. Gawl-darned Charlie, who disapproved of Jane spitting. It was bad for business, he always said.
Charlie spoiled all her fun.
So Jane swallowed down the impressive loogie she’d been working up (which we commend her for, as your narrators, but ewwww), cried “Yah!” and galloped ahead.
“You cain’t lose your temper,” Charlie scolded her later as they saw to the horses at the livery. “It reflects badly on the show.”
She nodded dully. “I didn’t. I won’t.” But she knew she probably would at some point. She’d never been skilled at holding back her temper, a trait she’d inherited from her hotheaded ma, God rest her soul.
“Folks can be mean as snakes, I know.” Charlie finished oiling Wild Bill’s saddle and gave Jane a sympathetic smile. “But at least they know your name. That’s good, Janie. That’s what we want. Recognition. Notoriety.”
Charlie was always working on the fame thing—how to get it, how to keep hold of it once they got it, how to turn it into profit. Sometimes it was easy to forget that being their manager was only a cover for Charlie’s true occupation: he was a Pinkerton detective.
(A little background information, dear reader, about the Pinkertons. By the time of our story, the Pinkerton agency was the largest private law enforcement organization in the United States. Pinkerton agents were mostly hired by businessmen to protect their interests, but they also served as bodyguards for Abraham Lincoln, spied on the Confederate army, and worked as “private eyes” sent to investigate crimes before we had the FBI. That last part brings us to Special Agent Charlie Utter, who’d been assigned to track the notorious garou known as the Alpha. Charlie’d been on the job for less than a year when he bumped into Wild Bill Hickok—who claimed to be retired from garou hunting but actually was an undercover US Marshal tasked with bringing down the Alpha. It made sense for the two of them to team up and start the Wild West show as an excuse to move from town to town, gathering intel. And the rest, as we like to say, is history.)
But the Alpha’s trail had gone cold months ago, and even though being Bill’s business partner was only a cover, today Charlie was all about the show. He pulled a tall stack of papers out of a box. “Be a dear, Jane, and put these up around town.”
Jane scowled. “It’s Frank’s turn.”
“Frank’s off with his adoring public, I’m afraid.”
“Simpering ladies, you mean,” Jane scoffed.
“It’s good for business.”
“I guess.”
“You know what else is good for business?” Charlie added good-naturedly. “You putting up these flyers.”
“All right.” She sighed and took the stack from him. “But you owe me.”
He smiled. “Fine by me.”
The trouble wasn’t in people knowing or not knowing her name, Jane thought as she made her way back toward the main street with a hammer and a pocketful of nails. The trouble was that they knew her name but they didn’t know her. Right now, for instance, people passing by assumed she was a man and didn’t give her a second glance. They didn’t think to themselves, Now there goes a genuine hero-eene.
“Hey, mister.” Jane felt a tug at her sleeve and jerked back reflexively, but it was only a kid, come to beg, by the looks of it. Dirty face. No shoes. “You got a penny to spare?”
She dug in her pocket, produced two nickels, and handed the coins over. Not so long ago, she’d been that kid, doing whatever she had to do to fill her empty belly.
The boy took the money and ran off down the street without even thanking her. He’d never know that he’d been face-to-face with the famous Calamity Jane.
If you want to know the truth, dear reader, Jane wasn’t sure she wanted to be famous. She was good at the hero-type things, if she did say so herself (and she did, quite regularly). But celebrity had come on her accidental-like, and she’d rolled with it, because she didn’t have much in the way of options as a woman. It would be enough for her, she thought, to lead a simpler kind of life, get a bit of land someday, a small cabin to call her own, some horses to raise and sell, and a few people she could call friends, maybe even family.
She trudged up to a post and nailed the flyer to it, narrowly avoiding pounding her thumb. The word family was like a burr in her heart—it pained her to think on, but she kept thinking on it all the same.
She’d had a family once.
She walked to the next corner and absent-mindedly nailed up another flyer. Before she’d set off to make something of herself (at the tender age of eleven, we should mention), she’d left the youngest of her siblings, Hannah and Sarah Beth, in the care of a Mormon family in Salt Lake City. Her brother Silas had died of a fever earlier that year, another thing Jane tried not to think on. Lena and Lige, who weren’t much younger than Jane, had gone to a boardinghouse. She sent money back when she could, which wasn’t near often enough.
She hoped they all had shoes.
“Look out!” Right then, Jane was nearly run over by a passing carriage. At the warning she jumped back in the nick of time and ended up sprawled in the dirt in the middle of the street, the flyers strewn around her.
“Consarn it!” she blasted after the retreating carriage. “Watch where you’re going, why don’t ya!”
“Oh dear. Are you all right?” came a sweet voice.
Jane squinted up at the figure who was suddenly standing over her, silhouetted by the sun. The girl was wearing a white dress with lace at the collar. She had fair-colored hair and eyes and a pair of black wire spectacles perched delicately on her nose.
She was the prettiest thing Jane had ever seen.
“Gosh almighty!’ Jane blurted. “You’re the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen!”
“Oh. Well. Thank you,” the girl said in an amused tone. “Here, let me help you up.”
Jane stared at the unblemished white-gloved hand the girl offered. She jumped to her feet. “No harm done to me,” she said. “Thanks.”
Together they bent to gather up the flyers, which were a bit dusty but all right. As they finished retrieving them the girl straightened and read the paper in her hand out loud: “‘Come one, come all, to Wild Bill’s Wild West! Tales of Wild Bill Hickok’s Most Terrifying Adventures with Outlaws and Garou! Exhibitions of Peerless Sharpshooting and Trick Shots by the Pistol Prince, Frank Butler! Wondrous Feats with the Bullwhip, Performed by Calamity Jane, the Heroine of the Plains!’” The girl pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Oh my goodness. You’re Jane, now, aren’t you?”
Jane waited for the girl’s eyes to sweep over her and find her wanting, but the girl only smiled.
“Yep,” Jane said at last. “That’s me. Most days, anyway.”
“I’m glad to meet you,” said the girl. “I’ve been most eager to make your acquaintance since I heard you were coming to Cincinnati.”
Jane nodded. “Uh, likewise.”
The girl laughed. “I’m Miss Harris.” She held out the gloved hand again. This time Jane took it and shook it gently.
“Jane,” she said. She thought it best to omit the Calamity part.
“Now that we’ve officially met, I hope I will be seeing more of you,” said Miss Harris. “I’ve read all about you.”
“Oh yeah? Like what?”
“Like you’re only sixteen.”
“That’s not true,” scoffed Jane. “I’m twenty.” (In truth, she was seventeen, but she always lied about her age. It suited her for folks to think she was older than she was, and she was so tall and brawny that they always believed her.)
“I see,” said Miss Harris. “Well, in any case, I think it’s admirable, what you do.”
Jane scratched at her head. “I am decent with the whip.”
“What I mean is, you don’t let your gender define you,” Miss Harris continued primly. “You walk about in men’s clothes and go adventuring just like a man. You’re not limited by the constraints of your sex. You’re perhaps the most daring and progressive woman in America, and I find you fascinating.”
Jane felt her face redden. “Uh, why, thank you, miss.” She found herself suddenly tongue-tied. She glanced up at the sky, where the sun was almost directly overhead. “Shoot, look at the time. I better scoot. Nice meeting you.”
“Likewise,” said Miss Harris.
It was nice, thought Jane as she walked away. This kind of thing usually happened to Frank, not Jane. She’d never had an honest-to-goodness admirer before.
“Well, shucks,” she whispered to herself.
She was almost finished putting up the flyers when she became aware that she was being followed by a man she didn’t know. Jane took off her hat and wiped her brow as if she were catching her breath, and surveyed the man from the corner of her eye. He was shorter than she was by almost a head. Young, maybe twenty at most. She could take him.
She crossed the street for no good reason but to confirm that he’d cross the street after her. Which he did. She walked for a spell, then stopped. So did he. She started walking again, faster. He sped up, too. She broke into a jog and then ducked around a corner, upon which she stopped and spun to wait for the fellow. When he turned the corner, she grabbed him by the front of the shirt and bashed him into the side of the building. With her other hand she presented her six-shooter. It wasn’t a fancy one like Bill’s, but it would get the job done.
“What business do you have with me, sir?” she asked politely.
It took him a moment to answer, seeing as the wind had been knocked out of him. Then he smiled broadly, which caught her off guard. He did not have particularly good teeth.
“You’re Calamity Jane,” he panted at last.
“What’s it to ya?” she replied.
“I’m Jack McCall. I got a message for Wild Bill Hickok,” he said, still smiling at her. “It’s about them woofs.”