Martha Jane Canary
Martha Jane Canary was an illiterate who published her autobiography, which she dictated to ghostwriters, a performer in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show who preferred to wear men’s clothing, an unreformed alcoholic, a self-proclaimed army scout in the Black Hills, and an occasional prostitute for madam Dora DuFran. She is known to history as Calamity Jane, has been portrayed as the lover of Wild Bill Hickok by Doris Day, and so little of her legendary life is verifiable that it is difficult to accept any of it.
Years after her death, a bundle of letters allegedly written by her were presented as proof that their owner was the daughter of Jane and Wild Bill, a hoax revealed when evidence was presented that Jane never learned how to sign her own name, let alone write a letter.
In 1867 Jane was described as an attractive woman, and she took her five siblings with her to Fort Russell after the deaths of both of their parents. There and at Fort Laramie she was by 1874 working as a cook, saloon girl, dance hall girl, and prostitute. She claimed in her autobiography to work as a scout for the Army in its campaigns against the Plains Indians, several army officers disputed this account. None of her accounts of her service with the army as a scout or courier has been verified by military records, and most have been disputed, with one officer writing in 1904 that she “…never saw service in any capacity…never was in an Indian fight…she was simply a notorious character, dissolute and devilish…”
Her relationship with Wild Bill Hickok appears to have been the product of her imagination as well. During the time Hickok was in Deadwood, South Dakota, Jane worked with and may have lived with Dora DuFran, the town’s leading madam. Hickok had married Agnes Lake in March of 1876, he died in August of that year in Deadwood.
Calamity Jane appears to have met Hickok when the two were part of the same wagon train to Deadwood in the spring of 1876. Calamity Jane did work as a wagoneer, possibly as a miner, tried her hand as an innkeeper, and definitely worked as a prostitute. Beyond that most of her claims regarding her colorful life are questionable.