The real Calamity Jane

Canary's notoriety evolved into respectability in 1876 Deadwood, when she met Wild Bill Hickok, the legendary desperado who was both admired for his courage and despised, says McLaird, "for his showy dress, his itchy trigger-finger and his compulsive gambling." For all executive producer David Milch's claimsfor its veracity, HBO's "Deadwood" got Jane wrong: She wasn't an idle drunk in buckskins; rather, she was a dance hall girl in the early days of E.A. Swearingen's Gem saloon, which was, at the time, a lumber and canvas construction where three women and a man dressed as a woman entertained customers. A Deadwood bartender claimed Swearingen sent Canary to "white slave" for him in Sidney, Neb., and that she brought back 10 girls she'd lured with stories of the vast wealth in the region. By one account, she followed Hickok all over Deadwood and wailed when he was killed; by another, her crush was Hickok's partner, Charley Utter, a local dandy. Though she called Hickok her friend in her autobiography, she later told the press he was her "affianced husband."

The seeds of her legend planted, Canary became a dime-novel heroine, inspiring writers to work her into their stories of frontier bravery, even though her daily life involved a string of low-paying jobs and bouts of heavy drinking. She lived all over the Northwest, marrying at least three men (one of whom was jailed for attacking her) and working -- intermittently -- as an attraction in Wild West and dime museum shows. She bore a son who probably died in infancy (she called him "muzzie's yittle snoozey darling") and later Jessie, who, before she was given up for adoption at around age 10, was taunted at school because of Canary's reputation. Wherever she could, she sold photos of herself for extra cash.

As a public figure, Canary was the Courtney Love of her day: A talented pioneer in a man's world, she was a chronic substance abuser prone to outrageous behavior and forever linked in the public mind to a dead man whose fame overshadowed her own. The difference between them is found in Canary's private acts of kindness. In a 1924 book, two pioneers who wrote about the Black Hills gold rush attempted to debunk Canary's myth, claiming she was "nothing more than a common prostitute, drunken, disorderly and wholly devoid of any conception of morality." Still, they said, she deserved recognition as a Black Hills luminary because of her humanitarian gestures: When hundreds of Deadwood residents were struck by a smallpox scourge in 1878, for example, other women in the camp refused to help them for fear they would contract it, but Jane cared for them, day and night, over the course of weeks. She was also, said a man who knew her in Spokane, Wash., "the last person to hold the head of and administer consolation to the troubled gambler or erstwhile bad man who was about to depart into the new country."

The challenge McLaird faces in telling Canary's story is resolving -- or, at least, acknowledging -- its many contradictions: Some said she was beautiful, others called her repulsive, and the book's photos show her to be striking at best, homely at worst, with bottomlessly sad eyes in every shot. One reporter called her "an ignorant woman of mostly unwomanly habits"; another said she was "generous, forgiving, kind-hearted, sociable, and yet when aroused, has all the daring and courage of the lion or the devil himself." She got her nickname because of her calamitous past (as an orphan), or because she caused her lovers venereal calamity, or because she was always in trouble, or because she cried "What a calamity" when she lost at poker, or because of the way she nursed people during epidemics. (To becloud things further, there were several other western women named Calamity Jane, all prostitutes and alcoholics.)

McLaird has done vast and careful research, digging up juicy anecdotes and providing important correctives to the Calamity Jane myth. But he doesn't quite deliver on the promise he offers at the start of the book, which is to explain why, if she was not much different from other frontier women, her life was spun into legend. He doesn't even discuss "Deadwood," nominated last year for 11 Emmy awards (as much a marketing oversight as an editorial lapse), which features a Jane who seems to fascinate viewers (and polarize opinion) just as the real one did. Historically thoroughgoing as his book is, it tracks but doesn't fully illuminate the half-life Calamity Jane has enjoyed since Canary's death, at 47, from "inflammation of the bowels" (no doubt brought on by alcohol abuse), when her body, lying in state, had to be guarded against women who clipped locks of her hair to take as souvenirs.

Who knows why we still thrill to her badness? She was a maverick, outsize and free-spirited, seemingly self-reliant yet vulnerable, who gave men a run for their money through her cursing, drinking, riding and gunmanship (which may explain why McMurtry cut her down to size by making her half a woman). Like so many pop culture icons, she lived fast, died young and was quickly canonized, yet her fictional self so quickly preempted the real one that it's almost impossible to say her legend is anything but fiction. In the end, a cowboy who knew her in Spokane (where she was the "keystone around which all the excitement and life of the new town was reared") provided the most concise eulogy for Calamity Jane: "She was a good woman [,] only she drinked."

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