MUSEUM OF MODERN MYTHOLOGY AND POP CULTURE

CALAMITY JANE

1852-1903. Martha Jane Cannary liked to ride, shoot, and hunt while she was growing up. By the time she was eighteen she lived in the mining towns wearing men's clothes, drinking, and chewing tobacco. Calamity Jane settled in the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1876, near Deadwood, and there, became friends with Wild Bill Hickok. Calamity Jane was a scout for the Army, bullwhacker, dance hall girl, ox-team driver, nursed smallpox victims in 1878, and rode briefly for the Pony Express. Starting as a character in the Deadwood Dick dime novels beginning in 1877, the legendary Calamity Jane began taking shape, as the real, living person went on with her life after the murder of her friend Bill Hickok. Thus, like David/Davy Crockett, and Annie Oakley, Calamity Jane became two people, the real woman and the larger than life character we know.

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