Calamity Jane
Calamity Jane, the stage musical
Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, 1996
Oh Calamity!
It’s just as well Calamity Jane really existed, as no writer of a musical would have dared invent her. While hard-drinking, rough-living wild women were two a penny along the frontier of the Old West, Calamity Jane was something more – beneath the dusty buckskins there beat a sensitive and sentimental heart, capable of love, sympathy and selflessness. She was nicknamed Calamity because it followed her everywhere, but when disaster preceded her, she was always the first to pitch in and help out. As a nurse she once held up a grocery store with the promise “You’ll get paid when the folks I save can walk again.”
She was born Martha Jane Cannary on 1st May 1852 at Princeton, Missouri where her folks owned a 200-acre farm. The family moved West by covered wagon in 1863 and Jane made the final break from them in her mid-teens. As civilisation, or at least the frontiersmen’s version of it, spread west across the continent, Jane went with it, selling her services as a muleskinner and outrider transporting supplies to mining camps. Petite, blue-eyed and russet-haired, she quickly built up a reputation for being well able to look after herself. Unwelcome advances were given short shrift; once she shot a man’s hat off with the warning “Next time it’ll stay on your head.” In Indian country where whites – let alone women – were particularly unwelcome she would ride balanced upside down on her saddle, indicating that she represented no threat: “They think I’m plumb loco and leave me alone.”
In her time, she was the only woman worker on the Northern Pacific Railroad, a professional gambler, a gold prospector and a stagecoach driver. By 1870 she had made her way to Abilene, Kansas where she first encountered James Butler Hickok, otherwise known as Wild Bill, a big, handsome roughneck with a legendary past of his own. They were married within a year, the marriage lines apparently scribbled out on the flyleaf of a bible.
Bill was a bit of a dandy, relatively speaking, and at first their pairing seems unlikely. But there was obviously a bond there which subsequent relationships for both could not dissolve. On 25th September 1873 at Benson’s Landing, Montana, Jane gave birth to a daughter, Janey. She was soon placed in the care of a Captain James O’Neil and his wife, but her mother never forgot her. After her death, the good captain passed on to Janey a diary made up of letters that Calamity Jane had written to the daughter she seldom saw. Not only do they prove she was one of the few literate women on the frontier, she was also one of the most entertaining.
Jane and Bill drifted apart as swiftly as they had come together, but it wasn’t a clean break as she was still in the vicinity of Deadwood the day Bill was gunned down playing poker on 2nd August 1876. Even though she would marry again, this time to a Charles Burke in 1885, Jane never forgot Hickok and her final request was to be buried next to him.
In August 1893 she joined the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show and with it toured the Eastern States and England, giving displays of sharp-shooting and horse-riding. Shortly after that she found a similar job touring with the Palace Museum Show. This time her act consisted mainly of spinning wild tales about Wild Bill and in particular how she kept saving his life for him. Up until the end she remained a colourful reminder of how the Wild West earned its name.
She eventually died of pneumonia in a hotel room in Terry, near Deadwood, on 2nd August 1903 – twenty-seven years to the day after Wild Bill’s murder. She still lies next to him in the Mount Moriah Cemetery at Deadwood.
JANEY
A Secret Love
Calamity Jane’s life as a wild rover left no room for the daughter she and Bill Hickok had in 1873. But time she had in abundance, and in between jobs and bouts of gambling to raise funds for Janey’s upkeep, she kept an intermittent diary of letters which were to be passed on to the girl after her death.
James O’Neil and his wife, Janey’s adoptive parents, resided at Richmond, Virginia. He was English, captain of the Cunard liner Madagascar that plied between Liverpool and New York, and one of the few men – or women, for that matter – Calamity Jane trusted. She was right to do so: they kept in touch, exchanging photos and letters right up to the day Jane died.
The remarkable document that Calamity Jane compiled at odd moments on the prairie or in the backrooms of boarding houses gives a unique and moving insight into her life and character. The first entry, dated 25th September, 1877 (Janey’s fourth birthday) mentions a photo Captain Jim had sent: “You are the dead spit of Meself at your age and as I gaze at your little photo to night I stop as I kiss you and then remembering tears start and I ask God to let me make amends some how some day to your father and you… A year and a few weeks have passed since he was killed and it seems a century – without either of you the years ahead look like a lonely trail.”
Writing in July 1880 Jane tells the story of how she and Wild Bill were driving a stage full of miners’ gold across the prairie when it was attacked by bandits: “they got careless. Your Father & I got the whole bunch. There were 8 of them & of course they had to be shot for they wouldnt give up. Your Father counted 3 with their right arms shot through. He said, ‘that’s your work Jane. You never aim to kill.’ The other 5 he shot to kill. He never seemed to mind killing, but I do. I’ve never killed anyone yet, but I would like to knock some of Deadwoods women in the head. There is only 1 woman in that mess of crums & that is Missus Bander…”
January 1882 finds Jane in confessional mood: “I am gambling these days to get enough money to give your Daddy Jim for your education […] but it goes Janey. Easy come easy goes. I always find some poor damn fool worse off than me & help them to a grub stake or buy some God forsaken Family of children clothing & food… I sometimes get a little tipsy Janey but I don’t harm any one I have to do something to forget you & your Father but I am not a Fancy Woman Janey if I were I wouldnt be nursing & scouting & driving stage.”
They saw each other briefly on a couple of occasions, but Jane never revealed her identity to the bright little girl who was growing up into a fine lady. In 1896 Captain Jim took Janey to see her mother perform in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show: “…well I saw you to night & you saw me too but you do not know that the woman you watched standing & shooting on a bareback horse was your mother. I saw admiration & wonder in your eyes – I rode as close as I dared to you & Jim. & after the show he told me how proud he was of you. He surely dresses you mighty swell. I am so glad… I would crawl on my knees just to be near you. I hope that the man with you to night doesnt mean much to you. But I am afraid he does… the years too soon have robbed me of you. I wanted nothing else but you all these years…”
Towards the end, Jane became concerned that her daughter would hear disparaging tales about her mother and earnestly begged her not to believe them. The final entry, dated June 1902, is one of the briefest, but also among the most telling: “I am sick and havent long to live. I am taking many secrets with me Janey. What I am & what I might have been, I’m not as black as I have been painted I want you to believe that. My eyes have cheated me out of the pleasure I could get from looking at your photo. Cant see to write anymore. There is some thing I should confess to you but I cant. I shall take it to my grave – forgive me & consider I was lonely.”
Calamity Jane Hickok died on 2nd August 1903. Nine years later, on the death of Captain James O’Neil, her diary finally reached the eyes of the person it was intended for. In a radio interview she gave some thirty years after that, Janey described her feelings: “After I received the diary my heart burned to think that my mother lived out her life in loneliness so that her daughter would have a better future. I only wish she could know how proud I am to be the daughter to Calamity Jane.”