Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Calamity Jane

Episode Date: August 4, 2021

Calamity Jane is group with the legends of the Wild West. Who was she really? A tough woman who made her way in a tough world from the age of 12. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Go to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and there's Dave, and this is short stuff. So giddy up, partner, or else Calamity Jane's going to shoot you in the foot. Did you watch Deadwood? No, I tried to, and I was like, I don't have the emotional investment for this. Okay. Calamity Jane was one of the great characters on the TV show Deadwood, the great character

of the Old West, and this is a tough one to research because when you're researching some of these people from this era of the Old West, you start to realize, and historians admit as much, that it's hard to get to the real truth because nobody really knows. A lot of the information we have on these characters from back then are very much written by people who wrote their bios for the Wild West shows they did, which are obviously going to be changed and pumped up, and it's just hard to get the real story, but Calamity Jane is worth talking about in so far as how much we know about her. Yeah, and she actually wrote an autobiography, which apparently was even more pumped up and

full of it than some of the dime store novels that were written about her, but the point of that is that she was a legend in her own time quite honestly, in actuality. Yeah. I'm not going to use the L word, but she was born Mary Jane Canary, which is a great name in and of itself, but she does have one of the all time great nicknames Calamity Jane or Calamity Jane, depending on where you come from. And I'll go ahead and spoil this, it's interesting you said the L word because that was a showtime show I believe about gay women, and it is very possible that Calamity Jane was a gay

woman at a time where you could not live as such. There's speculation about that, and we'll kind of get to that here and there through the thing, but I read a few articles that said, yeah, Calamity Jane was probably gay and then in the 1960s, she became a bit of a gay icon in some circles. Is that right? Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah, it's very interesting.

So yeah, born Martha Jane Canary in Princeton, Missouri, and her family went to, I mean, back in the old West, people traveled around a lot, so we're not going to mention every time she moved. This article does. It does. It felt like the whole article was just like, then she moved here, then she moved there. But they moved around a lot as people did back then. Her family was very poor, she had two younger brothers and three younger sisters, and then

pretty early on, when she was a kid, she learned how to shoot by hunting with the gentleman on these caravans and was really good at it. And in that caravan, one wagon train in particular, where her family moved from Missouri to Virginia City, Montana, she lost her mom, which was the first step in a turn for the work. First for an already hard childhood she had. By the time they got to Montana, I think her mother died, her father was like, well, let's just keep going on to Utah. And again, we're not going to say where she moved every time, but the point of it is,

her father died within a couple of years of her mom. So she loses her mom, and she's maybe nine or 10. And then her dad dies when she's 12 or 13, and all of a sudden, she's the oldest of five siblings, or maybe I think she actually had five additional siblings, so she's the oldest of six children, and she's in charge now. She's at age 13 now, charged with keeping her younger siblings alive and clothed and fed, and is basically cast into the Old West in this role. And this wasn't a place where you could go to social services or the local church or

something like that and get help. She had to figure all this out herself, and as far as figuring it out, she definitely did. And also, she developed a pretty pronounced taste for whiskey starting around that time too, from what I understand. Yeah, throw out what you think about Deadwood and these great old stories. I really needed to hit home that this is a 12 or 13-year-old young girl who is literally on her own with five younger siblings in her care, and she didn't just blow them off and

leave. She was, she had to figure this out and worked as a nurse and worked as a dishwasher. By all accounts, worked as a sex worker when she needed to. And this whole time, like you said, she started to drink a little bit. She was sort of roughhousing with the older men in the towns where she lived, shooting up things, and like we said earlier, it was a really good shot, and like her legend kind of started to grow. So she started taking on additional jobs, especially with the military, as a courier,

as a rider, as a scout. I guess got a lot of work with them, including working with General Custer. But it wasn't until she started to, so she first moved to Deadwood as an orphan 13-year-old in charge of her siblings, and then moved away. And then she moved back about a decade later, and that time, she became friendly with Wild Bill Hickok. And from what I understand, it was about there that her status as a legend really kind of was born, just by association with him, or standing in the same spotlight as him.

She deserved the spotlight herself, but it was his spotlight that she was initially introduced to the world of like Dimeshore novels back east. Correct. And let's take a break. That's a perfect place to start, right as her legend is growing. Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn?

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You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down.

It doesn't look good, there is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology? It changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So we're back, and let's see, Calamity Jane meets Wild Bill Hickock. They fall in love and settle down and have a family and live happily ever after, I believe.

And that was it. No, but they were really, really close. Everything I read really stressed the importance of their friendship over the years and how he really took her under his wing. And then when I started reading articles about whether or not she was gay and in a situation where she was not allowed to live that way, and speculation abounds because of things like she dressed like a man and she hung out with the men and she never had any boyfriends. There are stories of her getting married later in life and having a child.

And I also saw some articles that call that into question saying that maybe that didn't even happen. Well, there's no certificates anywhere on record. But it made me wonder about Wild Bill Hickock, and if he was maybe knew the deal and was sympathetic to what was going on. So he was her beard. Well, not beard because he didn't act as her boyfriend or anything, but just maybe sympathetic to her.

I mean, that's what I cooked up in my head at least. I got you. I've seen there are plenty of articles that put the two together romantically. Some say that she was into him and he wasn't into her. And it really kind of demonstrates just how hard it is to pin down fact from fiction in her story in particular. But it is factual that she and Bill Hickock were close friends at the very least in Deadwood. And that she was there when he was murdered in August of 1876 when he was shot in the

back of the head by Jack McCall at Point Blank Range while Bill was at a gambling table in a saloon in Deadwood. Yeah, which was very tough on her, obviously. So she left Deadwood pretty shortly after that. And then again, spent, you know, the next seems like 10 or 15 years really traveling all over the place. She never stayed in one place for long. I think in the early 1880s, she bought a ranch on the Yellowstone River but only stayed there

for about a year, went to California, only stayed there about a year, eventually went to Texas. And this is where she supposedly married Clinton Burke in El Paso. And then they went back to Colorado and ran a hotel as a family. But again, I saw that called into speculation. Yeah, supposedly there are corroborating accounts of witnesses seeing her with a young child in some of these places. So it is possible she did have a daughter, but again, there's no birth certificates or

anything anywhere. Apparently, some woman came forward in the 50s or 60s and claimed to be Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane's daughter, but was exposed as a fraud later on. Yeah. No, that was disappointing. I thought so too, right there at the end, it really took the legs out from under it. Eventually close to 1900, in 1895, she said, hey, you know what I can do really good is shoot a gun.

And there's this guy out here, she really crossed paths with all the biggies of the Old West. She hooked up with Buffalo Bill in his famous Wild West show and she was a sharpshooter for that show and she didn't do that for very long because that taste for whiskey she developed as a teenager. I saw more that she would go on big binges and it wasn't so much a steady alcoholism, but she couldn't help but go into these big drinking binges that cost her these jobs time and time again over the years.

Do you know how much of a drinking problem you would have to have to get fired from Buffalo Bill's Wild West show for drinking? Seriously. I can't imagine. Because they could work that into the show for a while. Yeah, she just shoots wildly into the air. Yeah, like look out everybody. Exactly.

Duck. Yeah, I imagine it was pretty severe, which is very sad actually, you know, you can make jokes about her being drunk at a Wild West show, but it seriously disrupted her life. Yeah, for sure, because not only did she lose that job, she also was later hired on at the Pan American Exposition. I think in 1901 and lost that job supposedly for the same things. So she was like, she was definitely a hard drinking person for sure. And it also kind of makes it even sadder when you realize that she went and got those jobs

to help support her family if she in fact did have a family. But even if she didn't, it's still, I mean, losing a job because you drink too much is a little sad. Yeah, for sure. As far as the name Calamity Jane, there are a bunch of stories on where she got this name. I thought we may as well read her own account, even though her book is not completely to be trusted. But she was talking about a campaign she was on.

And she said it was on Goose Creek, Wyoming, where the town of Sheridan is now located. Captain Egan was in command of the post and we were ordered to quell an uprising of the Indians and we're out for several days and I'm making this shorter. What do you call that? Abbreviating. I'm abbreviating this. When returning to the post, we were ambushed about a mile and a half from our destination and we were fired upon and Captain Egan was shot.

I was riding in advance on hearing the firing and turned in my saddle and saw the captain reeling in his saddle and about to fall. I turned my horse and galloped back with all haste to a side and got there in time to catch him while he was falling. Captain Egan on recovering laughingly said, I name you Calamity Jane, the heroine of the planes. Very nice. That sounds totally made up by the way.

Yeah. Yeah, that's quite a story, but again, like a lot of other stuff in her orbit is questionable for sure. She definitely was called Calamity Jane. It just seems to have been lost to time. Right. And again, what we hope is not lost is this was a young girl who made her way in the west, who lived against all odds and supported herself and her younger siblings against all odds.

Yeah, which is worth celebrating in and of itself, right? I agree. Well, that's it for Calamity Jane and everybody. That's it for short stuff. So adios. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. All podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.