Who was the real Calamity Jane? Historians search for an answer.

You would be forgiven in describing Calamity Jane as an iconoclast whose flouting of 19th-century female mores launched her into exceptional fame and fortune in a male-dominated American West.

It’s true the woman behind the fictional heroine—born Martha Jane Canary—was a buckskin-clad, gun-slinging, foulmouthed cowgirl whose affinity for alcohol was legendary, even among men. But that’s where facts diverge significantly from fiction.

Historians have spent decades trying to find her—methodically unraveling a century of mistruths, half-truths, and full-blown fabrication, many of them introduced by Calamity herself. She was also illiterate, leaving no letters or journals for analysis, not even a signature. So who was the real Calamity Jane?

The creation of a myth

“People, largely, are still in love with a romantic Old West," says Richard W. Etulain, former director of the Center for the American West at the University of New Mexico who’s written two comprehensive books on Martha Jane Canary.

It's been part of the country’s literary tradition from its inception around the early 19^th century, he says. James Fenimore Cooper created the early framework for the Western as a genre in his groundbreaking Leatherstocking Tales, a five-novel frontier series that includes his famous 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans.

(The Wild West lives on—in southern Spain.)

These were masculine stories featuring females as love interests, providing a formula for the early paperbacks called dime novels. Emerging around the start of the Civil War, the cheaply printed books sold on newsstands for no more than a dime.

With simple plots placing a hero or heroine in a dilemma, they were the perfect vehicle to spread myths about the real-life personalities of the American West—including Calamity Jane.

A calamitous early life

Born around May 1, 1856, near Princeton, Missouri, Martha Jane Canary was the oldest of three children. Around 1863, the family sold their farm and headed west toward Montana, ostensibly drawn by the booming mining towns.

She told of the five-month overland journey in her autobiography, Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane, a rare kernel of truth in what’s considered an exaggerated work of semifiction.

“I was at all times with the men when there was excitement and adventures to be had,” she said. “By the time we reached Virginia City, I was considered a remarkable good shot and a fearless rider for a girl of my age.”

The trek ended in heartache.

Both of her parents died within four years of the move and, by 1867, her siblings were allegedly sent to live with Mormon families in Utah. Not yet a teenager, Etulain writes in The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane that she was adrift in a pioneer man’s world.

(Here’s the true story of sharpshooter Annie Oakley.)

Calamity Jane lived a nomadic life, taking jobs for a few weeks at a time before heading to the next spot whim took her. And that’s where her story begins to blend into myth.

Dime novel fame

By the time she’d reached age 20, Martha Canary was already well known in the “rough and ready settlements of the western plains for dressing in men’s clothes, a taste for liquor and wanderlust, and a tendency to shoot off her mouth and her guns,” writes historian Karen R. Jones in The Many Lives of Calamity.

The genesis of her nickname is unclear. What is clear is that she was already known as Calamity Jane in the summer of 1876 when she sauntered down the dusty main street of Deadwood, South Dakota, on horseback in a suit of buckskin alongside Wild Bill Hickok.

She was traveling with the most famous gunman and lawman of the West, Etulain writes, having joined his wagon train of gold seekers as it headed north toward the Black Hills.

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“Calamity Jane has arrived!” local newspapers proclaimed. From that moment, her name would be intertwined with Wild Bill’s in Old West lore. The news stories that followed, embellished and sensationalized in the era of yellow journalism, flung her into stratospheric fame.

She would be forevermore the wild woman of the West, often cast in dime novels as the love interest of notorious gunslinger Wild Bill. She was also often linked with another famous Bill—Buffalo Bill Cody, whose prowess in slaughtering buffalo had become dime novel legend. Stories abounded of her performances in his famous stage show, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.

In her semifictional 1896 autobiography Life and Adventures of Calamity, Calamity also described herself as a rowdy plainswoman who rode for the Pony Express and served as General Custer’s scout.

(Why the short-lived Pony Express still fascinates us.)

For more than a century that followed, the depictions of Calamity Jane in media would make it even more difficult to unravel the truths of her life. In Cecil B. DeMille’s 1936 movie The Plainsman, she was a rip-roaring cowgirl who fought Native Americans alongside Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill. Some 70 years after that she was portrayed as the bawdy friend of Wild Bill and town drunk in HBO’s Western series, Deadwood.

The real Calamity Jane

Many of the tall tales surrounding Calamity’s life are rooted in fact.

She may have served as an Army scout, her biographers found—just not for General Custer. Calamity did know Wild Bill, but not as his romantic partner. In fact, they would have been little more than acquaintances. (Hickok was assassinated at a poker game shortly after the group’s arrival in Deadwood.)

Calamity Jane was also cast in traveling shows but not Buffalo Bill’s Wild West production, says Jeremy M. Johnston, the Tate endowed chair of Western history at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, which houses what’s believed is her only remaining buckskin suit.

She was legally married once in 1888 but did shack up with several men whom she called "husband” along the way. She also gave birth twice: first in 1882 to a son, who died shortly after his birth, and in 1887 to daughter, Jessie Elizabeth. (However, whatever happened to her daughter remains debatable.)

(Beyond the Western myth of exploration lies a rich and overlooked history.)

Tales recounting Calamity’s nursing skills are also well-documented. “She really took care of anyone who was sick,” Johnson says. “Anyone who needed anything, she would step up and help them through their troubled times.”

Johnston’s own grandmother used to tell the story of Calamity Jane helping their family recover from an illness. To thank her, his great-great grandmother made Calamity a nice shirt. A few days later, however, onlookers found her in the streets intoxicated with the shirt covered in mud.

The death of Calamity Jane

In fact, alcoholism was constant refrain throughout her life, writes historian James D. McLaird in Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legends, perpetuating her lifelong poverty. “Sadly, after romantic adventures are removed, her story is mostly an account of uneventful daily life interrupted by drinking binges,” he writes.

For the last seven-plus years of her life, Etulain writes in Life and Legends, she earned money as a performer and roaming saleswoman, peddling her autobiography and photos.

She died penniless at age 47 on August 1, 1903, likely from effects of alcoholism. She’s buried near Wild Bill in the Mount Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood—and the misinformation that pervaded her life has followed in her death, Etulain writes, as even her tombstone displays an incorrect name, birthdate, and age.

But though her real life may have been more tragedy than adventure, Etulain argues that she remains an illuminating example of grit and determination.

“The loss of her parents before her teen years, the lack of education, and the downward push on many frontier women in the late nineteenth century—Calamity rose above these challenges as a young woman of energy, endurance, and fortitude.”