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Buffalo Girls
In a letter to her daughter back East, Martha Jane is not shy about her own importance: "Martha Jane -- better known as Calamity -- is just one of the handful of aging legends who travel to London as part of Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show in Buffalo Girls. As he describes the insatiable curiosity of Calamity's Indian friend No Ears, Annie Oakley's shooting match with Lord Windhouveren, and other highlights of the tour, McMurtry turns the story of a band of hardy, irrepressible survivors into an unforgettable portrait of love, fellowship, dreams, and heartbreak.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
About the author
Larry McMurtry
173 books3,299 followersLarry Jeff McMurtry was an American novelist, essayist, and screenwriter whose work was predominantly set in either the Old West or contemporary Texas. His novels included Horseman, Pass By (1962), The Last Picture Show (1966), and Terms of Endearment (1975), which were adapted into films. Films adapted from McMurtry's works earned 34 Oscar nominations (13 wins). He was also a prominent book collector and bookseller.
His 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove was adapted into a television miniseries that earned 18 Emmy Award nominations (seven wins). The subsequent three novels in his Lonesome Dove series were adapted as three more miniseries, earning eight more Emmy nominations. McMurtry and co-writer Diana Ossana adapted the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain (2005), which earned eight Academy Award nominations with three wins, including McMurtry and Ossana for Best Adapted Screenplay. In 2014, McMurtry received the National Humanities Medal.
In Tracy Daugherty's 2023 biography of McMurtry, the biographer quotes critic Dave Hickey as saying about McMurtry: "Larry is a writer, and it's kind of like being a critter. If you leave a cow alone, he'll eat grass. If you leave Larry alone, he'll write books. When he's in public, he may say hello and goodbye, but otherwise he is just resting, getting ready to go write."
His 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove was adapted into a television miniseries that earned 18 Emmy Award nominations (seven wins). The subsequent three novels in his Lonesome Dove series were adapted as three more miniseries, earning eight more Emmy nominations. McMurtry and co-writer Diana Ossana adapted the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain (2005), which earned eight Academy Award nominations with three wins, including McMurtry and Ossana for Best Adapted Screenplay. In 2014, McMurtry received the National Humanities Medal.
In Tracy Daugherty's 2023 biography of McMurtry, the biographer quotes critic Dave Hickey as saying about McMurtry: "Larry is a writer, and it's kind of like being a critter. If you leave a cow alone, he'll eat grass. If you leave Larry alone, he'll write books. When he's in public, he may say hello and goodbye, but otherwise he is just resting, getting ready to go write."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 225 reviews
September 2, 2018
Calamity Jane. Dora DuFran. Wild Bill Hickok. Buffalo Bill Cody. Mountain men, Indians, miners, cowboys, and a big overgrown sweetheart of a young man named Ogden. (And Fred the parrot.)
Some were actual people, with their stories tweaked a bit to fit into McMurtry's plot lines. Others were invented. (Fred the parrot was real.)
The glory days of the Old West are over. The buffalo are gone, so are the beaver. The life itself is gone. Civilization has arrived. What are living legends supposed to do with themselves now?
In this book we learn the answer to that question, and live through the true end of an era with all of our characters. It is beautifully written, very hard to put down, and even harder to forget.
Some were actual people, with their stories tweaked a bit to fit into McMurtry's plot lines. Others were invented. (Fred the parrot was real.)
The glory days of the Old West are over. The buffalo are gone, so are the beaver. The life itself is gone. Civilization has arrived. What are living legends supposed to do with themselves now?
In this book we learn the answer to that question, and live through the true end of an era with all of our characters. It is beautifully written, very hard to put down, and even harder to forget.
April 21, 2024
Pretending not to hear always worked better with men than with women. When women gave an order they didn't care if you could hear it or not, they just wanted it obeyed. (PG 28)
This is a bust of a book and what no one expects from the writer of Lonesome Dove. Comparisons aside this was boring. We only got to know Calamity Jane through her letters to her daughter. The characters were all boring cardboard.
There were no adventures in this Wild West that had me smiling or wanting to know more.
Boring and wasted time, sadly, but truthfully.
This is a bust of a book and what no one expects from the writer of Lonesome Dove. Comparisons aside this was boring. We only got to know Calamity Jane through her letters to her daughter. The characters were all boring cardboard.
There were no adventures in this Wild West that had me smiling or wanting to know more.
Boring and wasted time, sadly, but truthfully.
Shelved as '3-read-fiction'
March 20, 2017I like to think about this: while 2nd generation Puget Sound pioneers were felling the old growth Doug firs from which my house is built, and Irish immigrant carpenters were nailing together my roof beams, Calamity Jane was still alive and kicking around Deadwood. It's true that the American wild west was history by then, but young Calamity had lived that wild west in her youth when it was the real thing.
This book isn't about the wild and audacious life Calamity lived, it's about the truth that the bigger the life, the more poignant its inevitable decline. What a girl! McMurty understands that even though these hard riding pioneers suffered the broken heart of watching their youthful wild west disappear, they loved their choices, refused to compromise and rode their dreams into the sunset.
It's interesting that the main focus in most of her biographies isn't her amazing life. At 15 she became the provider for her 5 younger siblings when her parents died along the wagon-train trails heading west. She became a professional scout, a daredevil rider, and a trick shooter. She wore a soldier's uniform, fought in the Plains Indian wars and fearlessly nursed dying pioneers during the small pox epidemics. When her detachment was ordered to the Big Horn River in 1885, under General Crook, she swam the Platte River with crucial dispatches and raced 90 miles at top speed, wet and shivering, to deliver them.
One brave woman. Ok she had some character flaws - it is after all the 'wild' west. But her biographers are completely obsessed about which of her stories were exaggerations or fabrications. They seem desperate to distract us from her real adventures. And they harp on her decline at the end of her life. It seems we want to be consoled that there will be miserable hell to pay if someone lives a life too adventurous and unconventional. Makes us feel better about our compromises.
This book isn't about the wild and audacious life Calamity lived, it's about the truth that the bigger the life, the more poignant its inevitable decline. What a girl! McMurty understands that even though these hard riding pioneers suffered the broken heart of watching their youthful wild west disappear, they loved their choices, refused to compromise and rode their dreams into the sunset.
It's interesting that the main focus in most of her biographies isn't her amazing life. At 15 she became the provider for her 5 younger siblings when her parents died along the wagon-train trails heading west. She became a professional scout, a daredevil rider, and a trick shooter. She wore a soldier's uniform, fought in the Plains Indian wars and fearlessly nursed dying pioneers during the small pox epidemics. When her detachment was ordered to the Big Horn River in 1885, under General Crook, she swam the Platte River with crucial dispatches and raced 90 miles at top speed, wet and shivering, to deliver them.
One brave woman. Ok she had some character flaws - it is after all the 'wild' west. But her biographers are completely obsessed about which of her stories were exaggerations or fabrications. They seem desperate to distract us from her real adventures. And they harp on her decline at the end of her life. It seems we want to be consoled that there will be miserable hell to pay if someone lives a life too adventurous and unconventional. Makes us feel better about our compromises.
May 26, 2014
Very, very disappointing as I have other McMurtry novels on my shelves (Lonesome Dove, Leaving Cheyenne, The Last Picture Show, Texasville) and have thoroughly enjoyed each and every one of them. I looked forward to Buffalo Girls as another enjoyable read. Boy, was I let down. The entire story revolves around Calamity Jane and her ability (or inability) to adapt to changes that the Wild West is going through during the mid 19th century. The indians are gone from the plains, there are no more buffalo (or bison, as they should have correctly been called) on the prairie, Wild Bill Hickock has retired as a gunslinger and is touring the world with his Wild West Revue. Calamity Jane writes to her daughter intermittently, but we are never told where the daughter is or who the father is. (This information is shared with us in the book's final pages.)
All in all, a very, very disappointing read. None of the characters are very "fleshed-out"; they all seem superficial and one-dimensional. Having read the previously-mentioned novels of his and enjoying them all tremendously, I was not prepared to dislike this as much as I did. I would skip this one and just tell folks you read it but didn't like it all that much.
All in all, a very, very disappointing read. None of the characters are very "fleshed-out"; they all seem superficial and one-dimensional. Having read the previously-mentioned novels of his and enjoying them all tremendously, I was not prepared to dislike this as much as I did. I would skip this one and just tell folks you read it but didn't like it all that much.
December 24, 2015
This was the umpteenth time I read Buffalo Girls but the first time since joining Goodreads, hence the review. This is Larry McMurtry at his finest. I see that others have posted that it cannot compare to Lonesome Dove. Yes, Lonesome Dove is a true epic tale of the west that was. Buffalo Girls is a smaller story of the "wild west" that is disappearing as told through the (mis)adventures of Calamity Jane and her cohorts. Any book is a good book that sends me scrambling to do online research. I've had the great fortune to travel through the west and visit many of these locations including the graves of Calamity and her supposed love Wild Bill Hickok. So many iconic western names are found in this short tale of the west that was. Simply excellent.
April 11, 2023
A fictional story of Calamity Jane. Several characters are real (Annie Oakley, Buffalo Bill Cody, Sitting Bull) others are based on real people, all are fictionalized. It's the story of people who live beyond their time - in this case the Wild West after it was tamed. It's a beautiful sad story I've read many times. Betty Buckley reads the audio version and she is just heartbreakingly wonderful.
May 17, 2021
Reread this for the first time in two decades. I'm teaching a course in Revisionist Westerns right now, and we just finished The Sisters Brothers which was fine, thank you. But I had forgotten to some extent just how good a writer that peak (or even near peak) McMurtry is. Funny, wistful, sad--and very knowing about the myth of the west. Watching these characters fight against the eulogizing of the world that they just created and now are alienated from is mind blowingly good.
May 1, 2024
I'm not really sure when I read this but I remember that I did. It was a nice slice of the history of the West, as only Larry McMurtry can write it - humorous but human - however it fell a little flat for me, as far as plot goes. I turned the pages with no particular destination except the end, where I eventually arrived, closed this book and picked up another. As they say in pick-up games of basketball, no harm, no foul. A book.
January 18, 2015
An old compliment to actors that you rarely hear anymore is, "I'd listen to him read the phone book," and I thought of that as I was reading Buffalo Girls. When it comes to Larry McMurtry, I'd read it if he wrote the phone book because, as plotless as it might be, he would somehow manage to convey in it all the pain of daily living. Not that Buffalo Girls has no plot, but it's a thin one; it's mostly just a few old characters coming to grips with the fact that the time of the American West as an untamed frontier is coming to an end. The reader gets to wander along with Jim Ragg, an old beaver trapper who laments the near-extinction of the beaver because of people like himself, his partner Bartle Bone who mostly just goes where Jim goes, Dora DuFran, who walked into Abilene a starved girl wearing her dead father's shoes and found success in one of the few ways available to women of the time, as well as other less central but no less tragic characters. Mostly though, this is Martha "Calamity Jane" Canary's story, and the narrative device that McMurtry uses to portray her marginality and loneliness is as heartbreaking as it gets. I'd be unlikely to read this book again as it's far too sad and, frankly, a little boring in stretches, but I understand there's a movie based on it starring a miscast Angelica Huston as Calamity Jane (and a woefully miscast Melanie Griffith as Dora), so I might try to watch that just to have something to complain about.
September 14, 2020
I am not sure what is the purpose of this book. Technically it is about Calamity Jane and Dora DuFran, the real women living at the end of XIX century, but author takes a lot of artistic liberty in telling their stories. Facts are mixed up with fantasy creating a pleasant picture even if somewhat disjointed. The whole story is more about bringing certain emotions than having an interesting plot - there is a lot of crying, a lot of reminiscing your friends that died a long time ago and grieving the Wild West that is not there anymore. It was an ok read I guess since it made me want to visit Deadwood and Black Hills but I am sure there are better books about Wild West.
September 19, 2009
At first I didn't think this book was special, but my opinion began changing with each new page. As the characters in the story age and fade like the wild west, I formed a connection with the characters and I felt their longing for the glory of a bye-gone era.
March 20, 2013
I enjoy reading a well written western. This book was not one of them. Character development seemed laborious and dull and the story lacked good continuity. A far cry from Lonesome Dove.
January 16, 2018
This book was beautiful and it blew my mind.
Larry McMurtry is a treasure, i'd love to live in his mind for a day or even better in one of his stories.
Larry McMurtry is a treasure, i'd love to live in his mind for a day or even better in one of his stories.
October 30, 2022
This is the third McMurtry book I’ve read, and my least favorite – but in fairness, the other two were Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show, which many consider among his greatest books. All three are exemplars of the axiom that the only themes we care about in storytelling are love and death, and in each of these cases the two themes extend beyond the characters to the environments in which they are set. For me, that casts a certain melancholy over the proceedings that was sufficiently offset in the first two books by McMurtry’s humor. This book felt more serious, a sense reinforced by what I took to be a subtext concerning the sexuality (and the physical sex) of one of its central characters, Calamity Jane, an American Wild West myth/legend along the lines of Annie Oakley, Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill Cody. They all appear here as well, mainly as hired performers in Cody’s traveling Wild West show, where we see them more as the last representatives of a time and place fading rapidly into the past than as vital protagonists. Some critics’ comments compare this book favorably to Lonesome Dove, which, though inevitable, I not only disagree with, but don’t think is even fair. I like McMurtry’s writing and look forward to reading more of his work to see if he ever wrote anything after Lonesome Dove that could possibly withstand critical comparison to it. In my opinion, this unfortunately doesn't.
December 4, 2014
Historical fiction with such historical names as Martha Jane Canary, Dora DuFran, Teddy Blue Abbott, William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody, Jack Omohundro, Sitting Bull, Annie Oakley, the Countess of Warwick (Daisy), Russell of the Times, and Potato Creek Johnny. But the person who steals the whole book is a fictional ancient Indian scout named No Ears. When he's in the story, it's MacMurtry at his finest.
One flaw in the book for me were the letters from Calamity Jane to her daughter who is also called "Jane." It was a mistake having her tell us about events that MacMurty should have had happen in the story.
One flaw in the book for me were the letters from Calamity Jane to her daughter who is also called "Jane." It was a mistake having her tell us about events that MacMurty should have had happen in the story.
September 19, 2019
I listened to this on audio and it was a most enjoyable experience. The voice of the narrator was on target and the harmonica playing between sections added to the ambience. Some complained that the book was plotless. I disagree. This is a timeless story of inevitable change and the struggle of a generation to hold on to their way of life in the midst of it as time marches on. Mr. McMurtry I am a fan for life.
February 24, 2012
McMurtry is the great feminist of the West, in my books. I loved this tale, and it was the book that made a reader out of my daughter. She fell in love with Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane in 9th Grade and McMurtry kicked the door in on American literature for her. His Calamity Jane is priceless.
June 25, 2012
Loved Lonesome Dove. HATED this book. So boring. The characters are essentially wandering around throughout the narrative waiting for death. Calamity Jane is a disappointing character in this novel. Flat and whiny. Perhaps the author wanted to show how time had broken her spirit.
April 9, 2014
I loved this story. With the last page turned I whooped out loud with pleasure. Wonderful dialog, dense characters, a good dab of history and literary technique (like the aside on the stage or screen) that builds and builds to the last. So glad I picked this book up!
December 12, 2015
It was a little like lonesome dove, and sad too, poignant, achingly so. All the characters who really lived in the beginning, middle and end of the old west. Realized how much life was lived in that short span.
August 7, 2008
This book starts slowly but it does deliver in the second half. A fun summer read with many sad parts. It's almost like he wrote it for the movie.
March 28, 2022
"Most of the Indians began to sing their death songs again… Calamity decided she should sing a death song too, and she sang 'Buffalo Girls'." (pg. 216)
Another in Larry McMurtry's hefty roster of demythologising elegies about the Old West, Buffalo Girls suffers in comparison to the author's more vigorous works. The story is rather pedestrian, lacking anything that might be called a plot, and simply follows some of the old names of the West as they mill around and glumly come to terms with the fact that the West, and the adventure that was implied in it, has now been irreversibly settled.
On the face of it, this is a compelling theme, and it's McMurtry's chosen raison d'être in much of his Western writing. Here we focus on Calamity Jane, whose admission of the shallowness of her own legend – she "hadn't done much of anything except wander here and there on the plains, the little reputation she had the result of invention… her story [was] mainly based on whiskey and emptiness" – is rather nakedly extended to all of the 'Wild West': "If every man who drank in the saloon had killed as many Indians as he claimed to have killed, there wouldn't have been an Indian west of the Mississippi; if every miner had found as much gold as was claimed, palaces would stretch down the Missouri all the way to St. Louis" (pg. 37).
The tired old legends have been put out to pasture, without even realising they were bovine, and the characters alternate between morose self-pity and a bereft self-awareness. The legends indulge in their own mythmaking, like Calamity deciding to invent an affair with Wild Bill Hickok (pg. 203), but it's about more than the big names. The trappers lament that there are no more beaver; the hunters no more buffalo; the soldiers no more Indians to fight. On each point, the connection is made: in wiping them out, they made them valuable (pp115, 293). Metatextually, the obvious point to make is that McMurtry is examining why we bother with Westerns in the first place: the fact that it's no longer reality makes it corruptible into story and consequently saleable.
It's all worthy stuff; the problem is that it's not enough to hang a story around. The decline of the old West is a bit stale as a theme, and needs some magic in order to give it life. McMurtry had that magic in Lonesome Dove, that glorious albatross around his neck when assessing any Western he went on to write, but quite frankly he doesn't have it here. I've already mentioned the lack of plot, but there's also a lack of spark in the characters. Even a minor character like the gentle giant Ogden lacks the personality given to the similarly minor role of Big Zwey in Lonesome Dove. The characters in Buffalo Girls no longer have a purpose, and to show this McMurtry delves deeply and unwisely into the trivial nature of their continued existence.
The only time Buffalo Girls rouses itself is in its middle third (its opening and final acts are a bit of a slog), when Calamity Jane and some others travel to England as part of Buffalo Bill's 'Wild West show'. These London scenes are (ironically, given the smog) a breath of fresh air. Buffalo Bill's circus act delivers most sharply McMurtry's cynical theme: the West has not only been commodified ("the big adventure's over… make a show of it and sell it to the dudes" (pp68-9)) but commodified with the connivance of those who enjoyed it as it was. Those wild men (and women) who tamed the West, and discovered with great irony that they preferred it when it was wild. This part of the book allows for some of Buffalo Girls' best writing, such as the old Indian seeing a whale breach the surface as they cross the Atlantic (pg. 150), and also allows for its most ironic, bittersweet moments, such as the fur trapper who has long lamented the decline of the beaver finally hearing the slap of their tails in a London zoo (pg. 174). It's a touching moment, but also McMurtry's starkest delivery of his theme of how irreversibly the West has been tamed: the Western trapper has to go all the way to bustling London to see beaver again.
Such moments, however, remain moments, and Buffalo Girls is unable to construct anything more substantial out of them. To meet its demythologising theme, the novel sacrifices any dynamism in the plot or vivacity in the characters. It is a circular novel of trivialities and redundancies that, however well-wrought, is too often a labour to read. It doesn't deserve to be judged too harshly, but when a story aims to show us that its characters and its world are not as exciting or as impressive as we always thought they were, it's rather shooting itself in the foot when it succeeds.
Another in Larry McMurtry's hefty roster of demythologising elegies about the Old West, Buffalo Girls suffers in comparison to the author's more vigorous works. The story is rather pedestrian, lacking anything that might be called a plot, and simply follows some of the old names of the West as they mill around and glumly come to terms with the fact that the West, and the adventure that was implied in it, has now been irreversibly settled.
On the face of it, this is a compelling theme, and it's McMurtry's chosen raison d'être in much of his Western writing. Here we focus on Calamity Jane, whose admission of the shallowness of her own legend – she "hadn't done much of anything except wander here and there on the plains, the little reputation she had the result of invention… her story [was] mainly based on whiskey and emptiness" – is rather nakedly extended to all of the 'Wild West': "If every man who drank in the saloon had killed as many Indians as he claimed to have killed, there wouldn't have been an Indian west of the Mississippi; if every miner had found as much gold as was claimed, palaces would stretch down the Missouri all the way to St. Louis" (pg. 37).
The tired old legends have been put out to pasture, without even realising they were bovine, and the characters alternate between morose self-pity and a bereft self-awareness. The legends indulge in their own mythmaking, like Calamity deciding to invent an affair with Wild Bill Hickok (pg. 203), but it's about more than the big names. The trappers lament that there are no more beaver; the hunters no more buffalo; the soldiers no more Indians to fight. On each point, the connection is made: in wiping them out, they made them valuable (pp115, 293). Metatextually, the obvious point to make is that McMurtry is examining why we bother with Westerns in the first place: the fact that it's no longer reality makes it corruptible into story and consequently saleable.
It's all worthy stuff; the problem is that it's not enough to hang a story around. The decline of the old West is a bit stale as a theme, and needs some magic in order to give it life. McMurtry had that magic in Lonesome Dove, that glorious albatross around his neck when assessing any Western he went on to write, but quite frankly he doesn't have it here. I've already mentioned the lack of plot, but there's also a lack of spark in the characters. Even a minor character like the gentle giant Ogden lacks the personality given to the similarly minor role of Big Zwey in Lonesome Dove. The characters in Buffalo Girls no longer have a purpose, and to show this McMurtry delves deeply and unwisely into the trivial nature of their continued existence.
The only time Buffalo Girls rouses itself is in its middle third (its opening and final acts are a bit of a slog), when Calamity Jane and some others travel to England as part of Buffalo Bill's 'Wild West show'. These London scenes are (ironically, given the smog) a breath of fresh air. Buffalo Bill's circus act delivers most sharply McMurtry's cynical theme: the West has not only been commodified ("the big adventure's over… make a show of it and sell it to the dudes" (pp68-9)) but commodified with the connivance of those who enjoyed it as it was. Those wild men (and women) who tamed the West, and discovered with great irony that they preferred it when it was wild. This part of the book allows for some of Buffalo Girls' best writing, such as the old Indian seeing a whale breach the surface as they cross the Atlantic (pg. 150), and also allows for its most ironic, bittersweet moments, such as the fur trapper who has long lamented the decline of the beaver finally hearing the slap of their tails in a London zoo (pg. 174). It's a touching moment, but also McMurtry's starkest delivery of his theme of how irreversibly the West has been tamed: the Western trapper has to go all the way to bustling London to see beaver again.
Such moments, however, remain moments, and Buffalo Girls is unable to construct anything more substantial out of them. To meet its demythologising theme, the novel sacrifices any dynamism in the plot or vivacity in the characters. It is a circular novel of trivialities and redundancies that, however well-wrought, is too often a labour to read. It doesn't deserve to be judged too harshly, but when a story aims to show us that its characters and its world are not as exciting or as impressive as we always thought they were, it's rather shooting itself in the foot when it succeeds.
March 9, 2020
2020 Pop Sugar Reading Challenge-A Western
It's no Lonesome Dove, but I finally found another book by McMurtrey that I enjoyed.
It's the end of the west as the Old-timers know it. Buffalo Bill comes and rounds them up for his Wild West Show, but that gives them no peace, either. Just a great book about accepting or fighting agains the end of an era.
It's no Lonesome Dove, but I finally found another book by McMurtrey that I enjoyed.
It's the end of the west as the Old-timers know it. Buffalo Bill comes and rounds them up for his Wild West Show, but that gives them no peace, either. Just a great book about accepting or fighting agains the end of an era.
April 5, 2018
Calamity Jane was infamous. I would be interested to read a biography of Calamity after reading Buffalo Girls as this book didn't portray her in the best light.
January 13, 2022
Far exceeded my expectations.
October 25, 2017
This is a review of the unabridged audio, read by Betty Buckley.
The memoirs of Martha Jane Canary, commonly known as Calamity Jane, mix with the Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in this lightly comic epic by McMurtry. Jane and her friends Bartle and Rag know that the West they loved is becoming civilized, and that they were participants in its destruction (as they see it). Joining Buffalo Bill's show changes their lives, although not necessarily for the better. Meanwhile, back in Miles City, The brothel owner Dora pines for Blue, the reprobate who married another woman. Observing all of this is the elderly Oglala No Ears, a natural philosopher of the first rank. The book is not of the first rank, as far as McMurtry is concerned. He uses an irritating device of Calamity's letters to her estranged (or is she?) daughter. For much of the latter half of the book, this letter-writing goes away, only to come back in full force at the conclusion. There are some structural issues too, with Dora coming into the action surprisingly after the novel should have, for all intents and purposes, ended. Buckley's narration is good, and you can see her as a more glamorous version of Jane. Her flat reading though undermines some funny lines, mostly No Ears's views on the white people he has chosen to live among. Still lukewarm McMurtry is better than most, and as always, he mixes humor and tragedy in a humanistic way. There's a TV version with Angelica Huston that I should track down.
The memoirs of Martha Jane Canary, commonly known as Calamity Jane, mix with the Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in this lightly comic epic by McMurtry. Jane and her friends Bartle and Rag know that the West they loved is becoming civilized, and that they were participants in its destruction (as they see it). Joining Buffalo Bill's show changes their lives, although not necessarily for the better. Meanwhile, back in Miles City, The brothel owner Dora pines for Blue, the reprobate who married another woman. Observing all of this is the elderly Oglala No Ears, a natural philosopher of the first rank. The book is not of the first rank, as far as McMurtry is concerned. He uses an irritating device of Calamity's letters to her estranged (or is she?) daughter. For much of the latter half of the book, this letter-writing goes away, only to come back in full force at the conclusion. There are some structural issues too, with Dora coming into the action surprisingly after the novel should have, for all intents and purposes, ended. Buckley's narration is good, and you can see her as a more glamorous version of Jane. Her flat reading though undermines some funny lines, mostly No Ears's views on the white people he has chosen to live among. Still lukewarm McMurtry is better than most, and as always, he mixes humor and tragedy in a humanistic way. There's a TV version with Angelica Huston that I should track down.
November 28, 2021
Wow! This book really affected me. Maybe it’s because I’ve always like Calamity Jane. This is the story of the last twenty-thirty years of her life. In it she is always writing letters to her daughter, Janey, and talking about her life. Janey is the daughter of Wild Bill Hickock and lives in St. Louis with a Mr. Burke. Calamity, Martha Jane Canary, writes about traveling around with her friends, the mountain men, Jim Ragg and Bartle Bone. She also spends a lot of time with an old Indian named No Ears, who was one of my favorite characters in this story. They travel all over the West, Calamity on her horse, Satan, and with her dog, Cody. She goes to England with Buffalo Bill Cody in his Wild West Show. She talks about Sitting Bull, who she knew and about her best friend, Dora DeFran, who she lived with on and off. Dora ran a whore house and later died in childbirth. When I got to the last chapter I was just blown away. Janey was just a figment of Calamity’s imagination. Janey was the child Martha Jane always wished she could have, but she couldn’t have any children. She didn’t even really know Wild Bill. Throughout the book, she was really just an old drunk who liked to shoot off her guns. This was a great book. I love McMurtry’s writing. I want to read more of his stories, cause I love them.
November 20, 2022
Buffalo Girls, written at the peak of McMurtry’s powers as a writer, is a great example of how to craft a great book about real historical figures without becoming beholden to historical fact. In this case, those historical figures are people such as Calamity Jane and Buffalo Bill, living out the later years of their lives when the Wild West isn’t so wild anymore. McMurtry gives each character a depth that is at once impressive and transcends “historical fiction,” which is to say they feel like his creations. The meditative look at the destruction and taming of the west, in which all of these characters played parts many now regret, plays nicely into McMurtry’s common themes of aging and death. My favorite character is No Ears, a lonely old man who lives his life divided between two worlds (those of Native Americans and the white man), and is essentially a loner, as well as a relic. He also sees the symbolic meaning of the world in ways few of the other characters care to understand. Although much of it takes place in the Wild West (Buffalo Bill’s show traveling to Europe is a highlight of the middle of the novel), this doesn’t read like a Western. To put it in terms comparable to music, I might call it a post-Western, a reaction to Westerns that’s ultimately doing something completely different. Whatever you call it, it’s a damn fine book.
July 1, 2017
While engaged in my journey with DODGE CITY, I stumbled across BUFFALO GIRLS on my TO-READ shelf, a book I’d received as a gift from my mother for Christmas in ’98-the shelf grows every year and I clearly don’t keep up with it. In high school I read LONESOME DOVE, for which McMurtry received a Pulitzer, and I loved that tome very much. The serendipity of my stumble surprised me-BUFFALO GIRLS was a fictional novel about the death throes of the Wild West featuring many of the same characters I was reading about in DODGE CITY. With a bittersweet focus on the manly character of Calamity Jane, McMurtry provides a swan song to the lawless violence, the discovery of unknown territory, the loss of Native American cultures, and the intentional destruction of the buffalo. A tragic character, Calamity Jane provides a flawed center point to the gang of friends who come in and out of her life through the years. We learn of her never-consummated crush on Wild Bill, her never-ending loyalty to her best friend Dora Dufran, her insatiable and crushing need for alcohol, and how she ended up joining Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show. McMurty has a special talent to make you care for even the most flawed individuals and by the end of the novel, I cared deeply about what happened to each of them.
July 31, 2011
Forget about Doris Day. This novel tries to ground the legend of Calamity Jane in something of the reality of the West.
The novel focuses on Jane and several of her friends as they try to eke out a living in a West which has changed substantially since they started out. The animals have been hunted to extinction and the Indian wars have been won, leaving these aging frontiers people with little option but to parody their past as part of Buffalo Bills travelling Wild West show.
McMurty fictionalises the lives of real people but in doing so paints an evocative picture of a dying world. He brings to life the wild towns of the West and contrasts them well with the hustle and bustle of late Victorian London.
Calamity Jane emerges as a lonely and unfulfilled woman whose alcoholic tales are exaggerated stories of what might have been. This is a poignant story which is vividly imagined.
The novel focuses on Jane and several of her friends as they try to eke out a living in a West which has changed substantially since they started out. The animals have been hunted to extinction and the Indian wars have been won, leaving these aging frontiers people with little option but to parody their past as part of Buffalo Bills travelling Wild West show.
McMurty fictionalises the lives of real people but in doing so paints an evocative picture of a dying world. He brings to life the wild towns of the West and contrasts them well with the hustle and bustle of late Victorian London.
Calamity Jane emerges as a lonely and unfulfilled woman whose alcoholic tales are exaggerated stories of what might have been. This is a poignant story which is vividly imagined.
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