The Real Dirt on America's Frontier Legends by Jim Motavalli
In this book frontier heroes and legendary true life personalities I read about in my childhood are scrutinized and investigated. As the book progressed the stories picked up speed and became even more interesting. I loved the behind the scenes look at the outlandish personalities that became legends in their own lifetimes.
A great read!
Excerpts: The settled US was quite small in 1801, when Thomas Jefferson became president. Two of every three Americans lived within fifty miles of the Atlantic, and the Mississippi was the western border. Jefferson himself had never been more than fifty miles west of the Shenandoah Valley, so it’s not surprising he would want to see the West mapped and explored. The hope was for an easy and navigable route to Asian trade routes.
During the Civil War there was three-times-wounded “Jack Williams” (actually Frances Clalin), “Franklin Flint Thompson” (Sarah Edmonds), “Samuel ‘Sammy’ Blalock” (Sarah Pritchard), and even Irish-born “Albert Cashier” (Jennie Hodgers), who continued living as a man after the war. But Williams was the first documented black woman to enlist in the army, and maybe the last until the military was desegregated in 1948.
Martha
Canary
(“Calamity Jane”) The Legend Calamity Jane was a
muleskinner, stagecoach driver, Pony Express rider “over one of the
roughest trails in the Black Hills country,” and an intimate of
both Wild Bill Hickok and General George Armstrong Custer. She was a
lover of the former, and the latter benefited from her scouting
prowess in Arizona circa 1870.
By her own account in the 1897 pamphlet Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane, the Custer trip was eventful. “During that time I had a great many adventures with the Indians, for as a scout I had a great many dangerous missions to perform, and while I was in many close places always succeeded in getting away safely.” Why? Because she “was considered the most reckless and daring rider and one of the best shots in the western country.” Some Indian observers thought she had supernatural powers.
On recovering, Egan exclaimed, “You are a good person to have around in a time of calamity. And I now christen you Calamity Jane, heroine of the plains.”
The earliest Calamity Jane picture, the silent 1915 In the Days of ’75 and ’76, is the first to depict a romance (and a marriage) between Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane, but hardly the last. And because she sometimes dressed in men’s clothing, Calamity is also something of a lesbian icon.
Doris Day singing “Secret Love” in the film Calamity Jane is cited for its venting of forbidden feelings in the documentary The Celluloid Closet.
Calamity Jane (likely born Martha Canary) claims in her short autobiography is true, nor are many of the legends that grew up around her. The real Calamity Jane was trouble, a drunk, an illiterate, and a teller of tall tales who caused mayhem wherever she went—and that’s the real origin of her name.
Jane had an uncanny ability (James Beckwourth shared it) to be where western history was being made.
Creators evidently wanted to split the difference between fact and fiction, because Calamity—while not linked romantically with Hickok—is still shown as better acquainted with him than she actually was.
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