| Title | : | The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane (Volume 29) (The Oklahoma Western Biographies) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 080614632X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780806146324 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 404 |
| Publication | : | First published September 15, 2014 |
Before Calamity Jane became a legend, she was Martha Canary, orphaned when she was only eleven years old. From a young age she traveled fearlessly, worked with men, smoked, chewed tobacco, and drank. By the time she arrived in the boomtown of Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876, she had become Calamity Jane, and the real Martha Canary had disappeared under a landslide of purple prose.
Calamity became a hostess and dancer in Deadwood’s saloons and theaters. She imbibed heavily, and she might have been a prostitute, but she had other qualities, as well, including those of an angel of mercy who ministered to the sick and the down-and-out. Journalists and dime novelists couldn’t get enough of either version, nor, in the following century, could filmmakers.
Sorting through the stories, veteran western historian Richard W. Etulain’s account begins with a biography that offers new information on Calamity’s several “husbands” (including one she legally married), her two children, and a woman who claimed to be the daughter of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity, a story Etulain discredits. In the second half of the book, Etulain traces the stories that have shaped Calamity Jane’s reputation. Some Calamity portraits, he says, suggest that she aspired to a quiet life with a husband and family. As the 2004–2006 HBO series Deadwood makes clear, well more than a century after her first appearance as a heroine in the Deadwood Dick dime novels, Calamity Jane lives on—raunchy, unabashed, contradictory, and ambiguous as ever.
The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane (Volume 29) (The Oklahoma Western Biographies) Reviews
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Martha Jane Canary — the woman better known as Calamity Jane — is one of those figures who is both famous and obscure at the same time. A national figures in her early twenties, she was subject matter for several authors, all of whom drew upon their imagination rather than the facts when constructing their accounts. Jane herself contributed to the obfuscating of her biography, as her own accounts (including a short dictated autobiography) often were a mix of truth and fantasy with no way for readers to distinguish between them.
Establishing the correct details of Calamity Jane's life remains a challenging prospect, largely because the paucity of reliable sources and the challenges in verifying them. This leaves gaps in Richard Etulain's coverage of Jane's life, as he freely admits. What is left, though, provides an account of a tough, hard-living woman whose peripatetic life was often defined by her alcoholism. Born in Missouri, she was orphaned at an early age and left to tend to her younger brother. A fortuitous journey to Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876 brought her into the national spotlight, as her brief association with Wild Bill Hickok and her own remarkable behavior drew the attention of several writers at a time when Americans were becoming fascinated by events on the frontier. Though she benefited from the fame in a number of ways, her legendary reputation did not alleviate her problems with alcohol or poverty, and she died at the age of 51 in 1903.
Etulain's book would be worthwhile reading just for his effort to separate the truth of Martha Canary's life from the legend of Calamity Jane. Yet its greatest strength is his coverage of the construction of that legend, Starting with the Deadwood Dick novels of Edward Wheeler, he chronicles the fictional depictions of adventures, both during her life and in the decades that have followed since her death. His analysis shows the evolution of her image, one that often reflected more the mores of the times than any effort to recount the truth. Together they make for a solid study of the life and legend of a woman whose fame has far outlasted the short and often tragic life that she lived. -
I immensely enjoyed this book! I read the book in its entirety at a leisurely pace over the course of two days. Easy, interesting read for anyone looking to know the truth behind the life of Calamity Jane. Very well researched and executed.
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I read the first 6 chapters, which is over half the book. Facts about Calamity are very hard to come by. The author has clearly done an amazing amount of research. These chapters attempt to tell an accurate story of her life. That’s what I was interested in & the reason I didn’t read more.
The rest of the book discusses her story since she died, which doesn’t really interest me.
The book presents a fact & then discusses why the author believes it to be true. That makes it a scholarly & well written book. It was just a little dry for me to read very much at any one sitting.
There are quite a few photos in the book & I did enjoy seeing them. Many of them were new to me. -
This book was difficult to get through at points, but I don’t want that to cloud my overall review. I really did enjoy the biographical points made about Calamity Jane and her life story overall. However, a large portion of this book focused on novels and films about Calamity Jane, and the author’s thorough descriptions of both the content of those novels and films and the inaccuracies portrayed in them. I did appreciate and understand the author’s reasoning for going into such detail on these things, as it helped to explain how we got the image of Calamity Jane that most of us hold today and how common misconceptions have overshadowed her real life. However, as a reader, it was not always interesting to read. Despite this, I did enjoy most of this book (specifically the first half), and I appreciated the research the author put into to create this book.
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I read an ARC supplied by a publishers rep to the bookstore where I work. I found this book to be readable (as in not extremely dry and academic) but tedious. The first part of the book follows the chronology of her life, but much of it is repetitive. The author clearly states that there aren't a lot of known hard and fast details of Calamity's life, but that means the book is a lot of speculation (things like "according to census records her parents were here then there, so they must have traveled between them - ok, that's a bit exaggerated but by the end of the section that's what it felt like it said. ) The later half of the book is basically a historiography of the essays, books, movies, etc which feature Calamity Jane. A little more interesting but it also got tedious as most of the criticisms of the various works started to sound alike. Altogether, this was worth reading as I had very little knowledge of Martha Canary (aka Calamity Jane) but I'm not sure I'll be recommending it a lot.
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Calamity Jane should make for an interesting subject. Unfortunately, to make a book out of the scarce information there is on Calamity Jane's life apparently involves a lot of commentary on topics tangential to Calamity Jane -- for example, an academic discourse on the history of Calamity Jane in popular culture, on public misconception of the character, on journalists' perpetuations of falsehoods, et cetera. Those who have a historian's interest in Calamity Jane will appreciate the enormous effort the author has put into documenting every aspect of Calamity Jane and her legend. Those who are only curious about the character, such as myself, might not be able to make it through the entire book.
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If you are a serious student of old west history walk, no, run away from this book. Of the 355 pages only 199 pages tell the story. The remaining pages are a bloated, long winded bibliography and critique of other books and films on the subject. I ended up picking and choosing what I read in this section because it served as one giant spoiler for other authors work. Very Disappointing.
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I appreciate the amount of research that went into this book trying to pin down elusive facts concerning Calamity Jane. The book contained an extensive amount of information of the facts and fiction pertaining to her life.
