WEST WORDS; Uppity woman; Calamity Jane The Woman and the Legend James D. McLaird University of Oklahoma Press: 378 pp., $29.95 HOME EDITION

• Published in: The Los Angeles times
• Main Author: Kirsch, Jonathan
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, Calif Los Angeles Times Communications LLC 16.10.2005
• Subjects: Biographies; Books-titles; Burk, Martha Jane Cannary (Calamity Jane) (1852?-1903); Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend; McLaird, James D; Nonfiction
• ISSN: 0458-3035

James D. McLaird, professor emeritus of history at Dakota Wesleyan University, sets out to answer that question in his definitive biography of Martha Jane Canary, the woman who came to be known as Calamity Jane. Canary was illiterate, and her ghostwritten 1896 autobiography is "so filled with exaggeration," according to McLaird, "that it confuses as much as it explains." As a result, much of McLaird's account is devoted to sifting through the accumulation of legend and lore in search of the few nuggets of historical truth, a task he performs with skill and flair. The making of the myth started in earnest in 1875, when Canary first arrived in the Black Hills of southern Dakota Territory and attracted the attention of a correspondent for the Chicago Times, who described how she "straddles a mule equal to any professional blacksnake swinger in the army." Here she came to be called "Calamity Jane," a nickname variously attributed to her heroism during an Indian ambush and her exertions as a nurse during a smallpox epidemic in the Dakota Territory town of Deadwood. Here, too, she acquired a reputation for wearing men's clothes, a habit she claimed to have acquired while scouting for Custer. But according to McLaird, it was a sign that she was indeed a camp follower, who wore the cast-off military uniforms of her clients. McLaird concedes that some contemporary historians of the West are resentful of the attention Calamity Jane commands. More worthy of study, they insist, are those unglamorous pioneering women whose lives were a compound of courage and drudgery. But McLaird insists that Calamity Jane is illuminating even if (or perhaps because) she is atypical: "Martha, like Buffalo Bill, is an anomaly in the history of the West," he concludes. "Her importance rests not on the similarity of her life to that of other frontier women, but on the manner in which her life was reshaped to fit a mythic structure glorifying the 'winning of the West.' "