Life can be sad for people sometimes. Not just a little, but a lot. I don’t understand why this is true.
It may have been the case for Calamity Jane. While I couldn’t say for sure, because she lived a long time before I was born, it sure appears from the outside that her life was fraught with sadness.
She started out as Martha Jane Cannary, and was born in Princeton, Missouri in 1852. She was the oldest child of six and her parents died early. So Martha Jane loaded up those kids and took them further west, to Piedmont, Wyoming.
In Piedmont, Jane took whatever jobs she could find to provide for her large sibling family. She would have been only about 16 years old. She worked several different jobs, among them a dishwasher, cook, waitress, dance hall girl, nurse, and ox team driver. There were also several times in her life when she worked as a prostitute.
When most of the world thinks of Calamity Jane, they picture the rough and tumble frontierswoman, who appeared in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. She also participated in the 1901 Pan-American Exposition. She had the “image” of a tobacco-spitting, beer-guzzling, foul-mouthed woman who preferred men’s clothing to dresses.
But behind all of that was a sadness, I think. Despite the tough exterior, there are lots of stories of her being a kind and compassionate person. Calamity Jane was a well-known humanitarian in Deadwood (SD), nursing local residents stricken by the smallpox epidemic. Other stories too.
One of the saddest episodes of her life was Wild Bill Hickok. It seems she had a thing for him, and that attraction was unrequited. At any rate, Wild Bill was killed and she went on. There are accounts that she was married at one point, and may have had a child, or even two. But all this is sketchy. She didn’t keep her alleged kids, giving them away after birth.
Throughout this, she was a heavy drinker. Her entire life, an alcoholic. She moved around to many places.
Jane returned to the Black Hills of South Dakota in the spring of 1903. She had a friend there in the way of Madame Dora DuFran, a brothel owner. For the next few months, Jane earned her keep by cooking and doing the laundry for Dora’s brothel girls.
In late July of 1903, Jane traveled by train to Terry, South Dakota, a small mining village near Deadwood, and stayed at the Calloway Hotel. She died at the age of 51. Today is the anniversary of that death. It was reported that she had been drinking heavily the whole time she was on board the train. She became sick to her stomach, and the conductor, a guy named S.G. Tillett, carried her off the train.
Once there, a bartender secured a room for her at the Calloway Hotel, and a doctor was summoned. Jane died shortly thereafter. The cause was attributed to inflammation of the bowels and pneumonia.
Calamity Jane was buried at Mount Moriah Cemetery, South Dakota, next to Wild Bill Hickok. And even the story of her death is forever sad. There were “four men” who planned her funeral. They buried her next to Wild Bill Hickok as a joke on him. They said Wild Bill had “absolutely no use” for Jane while he was alive, so they decided to play a posthumous joke on him by burying her by his side.
No one knows for sure how she got the name “Calamity Jane.” But I can certainly tell you what it means. Calamity: an event causing great and often sudden damage or distress; a disaster.
When I hear these types of stories, filled with so much misery and sadness, it makes me sad for them. It makes me wonder too. I wonder how many times they stopped to reflect on their inner selves, if ever. Or if it all just rolled and tumbled on to the next raucous thing? Did they have times of longing, or regret, or any moments of soul searching? We’ll never know these things about Martha Jane Cannary. But I hope when she passed, she finally found peace.
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“Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset.”
—Saint Francis de Sales
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“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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“When things change inside you, things change around you.”
—Unknown
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