Her name isn’t real and neither are most of the folklore images of her. Calamity Jane—yes, there really was such a person in the Old West—wasn’t the glamour puss as Jean Arthur portrayed her in 1936’s The Plainsman, but she also wasn’t the silly twit of Doris Day’s 1953 movie. She wasn’t “The West’s Joan of Arc” of dime novels or “The Black Hills Florence Nightingale” of early newspaper articles, nor was she the “Lady Robin Hood” of someone’s fantasies. But she
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