Most people have heard of Calamity Jane, once promoted as The Famous Woman Scout of the Wild West. But do we really know who she was? After losing her parents as a young girl, Martha Canary had to fend for herself on the frontier and eventually became the legendary Calamity Jane.
It’s hard to distinguish fact from fiction in Calamity’s life. Dime novelists invented tall tales about her and she fabricated many more yarns herself. In The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane, Richard W. Etulain separates fact from myth, showing all sides of this complex larger-than-life person. If you want to learn the truth and hear the fable of this Old West character, you need to read this book.
—Bill Markley author of Deadwood Dead Men
Related Articles
-
Art of the American Frontier: From the Buffalo Bill Center of the West (Yale University…
-
Arguing that Western movies have for more than a century “reflected American history and culture,”…
-
Michael K. Johnson’s Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos: Conceptions of the African American West is…
