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Ashley Shye

High Class Companion in Los Angeles

Heroine of the wild west

Published: June 13th, 2022

Heroine of the wild west

Hard drinking and high drama there is a possibility that very little of this is true. Calamity Jane is one of those historical figures whose identity is mostly fabrication, an illusion of grandeur and glory that disguised a life of carousing, alcoholism, and hardship. There are thousands and thousands of legends about the wild woman of the American West but not a lot of accurate information.

The human behind the myth: Calamity Jane.  By age 15, young Martha had separated from her family and was quickly being pulled into the fray of railroad life. After living as a vagrant and completing odd jobs, she wound up in Cheyenne Wyoming in 1869. At some point, she was recruited to work as a prostitute in Fort Laramie.
 
Prostitution was a booming business in the Wid West contrary to popular belief, prostitution was actually one of the more lucrative positions a woman could hold at the time. Instead of being bound to one husband, forced to do housework, and left without pay, prostitutes could pick who they had sex with and how they spent their days. It’s not hard to imagine that Calamity Jane, like many prostitutes, found power in the peculiar freedom that the profession offered. Of course, sex workers faced many risks in their own right, like most people on the margins of society. During her time as a prostitute, Martha Jane developed an interest in traditionally male activities like hunting and exploring. She also learned to smoke, drink, and curse, and somehow or other adopted the nickname “Calamity.” 

Eventually, Jane gravitated from physical labor to performance, her true talent. She was featured in Wild West shows, but was fired for alcoholism and debauchery on set.  Calamity Jane died in a hotel room. Some say she was kicked off a freight train for her drunkenness, and was helped into a hotel in the town of Terry, South Dakota, where locals called a doctor. She died there, most likely of pneumonia, on August 1, 1903 (of that, we’re pretty sure). 

Calamity Jane’s legacy is complex, like the legacy of the Wild West itself. Both the woman and the era have persisted in collective memory and in popular culture. Jane’s famous gender-bending appearance, in an era when women were mostly expected to comply with the standards of traditional femininity, presented a kind of escapism and drama that verges on fetishization at times. 

Regardless of what you believe, the myths Calamity Jane created have never died. She’s been a highwaywoman, a horse thief, a minister’s daughter, the daughter of a fallen soldier, a compliant wife, a woman who wanted to be a man, a hero, a sinner, a fiction. Yet like the larger myth of America’s grandeur and infallibility and goodness, she lives on.

Ashley: I can be wild and certainly willing xx