Mount Moriah Cemetery sits on a hill above Deadwood, South Dakota.
Walk up there today and you’ll find two graves side by side. One belongs to Wild Bill Hickok. The other belongs to Calamity Jane.
Every tourist who makes the climb takes the same photograph. The story goes that she asked to be buried beside him. The only man she ever loved.
That’s the version on the postcards.
The men who actually arranged her funeral told a different story about how she ended up in that plot. We’ll get to what they said, and it is not romantic.
But before the graves, and before the forged diary that showed up 38 years later and fooled the entire country, you need to know who’s buried up there. Because the woman under that stone is not the woman most people think she is.
We’re going to check her against the 1860 census, a newspaper dispatch from 1875, and the historian who spent 20 years running this down, James D. McLaird.
Real stories, rough country.
Let’s start with her birthday, because she lied about it. And the lie tells you how she operated.
She was born Martha Jane Cannary in Mercer County, Missouri. For most of her life, she told people the date was May 1st, 1852.
The 1860 census says otherwise.
It lists a four-year-old girl named Martha in that household, which puts her real birth year around 1856. McLaird goes with the census. So does Richard at Tulane, the other serious modern biographer.
Jane went with the better story.
Hold on to that pattern. We’re going to see it about nine more times.
Her family went west in 1865 toward the Montana gold diggings. Her mother died around 1866 near Blackfoot. Pneumonia.
Her father took the children into Utah and was dead himself by about 1867. There’s no death certificate for him, no burial record. He just stops appearing.
So that’s the actual starting point of the legend. Around 11 years old, both parents in the ground, five younger children looking at her, not a dollar to her name.
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Then the trail nearly disappears, and I’ll tell you that plainly instead of filling the gap with something invented. Because filling that gap with something invented is how this whole legend got built.
In 1869, she surfaces in the Wyoming Territorial Census, in a railroad town called Piedmont. The entry lists her as 15. She was probably closer to 13.
No parents. A clerk with a pen writing down a girl standing in front of him.
Then for the better part of five years, almost nothing.
When she reappears, she’s working the country around Fort Laramie. The documented jobs are laundress, cook, teamster, bullwhacker, dance hall girl.
Ben Arnold, who saw her then, said she learned to be a good driver of freight teams.
She also at times sold herself. McClard concludes she worked as a prostitute intermittently in the road ranches, though never as a regular fixture in any one house. It was one of several ways a woman with no money stayed fed.
What she was not doing in any of these years was scouting for the United States Army.
Remember that.
May 20th, 1875. An army surgeon at Fort Laramie named Valentine McGillicuddy watched a woman cross the parade ground in spurs, chaps, and a sombrero and asked who she was.
Lieutenant Colonel Richard Irving Dodge told him she was something like a regimental mascot. A woman who didn’t know the meaning of the word morals.
That summer, Dodge escorted a government survey into the Black Hills. A few days out, somebody noticed an extra young private riding with the column.
It was Jane in soldier’s blue, attached to the civilian teamsters, invited by nobody.
One of the men on that expedition was filing dispatches to the Chicago Daily Tribune. On June 19th, 1875, the paper ran his account, and in it he calls her Calamity.
He writes that Calamity is dressed in a suit of soldier’s blue and straddles a mule equal to any professional black snake swinger in the army.
That’s the first appearance of the name in print, a full year before she ever laid eyes on Wild Bill Hickok.
Whatever it meant to the men who started using it, it had nothing to do with a famous gunfighter.
So where did it come from?
Two stories, neither provable.
Hers went like this. She rescued a Captain Egan from an ambush, hauled the wounded officer onto her horse, and he looked at her and said, “I name you Calamity Jane, the heroine of the plains.”
Her friend George Hoshier, a pallbearer at her funeral, told the Washington Post something else in 1906. He said she picked it up in Cheyenne for the simple reason that she was a walking disaster.
Rent a buggy and she’d wreck it. Climb on a fence rail and the rail would throw her.
The editor of the Cheyenne Daily Sun started calling her Calamity Jane, and it stuck.
I’ll let you pick. I’ll only point out that one of those sounds like a dime novel, and the other one sounds like a woman.
In 1896, a booklet went on sale for a dime called The Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane, by herself.
It was not by herself.
Martha Cannary could not read or write. Somebody took down what she said and cleaned it up. And she sold copies out of her hands for whatever strangers would pay.
Here’s what’s in it.
She scouted for General Custer in Arizona from 1870 to 1872. She rode for the Pony Express. She swam the Platte in winter carrying dispatches.
None of it happened.
Custer wasn’t in Arizona in those years. He was at Fort Leavenworth working on his memoirs.
Dan Thrapp, who spent a career on frontier biography, put it flatly. There is no record that she was ever a scout.
And you don’t have to take it from a historian, because a man who actually did the job said it while she was barely cold.
Captain Jack Crawford scouted for General Crook. He knew her. In April of 1904, in the Anaconda Standard, he said she never saw service in any capacity under either Crook or Miles.
That she was never in an Indian fight.
And that she was simply a notorious character. Dissolute and devilish. But possessed of a generous streak that made her popular.
Hold on to that last part. Crawford is about to be right about that, too.
So when people say Hollywood invented Calamity Jane, they’re half right. Hollywood took the material. Jane wrote the sales copy.
Around the 1st of July, 1876, a wagon train was leaving Fort Laramie for the Deadwood gold camp. An officer asked the outfit to take a young woman off his hands.
She’d been on a tear and landed in the post guardhouse.
Joseph White Eye Anderson, traveling with those wagons, put it bluntly. She’d been on a big drunk with the soldiers. And she was very drunk and near naked when they collected her.
That’s the meeting.
The army wanted her gone, the wagons were leaving, and she went north with Charlie Utter’s outfit.
Wild Bill Hickok was on that wagon train.
That is when they met. Not years earlier, and not in any of the places she later claimed.
Here’s the detail that gets cut from nearly every version. Hickok was married.
He’d married Agnes Lake Thatcher on March 5th, 1876, four months before that wagon train pulled out. That marriage is on paper with a date and a place.
The Hickok historian, Joseph Rosa, found genuine affection in the letters between Bill and Agnes.
Now count forward.
Hickok was murdered on August 2nd, 1876, shot in the back of the head at a saloon table in Deadwood.
From the wagon train to the grave is about six weeks.
Six weeks on a wagon train and then in a mining camp, surrounded the whole time by people who left accounts of that summer.
And not one of those accounts puts them together as a couple.
Not a letter, not a diary entry, not a witness statement. Nobody standing there in the summer of 1876 thought there was a romance worth writing down.
What Jane said later is another matter.
She said they were secretly married. She said she cradled him as he died. She said she chased Jack McCall through the streets of Deadwood with a meat cleaver.
That last one is a great story, and there’s not a shred of it in the record.
If you want what happened to the man who killed Wild Bill, we made a whole video on it, and the real ending is stranger than the cleaver.
Six weeks wasn’t enough to build a life with Hickok. It was plenty to build a legend on.
She spent the next 27 years doing exactly that.
Now, the part that holds up, and it’s the best thing about her.
In 1978, smallpox came through Deadwood. In a mining camp, that meant a quarantine shack up the hill, and men lying in it alone.
The sick were carried out to a pest tent on White Rock Mountain, and most of the camp did what most people do.
Jane went up.
She had no medical training. She commandeered water and groceries, and by more than one account, she wasn’t polite about how she got them.
Eight men are commonly named. About five lived.
Dora DuFran, the madam who knew her for years, said Jane buried the three who died herself, and said over them the only prayer she knew, the one children say at bedtime.
Here’s why this matters.
The meat cleaver. The secret marriage. Cradling Hickok as he died.
Every one of those comes out of Jane’s own mouth and nowhere else.
The smallpox nursing comes from other people, several of them, describing the same woman doing the same thing.
That’s the difference between a story and a record.
And here the record is better than the story she sold.
Stay with me, because in a few minutes we get to a woman who sat down at a national radio microphone and told the United States a lie about Calamity Jane that the country believed for 50 years.
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In November of 1882, near Miles City, Montana, Jane had a son. The local papers called him little calamity.
A freighter remembered watching her cover the baby in kisses and call him her little snoozy darling.
She said later that he died.
And after that, the record thins out and doesn’t come back.
Five years later, she had a daughter. Jessie, born October 28th, 1887. That one is solid.
In May of 1888, Jane legally married a railroad brakeman named William Steers. There’s a certificate out of Bingham County, Idaho Territory.
It’s the one marriage of her life anybody can document, and it was violent.
She had him jailed for beating her more than once, and inside a year, he’s gone from the record entirely.
By 1895, she came into Deadwood saying she needed money to put Jessie in a convent school over in Sturgis.
Her old friends threw a benefit and it worked, right up until Jane started buying drinks for the room.
She got the girl enrolled anyway.
Jane told a writer that Jessie was all she had to live for.
She lost her anyway.
After that, she lived off her own name, selling the booklet and photographs of herself.
In 1901, she turned up at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, riding in the August parade with the Indian Congress alongside Geronimo and Red Cloud.
She was clearing about 30 cents a week out of it. So she drank the difference and got picked up for public drunkenness.
When Buffalo Bill Cody’s show came to town, she went to his tent and asked for a ticket home, and Cody paid it.
Which corrects the one that turns up in every comment section. She appeared at the exposition with the Indian Congress. She never performed in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.
Cody’s part in the story is that he paid to send her home.
By 1903, she was back in the Black Hills, taken in by Dora DuFran, cooking and doing laundry at the house in Belle Fourche.
A roof, regular meals, somebody who gave a damn.
The steadiest stretch of her last 10 years.
It lasted a few months.
On the afternoon of August 1st, 1903, in a room at the Callaway Hotel in the mining town of Terry, South Dakota, Martha Canary died.
The cause was recorded as inflammation of the bowels. What killed her was 30 years of drinking.
She was 51 by the count she gave the world. 47 if you believe the census.
They brought her into Deadwood, and the funeral was the largest ever held there for a woman.
The man who closed the lid on her coffin was one of the miners she’d nursed through the smallpox as a boy.
Now, the burial.
You’ll hear she asked on her deathbed to be laid beside Wild Bill. You’ll also hear something else entirely.
Both versions come from people’s memories, told long after the fact. Neither one is a document.
Here’s the second version.
There’s a letter in the archives at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West describing how the burial got decided. According to it, several prominent Deadwood men were drinking in Mike Russell’s saloon when word came that Jane was dead.
After a round or two, they agreed she’d earned a proper send-off, mostly on the strength of what she’d done during the smallpox.
Then somebody asked where they ought to put her, and somebody else said it would be a good joke on Wild Bill to bury her right alongside him.
Slow down here, because this is where you check the evidence instead of running with it.
That’s a recollection, written down long after 1903, reporting what other men said. It’s not an inquest and it’s not a court record.
It’s a strong story from people close to the event, and that’s all it is.
I’m telling you that because if I didn’t, somebody in the comments would, and they’d be right to.
What isn’t in question is where she ended up. The graves went in side by side and have stayed that way for 120 years.
Tourists climb that hill and read it as a love story.
If those men were telling the truth, it’s a punchline that outlived everyone who was in on it.
That might have been the end of it.
Except 38 years later, somebody took this story and did something with it a great deal bigger than a joke in a saloon.
On Mother’s Day, 1941, a woman named Jean Hickok Burkhart McCormick sat down at a CBS microphone for a program called We, the People and told the country she was the daughter of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane.
Born of a secret marriage that in 65 years nobody had ever mentioned or written down anywhere.
And she brought proof.
A diary kept by Jane herself, a stack of letters, a marriage record she said was inscribed in a Bible dated September 25th, 1873 at Benson’s Landing in Montana Territory.
Not folklore. Not a family story told at the dinner table. Documents.
Here’s the detail that ends it by itself.
Martha Canary could not read or write.
McClaird established that across her whole life, and it isn’t a close call. A woman who could not write her own name did not leave behind pages of flowing literate diary entries about her innermost feelings toward a secret husband.
That’s not a quibble about style. The person being presented as the author physically could not have produced the document.
And if that alone doesn’t finish it, the diary finishes itself.
Somewhere in its pages, Jane describes meeting Jesse James after his death and watching him sing at his own funeral.
I’m not making that up.
Jesse James died in 1882. You cannot attend the funeral of a man who is still alive, and you certainly cannot listen to him perform at it.
That doesn’t weaken the document. It breaks it. No expert required.
There’s more.
The diary has Jane traveling to England with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which the real Martha Canary never did. The dates don’t line up with where she was. Places are described by someone who’d never been there.
McLaird laid the whole thing out in the journal South Dakota History in the 1990s and again in his 2005 biography. And his conclusion is blunt.
The evidence is overwhelming that McCormick wrote the diary and the letters herself.
Now, here’s the part that should bother you.
This wasn’t some fringe claim a few people fell for. Some of Hickok’s own relatives accepted it. Newspapers ran it straight.
That June, McCormick rode in a parade in Abilene, Kansas as her daughter.
In September of 1941, the federal government granted her old age assistance on the strength of it.
Biographers cited the diary as a source. Western histories repeated the secret marriage for decades.
The Calamity Jane you’ve seen in the books and on the screen, the one who loved Wild Bill and lost him, ran on fuel a woman in Montana manufactured in 1941.
50 years went by before anybody ran it down properly. The forged papers sat in a museum collection being treated as a historical record.
Checking a diary against a calendar takes work, and the story was too good for anyone to want to do it.
So strip out the diary and the daughter who never existed, and the joke in the saloon.
What’s left standing?
A real daughter, for one, and almost nobody tells you about her.
Jessie bounced in and out of school and in and out of her mother’s custody until 1899, when a man Jane was living with took the girl to Montana to be raised by his mother.
They saw each other once more briefly in early 1903. On her deathbed, Jane admitted they’d become strangers.
Jessie grew up so far from all of it that for years she believed Calamity Jane was her grandmother.
Later, she told people that Jane and Bill Starr were her aunts. Neither was true.
She died in California in 1980, and her death certificate lists her mother’s maiden name correctly as Canary.
That’s the last true sentence in the whole story, and it took 93 years to get written down.
Two graves on a hill. A gunfighter who spent his last years half blind and broke before a stranger shot him in the back of the head. And a laundress who buried smallpox victims with her own hands, then spent 27 years turning a six-week acquaintance into the only thing she ever owned outright.
Dora DuFran, who knew her better than anyone left alive, said Jane knew where she’d made her mistakes and never rated her own virtues as high as her friends did.
The myth turned her into a buckskin heroine.
The record turns her into something a good deal more interesting.
Drunk and illiterate. Generous and kind. Abused and at times abusive.
Brave when it didn’t much matter, and gone when it did.
She wasn’t Wild Bill’s secret bride.
She was Martha Canary out of Mercer County, Missouri. Orphaned at 11 with five children looking at her, who played out about the worst hand anybody gets for another 35 years on nerve alone.
120 years later, people still climb that hill to see her.
Whatever those men in the saloon thought they were doing, she won.
If your family’s got roots in Deadwood or the Black Hills, or there’s a Calamity Jane story that got handed down in your family, true or tall, put it in the comments. I read every one.
And if you’re watching on the television right now and can’t type a word of it, come find this one on your phone later. Those comments are half the reason this channel exists.
Real stories, rough country.
