American Historical Ephemera & Photography

3 7/8 x 5 3/8 in. cabinet photograph on cardstock mount (light toning to print; minor spotting and soiling to mount). "Calamnity [sic] Jane, Gen. Crook's Scout" printed in the negative. Wilson's "Theatrical Celebrities" imprint to mount recto. Verso bears pencil identification and inscription "Anoka Minn." Calamity Jane is featured here wearing a fringed jacket, ammunition belt, and revolver, and holding the barrel of a repeating rifle pointed upward.

Perhaps no other figure is more illustrative of the wild days in Deadwood in the 1870s than Martha Jane "Calamity" Cannary (1852-1903). Her history is shrouded in uncertainty and myth. As early as 1864 her family was living in Virginia City, Nevada, and by the late 1860s she was apparently a consort of various soldiers at Forts Jim Bridger and Steel in Montana Territory. She had a propensity for dressing in men's clothes, and may have been with Crook at the Battle of Slim Buttes in 1876, dressed as such. She apparently accompanied Wild Bill Hickok, Colorado Charlie Utter and Bloody Dick Seymour when they arrived in Deadwood in June or July of 1876, and was there when Bill was murdered. By all accounts, she was a profane alcoholic, but with many likeable qualities. While never married to Hickok, she was buried next to him in Deadwood.