When the going gets tough…
By Mark Lane
Submitted to Corner Post
Not many people know who Martha Canary was, but plenty of those same people have heard of Calamity Jane. They’re one and the same. Born May 1, 1852, in Mercer County Missouri, near the town of Princeton, Martha Jane was the first of six children of Robert and Charlotte Canary. When Jane was 12 years old, the family joined a wagon train heading for Virginia City, Montana. Charlotte succumbed to pneumonia before reaching their destination, and was buried near Blackfoot, Montana. Not long after arriving in Virginia City, Robert and the children moved on to Salt Lake City Utah, where he intended to farm.
Within a year, however, Robert died, too. Alone in a strange land, with no support, Martha loaded her five young siblings and their meager belongings into a wagon and made the rugged trek to Fort Bridger, and then the bustling little railroad town of Piedmont in the Wyoming Territory. It’s said that when the going gets tough, the tough get going. To provide for herself and her siblings, Martha took on a variety of jobs, first for households, then for saloons, and eventually in dangerous roles undertaken only by tough and daring men.
When the food you eat depends on what you can shoot, and bullets aren’t easy to come by, you learn to make every shot count. Keen eyesight, quick reflexes and a steady aim mean the difference between meat in the belly and an empty pot. Martha became amazingly adept as a sharpshooting hunter. Those skills later served her well when, as an ox team and a stagecoach driver, she fought off bandits and Indians. She also developed a deep understanding of the land and the animals and people in it. Having never known a truly secure life, it was probably inevitable that she would parlay her skills and daring into a life of high adventure. By the time she turned 19, Martha was working as a military scout in the hostile Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Montana and Dakota territories.
According to one account, questioned by some, but generally believed to be true, Martha was with a small detachment of soldiers that was ambushed by Indians. The group’s leader, Captain James Egan, was shot and slumped in the saddle. Rushing over, Jane pulled Egan onto her own saddle, and riding fast and low, outran the charging natives back to the nearest fort. When he was recovering, Egan thanked her and christened her with the “Calamity Jane” moniker. (Prior to Egan’s nickname, she went by her legal first name, Martha. Army records identifying a scout in the service there as “M. Canary” at the same time that she was in that role, lend credence to that claim.)
When it came to sharpshooting and trick shooting, Calamity Jane had no equal among women. Among men, a few might boast of more impressive shots, but in head-to-head match shooting, she was not beaten. That fact was not lost on the consummate promoter of western drama, Buffalo Bill Cody. He added Jane as a featured act in his Wild West Show. He also had an interest in promoting her persona to boost ticket sales. This, in turn, led to publication of exaggerated accounts of her actual exploits to the point that “Calamity Jane” became one of the best-known characters of the late 19th century.
Later in life, Jane owned a ranch in Montana, tried at least twice to operate a business, and had two common-law husbands and at least two children. But alcoholism, developed over more than three decades of hard living, doomed those dreams, and little is documented about them. Jane died on August 1,1903 of pneumonia and inflammation of the bowels. She was 51. She is buried in Deadwood, South Dakota.
While fact and fiction are often blurred in the making and retelling of a legend, some nuggets of truth can be strained from life we recall. The girl in question faced calamities that would have crushed many others, but she took charge and took care of her brothers and sisters at her own peril. She grew up in a dangerous, unforgiving world. She did things others would have avoided, and in so doing, reached heights others could never imagine.
