Booklist Review
Jones (University of Kent) presents an academic study of Martha Jane Canary, aka "Calamity Jane," exploring Canary's life in relation to issues of gender identity and feminism in the shifting landscapes of the Old West. Jones clarifies how much of the legend of Calamity Jane was fact and how much was hyperbole that Canary herself promoted. She claimed, for instance, that she rescued Captain James Egan from a Nez Perce raid in 1872. She supposedly scooped the injured Egan up on her horse and carried him to the closest fort, saving his life, after which Egan christened her "Calamity Jane, Heroine of the Plains." Jones notes that "Calamity," however, was also slang in the Old West for venereal disease, and one could have used "Jane" at the time to refer to any woman. Jones fills the book with deep dives into the historical record to try to determine the truths in Calamity Jane's story, including discussions of gender fluidity, transgender practice, and treatment of women over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Choice Review
This fresh look at Martha Jane Canary (a.k.a. "Calamity Jane") draws on the best in previous conventional biographies as a starting point for a fresh, more complex approach, cementing Jones (Univ. of Kent, UK) as a topflight historian. Here, readers meet "Calam" as she arrived in boisterous Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876, exploiting a possibly invented story of rescuing a runaway stagecoach; men's clothing; her work as a scout for General George Custer; her gun-toting, hard-drinking, and straight-talking behavior; and a brief friendship with Marshal William ("Wild Bill") Hickok to invent a new persona and become a cultural icon. As such, she appeared in dime novels, Wild West shows, hagiographies and popular biographies, novels, comic books, motion pictures, television shows, and excellent academic biographies. Her career stretched boundaries as she embodied limited social roles for women while cross-dressing, hinting at a figure of sexual ambiguity that many movements, including gay liberation and radical feminism, could employ in support of their causes. One wonders whether Ellinor Pruitt Stewart's realistic Letters of a Woman Homesteader (1914) and its readership would have made a useful counterpoint to "Calam's" story. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Douglas W Steeples, emeritus, Independent Scholar
