Calamity Jane: She Knew Wild Bill for Six Weeks

Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok are buried side by side at Mount Moriah Cemetery above Deadwood, South Dakota. Every tourist reads it as a love story. They knew each other about six weeks.This is Calamity Jane: fact vs fiction. The real Martha Jane Canary against the legend she helped build.She met Hickok on a wagon train out of Fort Laramie around July 1, 1876, after the Army put her on it to get rid of her. He had married Agnes Lake Thatcher that March. He was murdered in Deadwood on August 2. Not one contemporary account from that summer describes a romance.So where did the love story come from? On Mother's Day 1941, a woman named Jean Hickok Burkhardt McCormick went on national radio claiming to be their secret daughter, with a diary and letters as proof. It fooled the country for fifty years. It falls apart on one fact: Martha Canary could not read or write.We check her against the 1860 census, the 1875 Chicago Tribune dispatch that first printed the nickname, and the work of historian James D. McLaird. We cover the Army scout claim that Captain Jack Crawford flatly denied, the 1878 smallpox winter that actually holds up, the marriage to William Steers, and the daughter almost nobody talks about.Got family roots in Deadwood or the Black Hills? Leave your story in the comments.Real Stories. Rough Country.Welcome to Saddle & Smoke — where the American Wild West comes alive through raw, untold history.Subscribe to Saddle & Smoke for more untold Wild West stories, outlaw history, cowboy legends, gold rush tales, frontier mysteries, and the darker side of American history. New episodes explore the real Wild West — one story at a time.#WildWest #OldWest #AmericanHistory #WesternHistory #Outlaws #Cowboys #FrontierHistory #SaddleAndSmoke