Yukon who is who

Martha Jane “Calamity Jane” Cannary (1852 – 1903)

Martha Jane Cannary was born near Princeton, Missouri to parents Robert Wilson and Charlotte M. Cannary. In 1865 the family moved to Virginia City, Montana and then to Salt Lake City, Utah after Jane’s mother died in 1866. Her father died in 1867 and Jane, the eldest of five siblings, took her brothers and sisters to Piedmont, Wyoming. She found whatever work she could including prostitution. This is where she acquired her nickname Calamity Jane. There are many unverified stories about her experience as a scout involved in the Indian wars. In 1875 she travelled with the Newton-Jenny Party into Rapid City, and then settled in the Black Hills area at Deadwood, South Dakota. She was occasionally employed by Dora DuFran, the Black Hills leading madam, and met Wild Bill Hickok and Charlie Utter. At one point she helped save passengers in an overland stage when the driver was killed by Plains Indians and she had to drive the coach on to Deadwood. In 1876 or 1878, she nursed the victims of a smallpox epidemic in the area. In 1881, she bought a ranch west of Miles City, Montana along the Yellowstone River. She married Clinton Burke and they moved to Boulder where they had a daughter who was given up for adoption. In 1893, she started to appear in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show as a storyteller.¹⁾

Jane performed sharpshooting skills astride a horse in the Wild West shows and toured the west for several years. Her appearance was unreliable as she could be drunk and disorderly. She sold her greatly exaggerated biography to her fans for pennies.²⁾

The Dawson newspaper Klondike Nugget noted that Calamity Jane of Deadwood and Leadville fame, and one of Well’s Fargo’s most trusted detectives, was in Dawson in June 1898.³⁾ She may have run a boarding house while she was in town.⁴⁾

Jane was depressed and an alcoholic. She was in the Black Hills for a few months in 1903, cooking and doing the laundry for Dora DuFran, and then travelled to Terry, South Dakota, a small mining village near Deadwood where she died from inflammation of the bowel and pneumonia. She is buried next to Wild Bill Hickok as a joke by her pall bearers as they said he had no use for her when she was alive.⁵⁾