Original subtitles

(techno music)

- [Narrator] In the mid-19th century,

the budding United States of America

which had been independent since 1776 was split in two.

(upbeat music)

This was the frontier.

(upbeat music)

In the East, millions of immigrants arrived

in the hope of a better life and piled into town.

Civilization arrived from Europe

and developed at a rapid rate.

The West, which was still a vast, wild plain

was inhabited by numerous American Indian tribes.

Their sacred lands had been protected

by peace treaties under government orders.

But these very lands became the object of envy

when gold was discovered.

It was the beginning of the conquest of the West.

Hundreds of thousands of pioneers

left to conquer the new world.

Miners, farmers, cowboys.

And among them, a woman unlike any other.

- When one looks at the West,

there's no doubt that there's one woman

who stands out as the preeminent female in the West

and that's Calamity Jane.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] In 1880, she was America's most famous woman.

The first heroine in the history of the United States.

A living legend.

In Custer, South Dakota, a peak was named after her.

(dramatic music)

In Philadelphia, she was the heroine of a play

that ran to a packed house.

(dramatic music)

In New York, she was the queen of the plain,

who protected the weakest and defied the strongest.

The adventures of the female cowboy who embodied

the Wild West fascinated the people of the East.

Her arrival in towns was a major event.

People wanted to toast with her.

Journalists flocked to interview her.

(dramatic music)

- But there's the other side of Martha Canary

that's often missed in history.

The human side of Martha Canary, the real side, the woman.

One of the things I think most people

would be shocked to realize is that she dreamed

mostly a lot of her time of being married and settling down.

She had at least two children.

One a boy who died in infancy evidently.

And a daughter who she loved immensely.

(footsteps)

Her problem was she couldn't maintain

a stable relationship for several reasons.

One was her lifestyle

and the other is she had become an alcoholic.

(dramatic music)

As far as we can tell, she was an alcoholic

possibly from teenage years and that means

she could not go without drinking.

She could not last very long without drinking.

The problem then is here we have Martha Canary the woman,

the alcoholic, trying to take this child with her

and that child would've had a terribly,

terribly bad childhood as Martha had had.

So she was repeating in a sense

her own childhood with her daughter.

- [Narrator] Martha Canary was born

in Princeton, Missouri in 1866.

(wind blowing)

She was the eldest in a family of several children.

And as a young girl she lived on a modest, windswept farm.

Her parents, Robert and Charlotte,

were poor peasants and they eked out a living

on a rather barren farm.

In the surrounding area, they had a bad reputation.

Robert was a gambler and Charlotte drank.

In 1864, unable to make ends meet for their family

and crippled with debt, the Canarys had no choice

but to sell their farm for a pittance

and leave Missouri to escape prosecution.

(dramatic music)

The previous year, gold had been discovered

not far from Virginia City in Montana.

Like thousands of other pioneers,

Robert Canary and his family left for the West.

(dramatic music)

The Canarys joined a group of pioneers on the Oregon trail.

(upbeat music)

Martha was eight years old.

(upbeat music)

She was about to experience one of the most

extraordinary journeys of her life.

(upbeat music)

- The Oregon Trail is the route followed by people

going to Oregon beginning very early in the 19th century.

And the Oregon Trail went from the Missouri River

across Nebraska, Wyoming, into Idaho,

and up into Oregon country as it was first called

before Oregon became a state.

(upbeat music)

Countless people, more than 350,000,

traveled the Oregon Trail between 1841 and about 1869.

And you're talking about a trail

that was 2,000 miles long thereabouts.

So it took four and a half months to five months

to traverse the Oregon Trail.

♫ The rain don't fall and the wind don't blow

- [Narrator] The pioneers hardly ever traveled

more than 15 miles a day,

most of them out of utter desperation.

(horses neighing)

By 1854, nearly 20,000 people

had already died on the Oregon Trail.

Despite the harsh living conditions,

the convoys followed a strict social hierarchy.

The division of tasks between men and women was adhered to.

As Robert had nobody else to help him look after his horses,

Martha was asked to help out.

- This was the time when Calamity learned

it was a lot more fun to do men's work than women's work.

'Cause they're out there on their horses free

and the women were back there cooking

and tending to their children and to the sick,

so you take your choice

and it's not really much of a choice.

And she saw that one right away. (laughing)

(horse neighing)

(dramatic music)

- I'd say that the real West when it began

was a delightful place to live because you had

no traditions to break, but just to make.

You had a new beginning and any time

you start something new, you can do what you want with it.

And I think that was one of the things

that really helped the American West.

People still dream of freedom, of independence.

And they dream of going out

and riding your horse and being a cowboy.

Why?

Because it's symbolic of freedom in America.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] But freedom came with a price.

Whilst on their travels, Charlotte fell ill and passed away.

Robert Canary fled his responsibilities

and disappeared without a trace.

Now an orphan, Martha was separated from her siblings

and confined to carry out household chores

for a foster family in Wyoming.

But a life of labor was not

what the young teenager had in mind.

She preferred rubbing shoulders with soldiers

to scrubbing with black soap.

A freedom that laid the way open for all sorts of excesses.

- The Three Mile Hog Ranch was very specifically

a house of prostitution.

But the reason it was called a hog ranch

was the hogs, the females.

You have a lot of soldiers on the frontier

who are without women, they're young,

they're willing to pay and so the Three Mile Hog Ranch

is one of several hog ranches

or several houses of prostitution

near military posts in the West.

This one is famous for us because Martha Canary

evidently was there for a brief time.

(dramatic music)

- Prostitution in the Old West

really had several different levels.

At the very top of the pyramid were the parlor houses.

Which were usually very fancy establishments,

they provided fine wines.

The women were well dressed.

Then the next level down was the common type of bordello

which was not so attractive women,

perhaps the men would be drinking beer

instead of drinking wine.

Then the next level down would be the cribs.

These were small and these were a lot cheaper.

They saw more customers.

The women were probably diseased and not very good looking.

So at that time there were

many common names for prostitutes.

They went all the way from rather delicate euphemisms

such as fair, but frail, which is

a very polite way of putting it.

To soiled doves.

Most of them drank to some degree or other.

Drank hard liquor, whiskey and so forth.

And a tremendous amount of them used

opium, morphine or laudanum,

which is a solution of alcohol and opium.

But eventually this led to a lot more depression.

And these women would commonly commit suicide

by taking overdose of morphine or laudanum.

And that was a fairly common ending

for a lot of these women.

(dramatic music)

(lively bugle music)

- [Narrator] In 1874, the government sent

a group of soldiers into the Indian territory

of the Black Hills of South Dakota.

(drum beating) (dramatic music)

George Armstrong Custer led the expedition

that was to determine whether there was gold in the Plains.

As there were no results, the following year

a geological expedition was launched.

At its head, Professor Walter Jenney.

(laughing)

- Probably the first time Martha Canary

makes a major entrance into history

is in 1875 with the Newton-Jenney expedition.

The reason Martha Canary flashes into history at this time

is she evidently sneaked along with the expedition.

And along with the expedition are some reporters.

The photographer along on the expedition

took a picture of her reclining on a rock.

(dramatic music)

And here she is in men's clothing, out in the Black Hills,

around the men looking as relaxed

as you could possibly look.

(dramatic music)

- During the U.S. Civil War there were

hundreds of women who disguised themselves

as men to fight in the army.

And they had to really pass as men

because it was illegal for women to be in the army.

But what was different about Calamity was

she didn't care if she passed as a man or not.

She just was herself.

She could be dressed as a man,

but she was still Calamity Jane.

She wasn't pretending to be Calamity Joe or anybody else.

And I think that more than anything else took people aback.

It's like, who is this woman?

She's really interesting because she's so

not like anybody, she was not like anybody else.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] In the article, the Chicago Tribune journalist

described Martha as a strange creature dressed

in the same uniform as soldier.

Everybody called her Calamity Jane.

She could ride a horse and drive oxen

as well as any man in the regiment.

- And when these are published in the Chicago newspapers

suddenly Calamity Jane becomes nationally known,

the name becomes known.

It's fascinating because she was only along

with the expedition a little while.

Once the commander learned she was there,

she was shipped back immediately.

- [Narrator] Unmasked the first time,

Martha carried out a second attempt a few months later

when she secretly joined General Crook's regiments.

As a large amount of gold had been discovered

in the Black Hills, Crook's expedition departed

from Fort Laramie in order to seize the Indian land.

The relationship between the many tribes

and the government fell to pieces.

Tension was running high.

Washington launched the offensive.

Despite their numbers and their automatic rifles,

Crook suffered a crushing defeat at Rosebud

on June 17th, 1876.

On June 25th, at Little Big Horn,

Custer and his men were ambushed and were wiped out.

(guns firing) (screaming)

The Americans were in shock.

For the first time, the Native Indians

were stronger than the White man.

Calamity Jane's military exploits made headline news.

Some even claimed that she had scalped several Indians.

- Martha Canary or Calamity Jane

was sent back right before Crook fights his one battle,

the Battle of the Rosebud.

She really never made it that far.

So whatever scouting career she had

on that expedition was extremely brief.

(dramatic music)

But she was also well-known to the soldiers in the region.

And they all claimed somehow to have met her or knew her.

And they sometimes misplaced when they met her

and when they knew her, but they knew she was along.

And this puts her into the books

as one of the important Indian fighters of the West.

She'd been with the military during that pivotal year.

And this becomes for her a cornerstone of her fame.

- [Narrator] But Calamity Jane's military exploits

were just the dawn of her story.

No sooner had she been sent back from Crook's regiment

than she joined a convoy for Deadwood.

Leading the convoy was Wild Bill Hickok,

the far West's most famous man.

Martha was rapidly becoming a cowboy heartthrob.

- [Woman] (mumbles) by hand with rope.

They was so worn down the horses were of no use.

(background noise drowns out conversation)

- While she was with Wild Bill and his companions

on the way from Fort Laramie to Deadwood

they camped out and she made a reputation as a storyteller.

- [Woman] We can't see anything (mumbles).

- And a man by the name of White-Eye Anderson

said that whenever Calamity began to tell a story

the people in the camp gathered around

because she was so good at telling stories.

And that was probably why so many people

wanted to listen to her.

- [Woman] Everyone thought I wouldn't make it, but I did.

(laughing)

- We have to remember that Calamity Jane was a storyteller.

That's a key part of her life.

She was a colorful storyteller.

And Wild Bill Hickok did not particularly care for her

and was often not present at the storytelling,

but he's just at the campfire.

- We had to lower our wagons by hand with ropes

over the side, but I always made it through.

- According to Wild Bill Hickok's associate,

he didn't like Calamity Jane.

He had nothing to do with her

and she would constantly beg to get whiskey

out of his keg, his wagon.

And Calamity Jane, who we could say

has this mixed background, colorful character,

when she rides into Deadwood with the Hickok party,

she becomes associated in people's minds

with Wild Bill Hickok.

Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane

rode into Deadwood together.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] The gold found in the Black Hills

caused a town to spring up.

A town that was to become legendary.

Deadwood.

- Deadwood in 1876 was very crowded with people coming in.

They weren't too concerned about where they lived,

they threw up brush shacks called wickiups.

They pitched tents, they lived in wagons

and some built small log cabins.

(dramatic music)

The streets were filthy because when it rained,

when it snowed the oxen that came in with the freight trains

would leave droppings all over.

The merchants threw garbage into the streets.

So it was rather smelly.

There were saloons about every other building it was said.

One miner said that whiskey flowed continuously.

And the prices were exorbitantly high.

(dramatic music)

- We need to ask the question, what in the world

is Calamity Jane doing in Deadwood to make a living.

The best evidence suggests that she is working

in places like the Gem Theater

where the demarcation line between dance hall girl

and prostitute was very narrow and shadowy.

(upbeat music) (laughing)

- The Gem Theater was one of the most popular

in Deadwood at the time.

These type of theaters were actually combinations

of saloons, gambling places, dance halls, bordellos

and whatever else the men wanted for entertainment.

(upbeat music)

- [Narrator] By night, Martha would pounce around

in petticoats behind curtains at the Gem Theater.

By day, she would don her suede pants,

belt and French jacket.

(wind blowing)

It was at this time that she crossed paths

with Horatio McGuire, a reporter from the East,

who had come to Deadwood to write

a promotional guide book on the Black Hills region.

(upbeat music)

When he saw Martha up on her horse

dressed as a man, he quickly put pen to paper.

(upbeat music)

- And so here this little story of Calamity Jane

somehow finally goes to the East Coast.

And a dime novelist in Pennsylvania

who had never been West as far we know,

Edward Wheeler, read that story.

And he liked to set, like many other dime novelists,

he liked to set his stories

in the new boom areas in the West.

And he was writing a series on Deadwood.

And he'd created a fictional character called Deadwood Dick.

And created a character, Calamity Jane,

as the sidekick so to speak of Deadwood Dick.

They became the two featured characters of the dime novel.

♫ Your chuck wagon rattlin'

- [Narrator] Dime novels were highly popular serial stories

sold for the very affordable price of 10 cents.

♫ Git around the old chuck wagon

- [Narrator] They first appeared in the late 1870s

and contributed to forging the myths

of the conquest of the West.

Calamity Jane featured in them as Deadwood Dick's partner.

They were a couple of invincible avengers

who performed heroic exploits

and shared a stormy relationship.

Within a few months, Calamity Jane was to conquer

the United States all the way to the East Coast.

Her adventurous character fascinated people.

Her nickname was on everybody's lips.

- The best known rumor for the origins of the nickname

Calamity Jane is the possibility she was named

Calamity because she was involved in

so many calamitous actions.

Whether they were military.

Whether they were actions where she was acting

outside of the normal roles of women.

Or that there seemed to be some tragedy

occurring wherever she was.

And that wherever she was, there was calamity.

- [Narrator] In 1878, Deadwood was hit

by a smallpox epidemic.

(dramatic music)

It was a dreaded scourge in the towns of the West.

Hundreds of people died.

(dramatic music)

Against all odds, Martha was taking care

of miners in an old shack.

(dramatic music)

Her nickname could've come from

her kindhearted habits in times of calamity.

(dramatic music)

But in Deadwood, smallpox was not the only killer.

(dramatic music)

On August 2nd, 1876, the young Jack McCall,

humiliated after losing at poker,

shot Wild Bill Hickok in the back, killing him.

At Wild Bill's funeral, Martha was brokenhearted.

(dramatic music)

- One of the difficult questions to deal with

in Martha Canary's life or Calamity Jane's life

is her relationship to Wild Bill Hickok.

However close or tenuous their relationship was,

we don't know, but certainly there was an emotional tie,

a feeling for each other.

And so in the public imagination,

Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok are linked

and they are linked to this day.

- [Narrator] With Wild Bill dead and gone,

Martha had no reason to remain in Deadwood.

She took to the road once again.

(upbeat music)

♫ I'm gonna have a cowboy wedding

♫ When the sage is all a blue

- [Narrator] From Montana to Wyoming,

she wandered from town to town

notching up adventures and cowboys on the way.

A few days, a few weeks, sometimes a few months at a time.

Alongside the cowboy, she kept ranches,

reared cattle and ran saloons.

But never for very long.

Her rowdy ways triggered all kinds of rumors.

(upbeat music)

(upbeat music)

In a world in which women could exist

only through their husbands,

Martha too needed men to make ends meet.

She lived for a while with a cowboy named Frank King.

The birth of her son, Little Calamity, made the headlines.

- We had the fellow and the recollection

in the paper at the time of Calamity Jane

bouncing her little baby boy on her lap

and saying, "My baby's going to become president

"of the United States someday."

And you see this proud mother with her infant.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] But Little Calamity never became president.

The boy died prematurely when he was just a few months old.

Barely recovered from the tragedy,

Martha crossed the path of another man

who was to turn her life upside down.

- Bill Steers was probably the most difficult husband

that Calamity was with.

They met sometime about 1885 in the Rawlins area.

He was a brakeman.

He was at least 10 years younger than Calamity.

And it was a stormy relationship.

(dramatic music)

- He was terribly abusive.

Serious beat her, once with a monkey wrench.

She had him jailed at least three times

and put in jail for beating her.

She would show up with black eyes and bruised face and so on

and yet she stayed with him.

And in 1887, traveled to Idaho,

out of Wyoming, and got married.

And we have the marriage certificate

of Martha Canary and Bill Steers.

And I think the reason she got married to Bill Steers

is just within the year before that,

she had given birth to a daughter.

(dramatic music)

And she legally married, I think,

to allow that daughter to be legitimate.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] Martha's family dream collapsed.

She ran away from her abusive husband to protect Jessie.

Both mother and daughter were to embark

for a long journey across the West.

With the railroad, civilization took ahold of the wild.

(dramatic music)

Easterners gathered by thousands

in order to cultivate new land.

Barbed wire invaded the countryside.

(dramatic music)

Buffaloes were vanishing for their hides.

And along with them, the starving Indians.

(dramatic music)

Expelled from their lands,

the tribes were placed in reservations.

In 1890, the Battle of Wounded Knee

put an end to the Sioux war.

The white man had dominated over the American West.

(dramatic music)

- They used to call that a battle.

The Battle of Wounded Knee.

And some people still refer to it as that incorrectly.

But it didn't take them long

to discover that this is a massacre.

About 300 people either died there or later of their wounds

and mainly the elders and women, children, babies.

My, several of my family are on the marker there.

If you go there today, their names are on those markers.

Several of my family are perished there.

(dramatic music)

There were at least two more infants

who survived the massacre.

One of 'em was Lost Bird and she was a little baby

who was miraculously found alive under her dead mother.

And Lost Bird, there's a book about her.

She lived to the age of 27.

She was adopted by this Lieutenant Colby

who paraded her around and took her

kind of like a war trophy.

(dramatic music)

- Think about the difficulties

of being Calamity Jane's daughter.

When she went to school, rocks were thrown at her

and they called her Calamity Jane, Calamity Jane,

and made fun of her.

Plus in the headlines of the newspapers

at that very time there were stories

about her mother getting drunk.

So the difficulties of being Jessie

must have been magnificent and monumental

in her life at that point.

- [Narrator] In 1895, weary from years of wandering,

Martha returned to the only place she had ever

felt a little at home, Deadwood.

But the town she had once known was no longer the same.

- Deadwood changed a lot.

And that was good for the town because they wanted

to get rid of the dusky memories of the past

as a mining town, rough and rugged.

They wanted to be known as a business and commercial center.

So they advertised Deadwood as having one state bank,

two national banks, seven churches, a nice school,

elegant shops, a new hotel built of brick.

They advertised its electricity

and the water system and the fire department.

They wanted to change the image of Deadwood

and it was working.

- [Narrator] When Martha arrived in town,

everybody who had known her

during the gold rush days welcomed her.

It had been 15 years.

Her face wizened, her body heavy,

and wearing a shabby black dress,

the legendary Calamity Jane was now

but a shadow of her former self.

Penniless and with nowhere to turn,

she settled in a modest shack

with her daughter above the town.

(dramatic music)

At that time a reporter came to pay her a visit.

Martha no longer had any esteem for the press,

but the reporter was a woman who wanted to know

what lay behind the legend.

Trusting, Martha opened up to her.

(dramatic music)

- I'm so glad you come.

So nice to talk to decent folks.

I was a tough woman.

I lived a bad life.

Just like all them that makes mistakes

I didn't see it until it was too late.

I'd like to be respectable,

but nobody will notice me.

They'd say, "There's old Calamity Jane."

I'm getting old, can't work.

I'm nobody nowadays.

Alls I ask is to be spared and have my health

so my little girl can get an education.

So when I do go, she has some way to support herself

if she don't get married.

Had a little boy, but he died.

I don't care what they say about me,

but I want my daughter to be honest and respectful.

She's my only reason for living.

- [Narrator] But celebrityhood caught up with her.

Martha was given a three month contract in a show back East.

In exchange for two performances a day,

the Kohl and Middleton troupe offered her $50 a week

at a time when cowboys were only earning $30 or $40 a month.

Leaving behind her role as a mother

she entrusted Jessie to Catholic nuns

in a convent near Deadwood.

- Kohl and Middleton was a part of

the dying museum movement.

It was an exhibit of weird and wonderfuls.

For example, there would be distorted human beings

with a third arm, there would be animals

with a trunk in the wrong place,

and there would be Monumental Minnie

who weighed over 300 pounds

and had to be transported by railroad car.

(upbeat music)

When Calamity went with the Kohl and Middleton tour group

pictured as an Indian killer and as something of an outlaw

she has a wild looking knife in her mouth

and there are words that are nothing but sensational.

In other words, she's a P.T. Barnum kind of exhibit

as a wild and wonderful person.

(upbeat music)

- And before she left the photographer in Deadwood

took wonderful pictures of her wearing her buckskin outfits.

Sitting or standing, sometimes with a rifle,

sometimes without in every pose.

And so you'll see these often in books.

So this is the Calamity Jane show woman.

Calamity Jane told her story, her life story,

so she would stand on the platform

and tell of her exploits dressed in her buckskins.

And it was put on paper.

She was illiterate.

But it was put on paper and put into a pamphlet form.

And we call it the Autobiography of Calamity Jane.

And that was sold at the Stein Museum.

(birds chirping)

- After 1895, one of the main ways

that she earned money to survive

was by selling photographs of herself and her pamphlet.

And she wandered around from town to town.

She went to Yellowstone National Park.

She'd finally after selling illegally there for a year,

got a license the second year.

And she really survived on her name and her fame.

And people bought her pamphlets and her photos.

(background talking and laughing)

(upbeat music)

There's a photograph of a woman

who's about 17 or 18-years-old sitting on her horse

with a rifle slung next to the horse

and she's dressed in black and she's wearing a cowboy hat

and a photo signed to her boyfriend then says,

from your sweet Calamity Jane, 1888.

Well, it's not Calamity Jane, it's some young woman

who took the name Calamity Jane because that's

what you wanted to feel like.

She wanted to feel free.

She wanted to feel like she could do what she wanted to do.

And I'm sure, she thought (mumbles).

♫ Well, I'm fine with my name

♫ Golden, waving black hair

- There've been quite a few different perspectives

on women of the West.

And some ways they're a lot freer, a lot more independent.

Women ran ranches.

They owned saloons, they owned stores.

Some of them were allowed to divorce and remarry.

Which would be a very unusual thing to do

I think in the East at that time.

- Women's suffrage started in a small town in Wyoming

and that's where women first found the right to vote.

That was symbolic, I think, at that time.

It implied that women everywhere in the West

were different than women in the East.

♫ I will charm every heart

♫ In his crown I will sway

♫ When I woke from my dream

♫ My idol was clay

♫ All portions of love had all flown away

(dramatic music)

- In early 1901, Calamity was facing increasing difficulties

with health, with alcoholism.

(dramatic music)

She was living in the little shacks or houses

that had been unoccupied or somehow she would ask someone

if she could live there.

She could not hold a steady job.

She could not maintain a relationship.

She was aging rapidly.

And the drinking and this kind of lifestyle,

moving from one little town to another

had to be one of the worst and bleakest experiences.

- [Narrator] In 1901, she was found sick and destitute.

And was placed into a poor house.

She would never see her daughter again.

Jessie was eventually adopted

just as Martha had been as a child.

In the following years, Calamity Jane's daughter

would almost forget who her real mother was.

- An interesting woman comes on scene

in Calamity's life in 1901, Josephine Brake

who was a journalist from the East Coast.

She had read the stories about Calamity

being put in the poor house.

Came West to resurrect and to save Calamity

and to take her back.

A little bit of evidence suggests she was hired

by the Pan-American Exposition to bring Calamity

as a featured guest and celebrity at the events of 1901.

(train whistle blowing)

(dramatic music)

The trip east was a hilarious tragedy.

Because the agreement was that Calamity wouldn't drink

unless she asked for drinks.

Well, the newspaper reports say that she asked

for drinks quite often.

And it was very difficult for Josephine Brake.

Imagine traveling with Calamity.

Chewing, smoking cigars and getting her regular nips.

I think Mrs. Brake was challenged

well beyond what she thought it would be.

(upbeat music)

- The Pan-American Exposition of 1901

it was a big fair, like a U.S. fair

or similar to the World's Fair.

Lots of technology displayed.

Really, then one part of that

was an American Indian component.

And a lot of tribes went there

and they set up photography studios, pictures were taken.

Artifacts were displayed, much like a museum.

And Buffalo Bill was there too.

- [Narrator] One of the main attractions

at the Pan-American Exposition was the famous

Wild West Show that Buffalo Bill

had created 20 years earlier.

In several colorful sketches, he told his story

of the conquest of the West, evoking a bygone era.

(upbeat music)

Everybody believed that Calamity,

the American Indian killer, was part of the performance.

But Buffalo Bill, being the shrewd businessman that he was,

was careful not to hire someone

he knew would be so unstable and scanty.

Instead, Calamity performed in another show

at the exposition initiated by

her so-called agent Josephine Brake.

But Martha lost control wasting away her meager earnings

in local bars and spent her nights

in another type of establishment.

(door slamming)

(dramatic music)

- [Richard] We have one picture of Calamity

at the Pan-American Exhibit.

And it's an interesting one.

She's on a horse, she looks very unhappy.

And I think it was her increasing dissatisfaction.

She had no money.

She was having trouble again with alcohol.

And I think that picture portrays

her dissatisfaction and sadness.

(dramatic music)

- And she looks just miserable.

Her shoulders are stooped and her face looks sad.

And you look at this picture and you go,

here is a woman who wants to go back West.

(dramatic music)

- The life in the East was not the life

Martha Canary could handle.

She was not a respectable person.

She didn't dress well, she didn't eat well.

She didn't act well.

She had no refinement whatsoever.

She was the lower class woman

who was typical in the smallest towns

in the mining frontier and so on.

(dramatic music)

- And then she went to Buffalo Bill and said,

"They got me buffaloed, Bill.

"Can you send me West?"

And he gave her a ticket to come back West.

(dramatic music)

When Calamity returned from the Pan-American Exposition,

she met both new and familiar kinds of barriers.

First, what are you going to do for work

when you don't have a job?

She does things that you would expect.

She helps with sick children, she tries to clean homes.

And within a few weeks, she's on the road.

And so she bounces along, month by month, week by week,

in fact, almost day by day.

More trouble with alcohol, not with any husband.

Not with Jessie.

And more and more feeling that the West

was a different place than she had come

onto the scene on in the 1870s.

(dramatic music)

- When she went back West,

the newspapers greeted her rather negatively.

Quite often she'd come into town and she'd hit the bar

and drink and end up in jail again.

And the newspapers typically would say

she's got to learn that this isn't the West she grew up in.

That things have changed.

We've become now refined, we have standards of behavior.

You have to abide by the rules.

(dramatic music)

During her lifetime she's involved in the Great Sioux War

of 1876, the year of Custer's Last Stand.

The Deadwood gold rush.

That incredible drama of western expansion.

She could be used to personify that.

But we see this tragic end to her.

She is living in a sense in a past,

an imagined past to a degree, but in a past

and can't adapt to the present.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] Terry, South Dakota.

A small mining town just under a mile away from Deadwood.

After roaming for months, Martha secretly settled down.

Still refusing any kind of assistance,

she was confined to a small hotel room out of sight.

On a sun-filled afternoon on August 1st, 1903,

Calamity Jane came to the end of her journey.

(dramatic music)

(dramatic music)

- The 1903 death and burial of Martha Canary

or Calamity Jane tell us a lot about

how she was perceived by the people of her time.

(dramatic music)

They decide to give her a spectacular burial.

Partly the town may have been caught up in its image

of its own Wild West roots.

Partly was respect for who she was.

Partly that was legendary, party was true.

But the woman who helped during the epidemic

was a strong felt belief whether it was fully true or not,

she had helped people.

She was a part of Deadwood.

(dramatic music)

The people poured out for that funeral,

the church was filled, the flowers were everywhere.

(dramatic music)

And of course, in true good Western legend fashion,

they buried her next to Wild Bill Hickok.

They wandered up to the cemetery

and as they came down the yell came out

let's have a drink in honor of Calamity.

Obviously they knew Calamity would have a drink

and they rushed to the bars

and had their drink in memory of Calamity.

(dramatic music)

- The last picture of Calamity Jane

taken in just a few days before she died.

It's taken outside the grave of Wild Bill.

The largest tourist attraction of the Old West

in Deadwood in 1903 was the grave of Wild Bill.

By going up there, she marries, and I use the word marries,

she marries herself to an Old West and maybe to Wild Bill.

And maybe that's a part of that final statement she makes,

"Bury me next to Wild Bill."

Maybe she was thinking that a marriage,

figuratively speaking, or the end of life

was really what the meaning of her life was.

- [Narrator] She was believed to be

an old woman when she died.

She was 47.

When she passed away in 1903,

she carried the Old West with her to her grave.

The Wild West had given way to a learning curve.

(upbeat music)

The Western towns had started to resemble those of the East.

In 1903, the booming film industry gave birth to a Western.

The first of a kind it would help

build the myth of the Wild West.

(dramatic music)

Alongside colorful characters such as Buffalo Bill

and Wild Bill Hickok, the legend of Calamity Jane

would live on forever.

But what would remain of her true existence?

Her name was Martha Canary.

Her name is Calamity Jane.

(dramatic music)

(techno music)