A real Calamity—Martha Jane's Myth and Mundane Reality in the Old West

 One of the most widely seen photographs of Calamity Jane taken in 1885 when she was 33 years old and already exploiting a growing public reputation,  Commonly used by debunkers to counter the glamorized portrayals in fiction and film.

Calamity Jane is a semi-mythical character out of the rootin’ tootin’ Wild West famous for being famous.  She is a character with serious schizophrenia.  On the one hand she has been portrayed as just an All-American Tom Boy with a crush on Wild Bill Hickok in innumerable novels and movies.  She was portrayed by Jean Arthur opposite Gary Cooper in Cecil B. DeMille’s wildly inaccurate The Plainsman, by busty Jane Russell in the Bob Hope farce The Paleface, by chipper Doris Day in the musical romp Calamity Jane, and more grimly by Ellen Barkin in Wild Bill.  Angelica Huston got a crack at the part in the TV miniseries based on Larry McMurtry’s Buffalo Girls opposite Sam Eliot’s Hickok.  Jane Alexander played her in the western cum family tearjerker TV movie also called Calamity Jane.

On the other hand, there are the professional western de-bunkers who depict Calamity as a vicious bull dyke, prostitute, drunk, and an inveterate liar who made up most of her alleged exploits.  The latter, in the age of tearing down icons, is increasingly the more popular view these days and frequently gets expressed in books, articles, and in portrayals like that of Robin Weigert in the fine, profane HBO mini-series Deadwood.  These portrayals paint her as ugly based on photographs taken of her when she was trying to exploit her image to make a living.

Perky Doris Day, like Jean Artur before her portrayed Calamity as a loveable all American Tomboy in a real romance with Wild Bill.

So, who was the real Calamity?  

Well, the debunkers have the evidence of her death on August 1, 1903.  She was carried dead drunk from a train at Belle Fouche, South Dakota where she had been working as a cook in a brothel operated by an old friend, madam Dora DuFran and taken to the Calloway Hotel in Terry, South Dakota, where she hemorrhaged and died at the presumed age of 51.

At her request her body was returned to her old stomping grounds in Deadwood and buried next to Hickok in Mount Moriah Cemetery high on a hill overlooking the city.  She reportedly made the request, which was honored by her friends who raised money for the grave site and a monument, because she claimed that “Bill was the only man I ever loved.”  Both graves are a popular tourist pilgrimage sites to this day.

She started out as Martha Jane Canary on May 1, 1852 to a hardscrabble farmer in Mercer County, Missouri just south of the Iowa border.  She was the eldest of a family that grew to include five more children.

Little is known of her early life.  After the Civil War in 1865 her father packed the family into a covered wagon and lit out for Virginia City, the gold mining boom town and new capital of Montana Territory.  The trek took more than six arduous months.  Later in her fictionalized and ghost written Autobiography she claimed that at age 14 on the trip she rode the family horse bare back and honed her skills as hunter to provide meat for the cooking pot. Her mother died of “washboard pneumonia” along the route and was buried at Blackfoot, Montana.

Her father was unable to get established in Montana and after a year relocated the family to the Salt Lake Valley where he tried to eke at a living on a 40 acre dust farm on land the Mormons didn’t want.  He died in 1867 leaving teenaged Martha to support the family.

This photo taken in what she later referred to as the "uniform of my sex" circa 1880 hints at the attractive young girl described in the earliest accounts of Martha Jane Canary in the west by those who actually knew her

She loaded up the wagon and headed east to Fort Bridger, Wyoming where she sold the rig and piled the family onto a Union Pacific train that took them to near-by Piedmont, a railroad boom town whose main industry was lumbering and cutting ties for construction of the Transcontinental Railway.  Jane and her family stayed in the town until 1874 and she supported the brood by taking any jobs she could find—dishwasher, a cook, a waitress, a dance-hall girl (prostitute), a nurse, and an ox team driver.  Despite her later reputation as ugly, at this point in her life she was described as extremely attractive and as a “pretty dark-eyed girl.”  She still wore conventional women’s clothing including what finery she could assemble to attract customers to her dance hall/brothel duties.

According to her suspect autobiography, Martha Jane began her association with the Army in 1870 when she claimed to have enlisted as a Scout under Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer (still called General by some because of his brevet Civil War) rank at Fort Russell in Cheyenne.  She thus coupled her identity with a famous name.  But the story is impossible.  Custer was never stationed at Ft. Russell and troops from there were not dispatched to Arizona for an Indian campaign where she claims to have served a Scout.  Since Scouts generally needed to be familiar with the territory in which they were operating and a good knowledge of the tribes they were fighting, a youthful girl with no experience in the Southwest would hardly have been enlisted.

Some historians date her involvement with the Army to 1872 under General George Crook at Fort Fetterman, one of the string of posts north of Ft. Laramie meant to enforce the terms of the Sioux Treaty of 1868 which ended Red Cloud’s War.  She was certainly active there and at other posts by 1874.

Her service was not likely as a Scout, except perhaps unofficially.  She was a teamster, a job critical to logistical support of both the permanent posts and operations in the field.  It was during this period that she began adopting men’s clothing, certainly more suitable attire for her work than the cumbersome dresses and skirts of the era.

One Cavalry officer who would have known her during this period, Captain Jack Crawford, told a Montana newspaper after Jane died that she “never saw service in any capacity under either General Crook…never was in an Indian fight. She was simply a notorious character, dissolute and devilish, but possessed a generous streak which made her popular.”

Popular she was on those isolated posts where the men were amused by her ability to curse like the mule skinner she was, drink and carouse the best of them, and probably liberally bestow her sexual favors for fun and profit.

She was beginning to establish a “reputation” and stories circulated.  About this time, she acquired the nick name Calamity.  She claimed it was for rescuing wounded Captain Egan after a running Indian fight outside a small post at Goose Creek, Wyoming about 1872.  This seems to have been a wholly invented yarn.  Other times she told people it was because she warned men that it would be a “risking calamity to offend her.” An old timer recalling her probably got closest to the truth when he told the St. Louis Post Dispatch that, “She got her name from a faculty she has had of producing a ruction at any time and place and on short notice.”

Calamity during her brief stay as part of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.

As a teamster Jane visited many posts and may have taken to the field in the baggage train of active campaigns.  She evidently accompanied troops to the Black Hills for the first time in 1874 and was there again the following year.  It was at this time she may—or may not—have made the acquaintance of William Fredrick Cody, the Scout known as Buffalo Bill who would figure in the legends and yarns about her and briefly later employ her in his Wild West Show.

She wintered over at Ft. Laramie where she worked at the Three-Mile Hog Ranch brothel as a prostitute, and reportedly one of the establishment’s top attractions.

At least one instance of her acting in the role of a scout has been verified by contemporary accounts.  In the spring of 1875 accompanying Crook on a second march to the Big Horn.  She was entrusted with “important dispatches.”  She swam the Platte River and made a 90 mile ride soaking wet to Ft. Fetterman to deliver the message.  At the Fort she was taken ill, probably with pneumonia and had to be nursed back to health.  It was on the basis of this confirmed episode that many years after her death the Army granted pension survivor benefits to a woman claiming to be her daughter.

Calamity spent another winter at Ft. Laramie and at her employment at the Hog Ranch before signing on as a Teamster on a Charles Utter wagon train heading north with supplies for the rogue boomtown of Deadwood.  It was on this trip that she met Hickok, a fellow teamster and a meat hunter for the expedition.  They arrived in town in July of 1876.  Jane had enough of a reputation that the Black Hills Pioneer reported “Calamity Jane has arrived.”

Calamity first worked in Dora Dufran's Deadwood brothel when the madame was only 15 years old.  They remained life-long friends and Dufram employed Calamity in various capacities over the years including a final job at her Belle Fouche, South Dakota whorehouse as a cook/dishwasher and tourist curiosity.

She was smitten with Hickok and he was friendly with her, standing her to drinks in the local saloons.  When he decided to stay and take the local miner’s gold at the poker table, Jane decided to stay too, riding mail dispatches to and from Ft. Custer, operating a freight hauling business, and servicing customers for Dora DuFran.

Jane’s later claims that she married Hickok in Benton, Montana in 1873 and that he fathered her daughter Jean, despite being honored by the Army claims board in 1941, were impossible.  Hickok married Agnes Thatcher Lake, who operated a circus in Cheyenne in March, just before joining the wagon train where he did meet Calamity.

Hickok was famously shot in the back of the head at a poker table in Deadwood on August 2.  Jane later claimed to have personally hunted down his killer, Jack McCall and “arrested” him armed with a meat clever.  It wasn’t true.  She was so depressed by the killing that she drank herself in a stupor, not an unfamiliar condition.

 

Calamity at the grave of Wild Bill Hickok on Mt. Moriah in Deadwood.  She later had copies of this photograph made into postcards which she sold to tourists and at attempts to exhibit herself  on the stage to make a living.  Her dying wish was realized and her remains were buried next to Hickok's grave in 1903.

Despite Hickok’s death Jane stayed around Deadwood.

In 1877 riding post to Crook City, Jane performed her most famous confirmed act of daring to.  She encountered the Overland Mail coach from Cheyenne under attack by a band of hostiles as it was coming into a relay station to change horses.  The driver, John Slaughter—a semi-famous character in his own right—was dead.  Calamity stopped the runaway team, jumped into the driver’s seat, and sped away avoiding a second ambush at the station.  She saved the lives of the six passengers and brought the stage safely into Deadwood.

Despite her increasingly obnoxious, alcohol-fueled behavior around town, Jane won a place in the city’s heart and history in 1878 when she was the only person who volunteered to care for eight men quarantined with smallpox in a small cabin outside of town.  Although three of her charges died, the others recovered, and Jane treated other victims until the epidemic played itself out.

Shortly after the smallpox outbreak, Jane returned to working as a teamster, this time using oxen instead of mules, for the Army, accompanying the 7th Cavalry to Bear Butte Creek where they established Ft. Meade and the town of Sturgis.  The next year she joined the gold rush to Rapid City where she evidently panned the streams and tried to establish a claim.

By 1881 Jane had drifted into Montana where she tried her hand at ranching near Miles City on the Yellowstone River and also ran a “wayside inn for weary travelers.”  It must not have been successful. In 1883 she headed to California where she spent the next two years in Ogden and San Francisco.

In 1885 she was in El Paso, Texas where she met and may have married Clinton Burk.  Although the couple moved together to Boulder, Colorado where they operated a hotel, some scholars don’t believe that they became legally married until the 1890’s.  In 1887 Jane gave birth to daughter Jean, who she gave up to foster parents recognizing that she could not care for the child.

What happened to the baby is unknown, although a woman named Jane McCormick claimed to be Calamity’s daughter born earlier by Hickok.  Jane claimed to be in possession of letters Calamity written but unsent to her daughter which were found among her possessions at the time of her death.  Since Jane was known to be illiterate, these letters have been called into question.  But they have entered the lore.  A composer even set them to a cycle of art songs and they were the basis of the TV movie starring Jane Alexander.

The couple remained in Boulder through 1893.  Meanwhile Calamity’s name had been used without her permission in dime novels including the popular Deadwood Dick series dating back to 1877.  The exploits in them were entirely imaginary, but they fueled public interest.  Reporters sometime sought Jane out at the Boulder hotel where she was interviewed and happily posed in male garb heavily armed on and off horseback.

                       

                                    Calamity later in life as a hotel keeper or as Dora DuFran's cook and dishwasher.

Probably due to Jane’s drinking, her marriage deteriorated.  She became a vagabond sometimes with and sometimes without her husband roaming through Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Oregon.  In 1895 she returned to Deadwood, where she claimed her old friends welcomed her with open arms.  Certainly, Dora DuFran did, although after 17 years Jane was no longer fit to be one of her girls.  She was, however, an attraction for the eastern tourists who were already showing up looking for the “authentic West.”  If they would stand her for a drink, Calamity was free to accommodate their interest in yarns real and fanciful.

Old associates like Bill Cody had already turned to show business to exploit their celebrity.  Even her beloved Hickok allowed himself to be “put on display” before he died.  Jane accepted an offer by the Palace Museum in Minneapolis in 1897.  But after a few months her drinking and sometime bizarre behavior cost her job.  She tried exhibiting herself on the vaudeville circuit, but her act, telling stories, failed to win many bookings due to her drinking.  She was frequently in trouble.  Cody tried briefly to employ her in his show but could not keep her on.

In 1901 she was appearing at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York where Cody’s Wild West Show was also an attraction.  She was arrested for fighting and disorderly conduct.  Cody bailed her out and paid her fare back to Deadwood.  He later said, “I expect she was no more tired of Buffalo than the Buffalo police were of her, for her sorrows seemed to need a good deal of drowning.”

New markers replaced the original headstones for Calamity and Hickok at Deadwood's Mt. Moriah Cemetery. They remain a tourist attraction but have been eclipsed to some degree by the slot machines that have taken over much of the city's historic downtown strip.

It was pretty much her last hurrah.  Two years later she was dead.  She was taken off a train from Belle Fouche passed out in a drunken stupor and died of a hemorrhage two days later without regaining consciousness.  Her remains were shipped to Deadwood where in the ground next to Hickok she made a more dependable and less troublesome tourist attraction. 

Holding Aces and Eights Wild Bill’s Luck Runs Out

 

James Butler Hickok had been made semi-legendary as Wild Bill in the penny press and dime novels.  As a genuine celebrity his death was breathlessly covered by the popular press.

On August 2, 1876 James Butler Hickok a.k.a. Wild Bill, was shot in the back of the head by drifter Jack McCall while playing poker in a Deadwood saloon.  At the time of his death he was losing for the day but held a promising hand with two pairs—black aces, black eights.  The fifth card was a Diamond but its value has never been agreed on.  After Hickok’s death aces and eights became commonalty referred to as the Dead Man’s Hand, although that designation had previously been given to other poker hands involved in fatal altercations.  

Hickok was born in Homer, Illinois in 1837.  His father was an abolitionist and ran a station of the Underground Railroad out of the family’s barn.  Young James was given his first pistols by his father to defend the station in case of raids by slave catchers.  Although the raids never came, the boy became an expert marksman and something of a local celebrity for his shooting skills.  

He high tailed it to Bloody Kansas in 1855 after he mistakenly thought he had killed a companion in a fist fight in which both boys ended up in a canal.  Likely he was drawn to Kansas in support of his father’s views.  He quickly enlisted in a Jayhawker militia fighting pro-slavery Bushwhackers.  He met young William Fredrick Cody, then 12 years old and serving as a scout/spy for the Jayhawkers.  

 

A young Hickok in his early Kansas and Missouri days is  flanked by his parents.  He idolized his abolitionist father who gave him his first pistol as a boy to guard the family barn, an Underground Railroad station.

By 1859 both he and Cody had signed on with the Russell, Waddell & Majors freight company, a contractor for the Pony Express.  After being injured by a bear, he was recuperating on light duty as a stable man at Rock Creek Station in Nebraska when he was involved in a gunfight with the former owner of the property David McCanles and members of his family who demanded a due payment on the land.  In a wild exchange of fire McCanles was killed.  Hickok, the station manager, his wife, and another employee were all charged with murder but acquitted on the ground of “defending company property.”  Whether Hickok himself made the fatal shot is still a matter of dispute.  

At the outset of the Civil War Hickok enlisted as an Army Teamster and within six months was promoted to wagon master.  He served in the bloody civil war with in the Civil War in Missouri.  He was discharged in September 1862 and disappears from history until late the following year when he was appointed a detective for the Provost Marshal of South-West Missouri working out of Springfield.  There is indirect evidence, and much speculation that Hickok was serving as a spy during those missing months.  He mustered out of the service at war’s end but stayed in Springfield as a gambler.

Hickok's 1865 gunfight with Davis Tutt in Springfield, Missouri is considered the first recorded quick draw, stand up gun fight in Western history.  His amazing kill shot at 75 feet made him instantly famous.

On July 21, 1865 he was involved in a shoot out in the Springfield streets that is usually considered the  first recorded “quick draw” duel in history—the kind of gunfight that though extremely rare in actuality became a staple of Western movies.  He shot and killed Davis Tutt, a drinking and gambling companion, over an alleged poker debt and Davis’s wearing of the watch that he took from Hickok as collateral.  Several witnesses attested that both men drew and fired at a distance of 75 yards—ordinarily far out of range for accurate pistol fire. Tutt, at least, may have believed that both men could fire, preserve their honor, and survive the confrontation. Tutt’s shot was wild and wide.  Hickok sent a ball completely through Tutt’s torso, although he was standing in a sideways dueling posture to reduce his exposure.   The shot impressed everyone and cemented Hickok’s later reputation.  Again, he was acquitted on a murder charge because the judge instructed the jury to considerer the incident a “fair fight.”  

Shortly after the trial Hickok, who had acquired the nickname Wild Bill during the war, was interviewed by Colonel George Ward Nichols for an article that appeared with a woodcut of a ferocious looking Wild Bill in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.  Either Hickok hornswoggled the writer, or more likely given his personal reputation for not being a braggart, Nichols simply spun a wild but entertaining yarn, but the article portrayed Hickok as a dead shot who had killed dozens of men. 

In reality Wild Bill is known to have killed five men in gunfights over his entire life or six if credited with McCanles.  He was involved in other, non-fatal scrapes and fights, but his fearsome reputation discouraged many would-be assailants.  In addition in his Civil War service and later service as an Army Scout he undoubtedly killed others.  

After losing an election for city marshal of Springfield that November, Hickok accepted an appointment as a Deputy U. S. Marshal at Fort Riley, Kansas.  During his tenure there he also served as a scout for Col. George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry.  Custer burnished Hickok’s reputation by extolling his “sure shot” ability with a pistol, bravery, and honor in press interviews.  Hickok was involved a number of skirmishes and led small parties seeking out Indian raiders during Red Cloud’s War.  

In 1867 Hickok went East for the first time to cash in on his reputation by performing in a western melodrama in Buffalo, New York.  He was a terrible actor and returned west within a month with a bitter taste in his mouth.  

He ran for election as sheriff in Ellsworth County, Kansas but was defeated.  Resuming duties as a Federal Marshal he arrived at wild and woolly Hays City where he arrested a gang of Army deserters and was re-united with Cody who served as scout for an army detachment sent to help escort the 11 men to trial in Topeka.  

                                    Hickok in his days as a Cavalry Scout around 1869.

After an 1869 stint as a scout with the Buffalo Soldier 10th Cavalry during which time he was wounded in the foot while rescuing a party of ranchers who had been surrounded by hostiles in Colorado  near Bijou Creek.  

Back in Hays City in July 1869 Hickok finally won an election—two in fact—to serve as both city marshal and Ellis County sheriff.  Hays City was then a railhead destination for the great Texas cattle drives and the town and county were beset by wild cowboys fueled on lots of liquor at the end of a long trek.  It’s clear the Hickok was expected by the town’s “better elements” to clean things up.  

In his first month on the job he was involved in two fatal gunfights.  Legal questions arose about his first election and his defeat at the hands of his deputy for Sheriff in November was overturned on account of election fraud, Hickok remained in “effective control” of law enforcement in the area through most of 1870.

In July of that year he got into a fracas with two drunk and disorderly 7th Cavalry troopers who somehow got the best of him. The two held him on the floor of a saloon while one trooper, John Kile, tried to shoot him in through the ear.  When Kile’s pistol misfired, Hickok wrestled the gun from his companion, Jeremiah Lonergan, shot him in the knee and put two balls in Kile, who died the next day. Hickok held up in the town’s Boot Hill for a few days where the commanding view and clear field of fire would give him a chance in case fellow Troopers rode after him in revenge.  

That fall, after the town fathers decided to get out of the business of running a trail head for the cattle drives, Hickok was defeated for re-election and replaced by a much less expensive officer.  

Hickok in buckskins.  He liked to wear his bone-handled Navy Colt pistols butt forward and tucked into his belt rather than holstered.  Despite the cumbersome arrangement he could get them out with speed and fire with accuracy...until perhaps his eyesight began to fail.

In 1870 he became town marshal at Abilene, Kansas which had picked up most of Hays City’s former business as a cow town.  On October 5, 1871 Hickok was involved in his last known fatal gun fight, the outcome of which would haunt him the rest of his life.  

After an earlier run-in with a drunken saloon keeper—Phil Coe who was also a business rival to Hickok’s second profession as a gambler—he tried to arrest the man for discharging a gun on the street.  Coe pretended to hand over the gun, but spun it and took aim at the marshal who fired, killing him. Another man rushing to the scene caught Hickok’s attention and thinking that he was under attack by Coe’s friend, killed the second man.  That man turned out to be his own friend and deputy, Mike Williams.  Hickok was inconsolable.  He is known to have written an anguished letter to Williams’ widow and raised money for the support of her and her children.  Some historians believe that the incident happened because Hickok was beginning to lose his fabled eye-sight, probably from trachoma.  He now occasionally wore spectacles but did not have them on the night of the shooting. 

A publicity photo for the show Buffalo Bill Cody put together  in 1873.  After a few months on stage, Hickok came back west temporarily flush. Left to right Elisha P. Green, Hickok, Cody,Texas Jack Omohundro, and Eugene Overton.

Hickok’s career as a lawman and a gunfighter was over within two months.  He turned to full time gambling and heavy drinking.  In 1873 Cody convinced him to join with another showman, Texas Jack Omohundro in a new western stage play.  Although this was better received than his first theatrical attempt, he left the show after a few months with a substantial purse from the show’s success and two new Smith & Weston revolvers from his old friend. Those revolvers soon disappeared, probably pawned, as Hickok fell on hard times back out West. 

He returned to his old favorite twin bone handled Colt 1851 .36 Navy Model pistols—by then obsolete cap-and-ball revolvers.  He carried them, usually without  holsters, stuck in his belt butt forward in the fashion of the cavalry and drew them with equal skill with either a reverse spin or a cross draw.  

Frequently a loser at cards, Hickok was arrested for vagrancy several times before winding up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, another wide open town.  He had better luck there. In March of 1876 he married Agnes Thatcher Lake, the operator of a small time circus who was 14 years his senior.  Her money may have been a factor, although surviving letters indicate an admiring and loving relationship.  

Hickok with his long locks shorn and sporting a goatee with his new Cheyenne family.  Circus proprietor Agnes Thatcher Lake, was better looking than the formal photographer's frown of the period would indicate despite being Wild Bill's senior by 15 years.  Her daughter Emma, on whom Hickok reportedly doted, is center.

Despite his new wife, however, Hickok signed on as a teamster and guard for a wagon train taking supplies to the Black Hills gold rush town of Deadwood, a lawless, illegal settlement on Indian land in what is now South Dakota.  His aim was to re-make his fortune in the gold fields, not as a miner, but by separating miners from their gold—and possibly even from their claims.  He may also have had the notion that the new wild town might use his somewhat rusty services as a law man.  

Mary Jane Canary, better known as Calamity Jane, joined the wagon train near Ft. Laramie.  This was likely the first time the two met, although she would later claim to have previously had a child with Hickok and graciously given him up to Agnes Lake.  Calamity was an alcoholic sometime prostitute, teamster, and a fairly shrewd business woman who was better looking than the most frequently seen picture of her in her teamster’s buckskins.  They were both in Deadwood for some weeks, although they were not known to have a relationship.  

Hickok was drinking heavily and gambling, mostly unsuccessfully.  On August 1, he had a minor run in with Jack McCall that ended with Hickok buying the younger man a drink.  Perhaps because he had been humiliated, perhaps looking for revenge for a brother he said he believed Hickok had killed as marshal in Abilene, perhaps to just to gain a reputation as the man who killed Wild Bill, and perhaps at the urging of local interests that may have been worried about Hickok resuming his lawman career, McCall entered Nuttal & Mann’s Saloon No. 10 where Hickok was sitting uncharacteristically with his back to the door and shot him once in the back of the head crying out “Take this!”  

Hickok's assassin Jack McCall miraculously was acquitted by an illegal Deadwood jury.  He would not be so lucky when real law got a hold of him.

After boasting around town of the killing, he was captured and put on trial for murder but somehow acquitted.  The trial, however, in unorganized Deadwood, had no effect in law.  The next year Federal Marshals re-arrested McCall and he was tried in Dakota Territory capital Yankton.  This time he was convicted and hanged.  

Hickok’s friends arranged for a Deadwood funeral and burial.  The grave was later relocated to the new Mount Moriah Cemetery high on a hill overlooking the town.  Various monuments were destroyed by souvenir hunters as the grave became a tourist attraction until the current bronze bust and marker were erected.  When Calamity Jane died in 1903, old timers buried her next to Hickok, some said as a joke because “Bill couldn’t stand to be around her” but probably to further interest tourists.  

Calamity Jane at Wild Bill's grave after it was moved to Mt. Moriah Cemetery.  She peddled picture post cards of this to tourists for drinking money.  Later she would be buried  next to Hickok "as a joke"--and as an added tourist attraction.

Hickok was one of the western figures who almost lived up to his reputation—if you discount the wild exaggerations of the dime novels and barbershop rags like the Police Gazette.  But in death he became iconic.  He has been portrayed in dozens of films, the best known of which include Wild Bill Hickok staring William S. Hart in 1923; The Plainsman, C.B. DeMille’s fanciful 1936 epic staring Gary Cooper; the musical Calamity Jane with Howard Keel opposite Doris Day in the title role in 1953; Little Big Man with Jeff Corey as Dustin Hoffman’s mentor in 1970; and the gritty Wild Bill starring Jeff Bridges in 1995.  Wild Bill Elliot and Roy Rogers both played him in B movie oaters. 

Older Baby Boomers like me will remember the long running TV show Wild Bill Hickok staring heart throb Guy Madison and Andy Divine as comic sidekick Jingles.  Absolutely nothing in the series was remotely like the life of the real teamster/spy/scout/lawman/actor/gambler/drunk.  But we could all imitate Divine gargling out "Wait for me, Wild Bill!"

Baby Boomers undoubtedly best remember the long running TV show (1951-’58) The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok starring heart throb Guy Madison with Andy Divine as his comic sidekick Jingles.  Other than the name the TV character had nothing in common with the historical figure.  Much better was David Milch’s riveting cable mini-series Deadwood which ran from 2004-2006 with Keith Carradine as Wild Bill.

Hickok has also frequently appeared in print in innumerable cheap popular paperback novels, and in comic books, but also in serious fiction, most significantly in Thomas Burger’s Little Big Man, Buffalo Gals by Larry McMurtry, and Darlin’ Bill: A Love Story of the Wild West by Jerome Charyn.