Martha Jane Canary May 1, β August 1, , better known as Calamity Jane, was an American frontierswoman, and professional scout. She was a friend of Wild Bill Hickok and she became famous for that but also because she fought Native Americans. She also exhibited kindness and compassion, especially to the sick and needy. This contrast helped to make her a famous and infamous frontier figure. Martha Jane was the eldest of six children, she had two brothers and three sisters.
In , Robert, her father, packed his family and moved by wagon train from Missouri to Virginia City, Montana. Charlotte, her mother, died along the way in Black Foot, Montana, in of "washtub pneumonia.
They arrived in the summer, and Robert supposedly started farming on 40 acres 16 ha of land. They were there only a year before he died in Martha Jane took over as head of the family, loaded up the wagon once more, and took her siblings to Fort Bridger, Wyoming Territory.
They arrived in May In Piedmont, Martha Jane took whatever jobs she could to provide for her large family. She worked as a dishwasher, a cook, a waitress, a dance-hall girl, a nurse, and an ox team driver. Finally, in , she found work as a scout at Fort Russell. Martha Jane received little to no formal education and was illiterate. She moved on to a rougher, mostly outdoor adventurous life on the Great Plains. Martha Jane was involved in several campaigns in the long-running military conflicts with Native American Indians.
However not everyone accepted her version as true. A popular belief is that she acquired it as a result of her warnings to men that to offend her was to "court calamity". There, she became friends with, and was occasionally employed by, Dora DuFran, the Black Hills' leading madam. Jane greatly admired Hickok much later others alleged to the point of infatuation and also claimed she was obsessed with his personality and his life.
