biography
| name: |
Calamity Jane
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popular name of Martha Jane Burke or Burk, née Cannary
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| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (?1852–1903)
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| biography:
| Legendary frontier figure, born in Princeton, Missouri, USA. Raised in Virginia City, MT (1864), she became an expert markswoman and rider and (dressed as a man) held her own in rough, mining-town society. Allegedly a pony-express rider and then a scout for General George Custer in Wyoming (1870s), she was companion to ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok, and was a heroine during the smallpox epidemic (1878) in the gold-rush town of Deadwood, SD. She is said to have threatened ‘calamity’ for any man who tried to court her, but in 1891 she married Clinton Burk(e) in El Paso, TX, who soon left her. She died in poverty, and is buried beside Hickok in Deadwood. She is the heroine of a novel Deadwood Dick on Deck, or Calamity Jane the Heroine of Whoop Up (1884) by Edward L Wheeler. |
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