CALAMITY BEFORE JANE, by Noah Van Sciver
The biggest challenge of writing about the legendary frontier figures of the American West is separating myth from reality. Falsehoods and exaggerations must be carefully unwrapped and taken apart so that the true (and invariably better) stories can be told. That is precisely what the award-winning cartoonist Noah Van Sciver seeks to do in his latest graphic novel-style biography, “Calamity Before Jane.”
Having proved his myth-busting skills in “Paul Bunyan: The Invention of an American Legend,” which explored how the superhuman lumberjack was created by an adman for a logging company, Van Sciver uses a similar approach to deconstruct the popular image of the real-life swashbuckler Calamity Jane.
Born in Princeton, Mo., in 1852, Martha Jane Cannary was still a girl when she moved west with her family, and she was orphaned in her early teens. After that, almost everything about this curious character remains a matter of conjecture, including how she got the handle Calamity Jane.
The explanation offered by Jane — whom Van Sciver slyly enlists as a quintessentially unreliable narrator — revolves around her purported adventures as an Army scout for General Custer, an origin story that could never be officially documented. (She said in her autobiography that it was one Capt. James Egan, grateful that she’d lifted him onto her horse and whisked him safely back to his fort after an ambush, who proclaimed laughingly, “I now christen you Calamity Jane, heroine of the plains!”)
Many of her other claims about her exploits are also dubious or simply unprovable, including that she was a stagecoach driver and Pony Express rider. Accounts of her being a bullwhacker (such as the tale Van Sciver has her tell of driving a team of oxen carrying supply wagons to Union Pacific Railway workers in Wyoming) are more plausible.
Setting the scene at the 1901 World’s Fair in Buffalo, N.Y., when Jane is nearly 50 and performing in Buffalo Bill Cody’s touring Wild West show, allows Van Sciver to show her spinning some of her most preposterous yarns as stories within her larger story.
His attempt to expose Jane’s tall tales while also presenting authentic episodes of her life is admirable and often successful. This balance of myth and reality helps readers understand how her legend was created, and should be a useful conversation starter for parents and teachers.
In her later years, Jane wandered the West — which by then, sadly for her, had lost much of its wildness, in all senses of the word — frequently wearing out her welcome. Still, she was generally liked and, when well behaved, was regarded as a celebrity. During an 1895 visit to Deadwood, S.D. — where nearly two decades earlier she’d tended to victims of a smallpox epidemic (a true tale of her compassion) — she sat for photographs to be sold during her tours of Eastern cities.
On Aug. 1, 1903, Calamity Jane died, most likely of inflammation of the bowels related to alcoholism. Her final resting place is next to the grave of Wild Bill Hickok (whose killer, “the notorious desperado Jack McCall,” she claimed to have helped capture).
The truth is that Calamity Jane lived at a time when women who wanted to be treated as equals to men had few opportunities, especially on the frontier. For many years, historians were mostly white males whose conventional image of womanhood in the West was either a dutiful wife in a bonnet or a soiled dove in a brothel.
Although they never met, Jane seems much like Belle Starr, the so-called “Bandit Queen,” another mythologized Wild West character whose narrative became tangled in folk tales, innuendo and outright lies. Both women shunned the Victorian ideal that females were limited in their abilities and expected to focus on domestic duties.
A key ingredient that sets this book apart — in addition to the extraordinary historical photos of Jane that bookend Van Sciver’s comics — is its insightful postscript by the Indigenous scholar Dr. Susana Geliga. Entitled “The Black Hills and the Fiction of Calamity Jane,” this essay provides historical and political context for Martha Jane Cannary’s life and times as they relate to the struggles of the Lakota Sioux, with whom she became acquainted both early on in South Dakota and through their participation with her in Wild West shows across the country.
“As a military camp follower and self-proclaimed storyteller, she would often mingle around the soldiers where she must have heard many stories of skirmishes between them and the Lakota Sioux who were protecting their people and territory,” Geliga writes. “Being that she was never a soldier or part of the military, and never fought against Indians, her reputation as a fearless Indian fighter was as fictitious as her stories.”
In the same way that Calamity Jane exaggerated her goodness, then, it seems she exaggerated her badness as well.
CALAMITY BEFORE JANE | By Noah Van Sciver | (Ages 8 to 12) | TOON Books | 56 pp. | $17.99
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