 Here comes Calamity!
A spiritualist who approached her on Deadwood’s
Main Street last summer told Dianne Gleason, “You really are the spirit of Calamity Jane. Through you she has been given a
second chance to finish out her life.”
Gleason admits she feels a close spiritual connection to the notorious
woman who arrived in 1876 Deadwood as an outrider with the Charley Utter
wagon train. The picturesque woman who dressed, drank, and swore like a
man. The footloose woman, who roamed the west, then returned home to
Deadwood to die.
Gleason is totally believable as Calamity Jane. Cracking her whip, she
stomps onto the Old Towne Hall stage to testify in the re-enactment Trial
of Jack McCall, after helping sheriff’s deputies capture Wild
Bill’s assassin on Deadwood’s Main Street.
There are many parallels in the lives of these two women who were born a
century apart. Both were on their own at a very early age. Raised in
Central Ohio, Gleason left home at the age of 18, moved to Tucson,
Arizona, has lived in several western states and travels extensively.
“We’re nomads, Calamity and me,” she said.
Extensive research into the life of Martha Cannary has given Gleason
more than just a superficial understanding of the character she
portrays.
“To
really understand Calamity you have to be able to put yourself back into
the time when she lived,” Gleason said, citing the prudishness of the
Victorian era that dictated female behavior in the 19th
century.
“Women were chattels whose identity and financial
security depended on men,” Gleason said. “Calamity scorned
society’s conventions. She was independent, free-spirited, and
liberated when other women were still fighting for the right to vote.”
”She was referred to as a loose woman, but in those
days the term ‘loose woman’ literally meant one who didn’t wear
corsets. It was a polite way of saying a female didn’t conform to
society’s standards of proper feminine behavior.”
Hollywood’s version, dramatized by Jean Arthur,
Jane Russell, Doris Day, Yvonne DeCarlo and Angelique Houston, has
little relevance to the real Calamity Jane.
But Gleason has a close physical resemblance to the
character she reprises. Her husky voice, six-foot height (she claims
5’ 12”) and strong, big-boned physique contribute to her realistic
depiction of Deadwood’s most infamous woman.
Rejecting the commonly held opinion that Calamity was
just a drunk and a whore, Gleason maintains she was much deeper, a much
more complex character than that.
“Sure, she liked to drink. She got drunk
in the saloons of every town she visited, at a time when women were not
allowed in saloons. Obviously, she was an alcoholic. I can relate to
that. I’m a ‘friend of Bill’s.’ I celebrated my 15th
AA birthday on May 6.”
One old Black Hills cowboy described Calamity as
looking like “a busted bale of hay.” Yet as a young girl, Martha
Cannary was not all that unattractive. Even in her later years, when she
shed buckskins to don a dress and fashionable feathered hat, she
“cleaned up real good.”
 Gleason, too, was a good-looking young woman. Now, at
age 54, only those who look beyond physical appearances would call her
beautiful. Her once blonde hair has reverted to its natural
gray-streaked brunette and hangs straight over broad, buckskin-clad
shoulders. Calamity didn’t carry cosmetics and curlers in her leather
fringed ‘possibles’ bag. Neither does Gleason.
Leathery, weather-beaten skin and wrinkles speak of a
woman who spends a great deal of time outdoors, much of it in
southwestern states where she’s a tough contender at competition
shooting matches.
Gleason’s ivory handled 44’s are more than just
stage props. She’s a crack shot with rifle or six-shooter and holds
many SASS (Single Action Shooting Society) state, regional and national
titles. She proudly displays the engraved belt buckle she won as the
2000 world champion woman duelist. Last year she went up against eight
males to take the Arizona men’s gunfighter class championship (the
first woman ever to challenge the men) then placed fifth in regional and
seventh in national men’s gunfighter competitions.
In
her memoirs, D. Dee (brothel madam Dora DuFran) told of her friend
Calamity’s skill with guns, drunk or sober:
When Calamity decided it was time to go on
another spree, her first idea was to don her buckskin suit, high-heeled
boots and Stetson hat, a wide ammunition belt and two 44’s holstered
at each side. She looked like a very formidable person and anyone who
crossed her got cussed up one side and down the other, and she was past
master at profanity. …when in a peevish fit, out came one or both of
her big 44’s and folks were told where to head in.
“All right, Jane, I’ll take it all back,” would mollify her and a
drink made her forget any differences in a second.
As to the whore imputation, Gleason said Calamity may
have slept with a lot of men, “but no one has ever been able to prove
she was paid for it. She obviously liked men and enjoyed sex, but I
seriously doubt she could have complied with the male-subservient life
required of prostitutes who worked in brothels.”
Nor are there records of Calamity Jane ever being
arrested as a prostitute, at a time when soiled doves were routinely
hauled into court to pay hefty fines. Calamity saw the inside of jails
in many western towns, but her offenses were invariably liquor-related.
In 1887 the Laramie, Wyoming Boomerang reported:
To say that the old girl has reformed is somewhat of a
chestnut. She was gloriously drunk this morning and if she didn’t make
Rome howl she did Laramie.
Her resting place is now the soft side of an iron cell. Judge Pease will
deliver the lecture and collect the fine in the morning.
Over the years, Calamity introduced numerous
paramours as husbands. In reality, she wasn’t a woman that bothered
with such formalities as a marriage license. There’s no record of her
ever having been lawfully wed, although she was buried in Deadwood’s
Mount Moriah as Mrs. M. E. Burke.
Clinton Burke (sometimes spelled without an e)
was the ‘husband’ who accompanied Calamity when she returned to
Deadwood in October 1895. The Pioneer-Times
reported:
Mrs. Jane Burk …arrived in the City yesterday after an absence
of sixteen years during which time she has been living quietly with her
husband on a ranch in southeastern Montana. They drove across the
country to Belle Fourche and Mrs. Burk came to Deadwood to do a little shopping and renew
“old
acquaintances.”
As Gleason explains, a ‘husband’ was sometimes a
necessary but temporary convenience for the non-conformist frontier
female. “When winter came Calamity couldn’t live out on the prairie;
she had to hole up in town. She
needed a place to live. If she hadn’t introduced the man she lived
with as her husband she’d have been run out town.”
In a 1924 letter to the Rapid City Journal, Dr.
Valentine McGillycuddy defended Martha Cannary’s unconventional
behavior:
Jane was a healthy girl of an affectionate disposition,
and naturally had many husbands, license shops and preachers being
scarce in those days, she would select a new one when occasion made it
desirable or necessity required. She was not immoral, she was unmoral,
she lived in accordance with the light given her, and the conditions
of the times.
An old muleskinner that worked with Calamity Jane on
bull trains freighting into the Black Hills was quoted as saying, “She
took her place as any man would and did her share of work with the best
of them. But when night came if any of the boys wanted to go to the
brush, she was always willin’ to pull off a pants leg.”
Gleason wonders how Calamity had the energy to ‘go
to the brush’ when the bull train stopped for the night.
“Bullwhacking is hard work. After walking beside a team of 16 or 20
oxen, cracking a heavy 20-foot bullwhip for 12 to 14 hours, I don’t
think you’d feel too frisky by nightfall.”
As a living history actress, Gleason makes sure her
characterization is believable and authentic, right down to costumes.
Her beaded vest of smoked, brain-tanned elk hide, is a faithful
reproduction of the one worn by Calamity, now displayed in the Buffalo
Bill Cody Museum. Gleason’s chaps were replicated from a studio photo
of the infamous Jane.
 It’s easy to see why Gleason won “best actress”
and “best costume” awards at Deadwood’s Wild Bill Days 2000
western reenactment competition.
Unlike the uneducated Calamity -- some historians say
she was illiterate -- Gleason earned her B. A. degree in cultural
anthropology. She reads extensively and has been a lifelong student of
western history.
Roberta Bed Sollid prefaced her carefully researched
book, Calamity Jane, A Study in
Historical Criticism, with this statement:
No career is so elusive
to the historian as that of a loose woman. Calamity Jane was that sort
of woman, and known details about her life are hard to find … she
left little behind in the way of tangible evidence which could be used
by historians to reconstruct the story of her checkered career.
Gleason takes research a step further, immersing
herself in the character she so aptly recreates. She demonstrates a deep
empathy for the times and conditions that shaped the life of Martha
Cannary.
“When I’m downtown, I’m back in 1876 Deadwood,
walking on muddy dirt streets, not concrete sidewalks.”
Dianne Gleason has walked a mile or two in Calamity
Jane’s boots.
|
