She made Calamity Jane live again

After being a teacher and a librarian, Glenda Bell switched gears 20 years ago and became Calamity Jane for a living.

Traveling with her friend Barb Fisher, the Powell, Wyo., resident appeared as Calamity Jane more than 2,400 times, averaging 150 shows a year.

The pair spent years researching the Western legend, accumulating everything they could find on Calamity Jane and sifting through what was true and what was legend.

“Trying to find factual information about Calamity Jane was like trying to find hen’s teeth,” Bell said.

Although some of the tales surrounding the frontierswoman are legend -- her marriage to and child with Wild Bill Hickok, for one -- some anecdotes are indeed factual.

For starters, Calamity Jane, whose real name was Martha Jane Cannary, certainly was not an average woman of the West.

“She dressed like a man, smelled like a man and she could spit with talent,” Bell said.

Calamity used her spitting abilities to her advantage. She would go into a saloon, light a candle, step several feet back and then bet folks that she could spit out the candle.

That was one way to make a few bucks. Calamity also had a short-lived stint as a prostitute, but quickly changed professions because of the disadvantages, such as disease.

She spent time as a freighter, and had a reputation as a woman who wore pants, not dresses.

“Calamity went into britches really early,” Bell said. “That’s actually what made her famous. She put on a pair of britches and marched into the male culture without asking for permission.”

Calamity was clever and could fool her male counterparts when it came to gambling.

Bell described one poker game with high stakes. All the other players had folded, except for one man and Calamity. Peering at her cards, Calamity innocently said, “I don’t really get this game. Are four queens two pairs or a four of a kind?”

Upon hearing the answer, Calamity raised her opponent $30, and he folded. She got the jackpot and didn’t have a single queen in her hand.

Bell uses stories like this in creating her Calamity Jane presentations.

Calamity was born in Missouri about 1848, though information on an exact date of birth is sketchy. Her family moved west, and after her mother died in Montana territory, Calamity and her siblings were taken to Salt Lake City. The lifestyle there didn’t suit her, so she left to find work on her own as a teenager.

She lived in Fort Bridger, Wyo., but after an abusive relationship, moved to Fort Washakie, Wyo. A group of men there recognized her and said, “Whenever there’s a calamity, she comes to help us.”

The name “Calamity Jane” was coined and stuck, Bell said.

Her nickname had some truth to it. Calamity received a reputation for starting trouble and made the news for it.

Bell has multiple references for Calamity’s various husbands, but she said that on the edge of the frontier, records weren’t maintained.

“There weren’t records kept for divorces,” she said. “You took the kid and cow, he took the horse and saddle.”

Bell said that during the years of her Calamity Jane show, she adapted it to fit the audience, ranging from G-rated to R-rated.

“If we had bankers, we could do a show for bankers,” Bell said. “If we had beer distributors, easy.”

Calamity was known as a roaring alcoholic, she said, but Bell has a theory about why so many people in the 1800s had alcohol addictions. “If there’s no drinkable water, what else is there?” she said.

Some legends say Calamity quit Buffalo Bill’s famous Wild West Show after her drinking became a problem. Bell said Calamity did not tour with the show. In her research, Bell found that Calamity appeared in a Buffalo Bill show in Mitchell, S.D., but she was never a starring member of the show Buffalo Bill is famous for.

Although Bell no longer tallies 150 Calamity Jane shows a year, she continues researching the frontierswoman.

“It could go on and on,” she said. “Calamity was a fascinating woman. Fascinating.”