From Salon via Powell’s Books a review of Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend by James D. McLaird. The review begins:
As author James D. McLaird confesses in his conclusion to Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend, historians sure know how to ruin a good story. In this case, somebody had to do it. Calamity Jane — 19th century gunslinger, drinker and cross-dresser — was so barnacled over with myth that it had become impossible to see the lady for the lore. From dime-store novels of the 1870s and ’80s chronicling her frontier fearlessness, to Doris Day’s G-rated Jane in the 1953 musical Calamity Jane, to Jane Alexander’s feminist reanimation of her in a 1984 ABC special, to Robin Weigert’s blowsy portrayal of her on the HBO series Deadwood, Calamity Jane has served as a Rorschach blot for devotees of unconventional women for over a century. Then again there was Larry McMurtry’s Buffalo Girls — published in 1990 — which trashed the myth altogether, casting her as a drunk, a liar and a hermaphrodite.
…For all executive producer David Milch’s claims for its veracity, HBO’s Deadwood got Jane wrong: She wasn’t an idle drunk in buckskins; rather, she was a dance hall girl in the early days of E.A. Swearingen’s Gem saloon, which was, at the time, a lumber and canvas construction where three women and a man dressed as a woman entertained customers. A Deadwood bartender claimed Swearingen sent Canary to “white slave” for him in Sidney, Neb., and that she brought back 10 girls she’d lured with stories of the vast wealth in the region. …
A couple of key quotations:
“Canary was the Courtney Love of her day”
“She was a good woman [,] only she drinked.”