Bad Girls by Jane Yolen

Author:Jane Yolen [YOLEN, JANE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-60734-538-1
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Published: 2013-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

MARTHA JANE’S life was a calamity. Her mother died when Martha Jane was young. Her father and brothers were separated from her in an Indian uprising, and she had to fend for herself. Or maybe it was that both her parents died when she was eighteen. Who could tell? Martha Jane Cannary almost never told the truth.

She learned to shoot and ride early in life. By twenty she was an army scout. She wore men’s clothing and smoked a cigar. In Wyoming she rode into a fight between some Indians and a small contingent of soldiers. There she picked up the fallen Captain Egan and saved him by riding off with him across her saddle. The rest of the soldiers were slaughtered.

When Egan recovered, he nicknamed his rescuer Calamity Jane. Or so the story goes. But if Calamity Jane told it, then maybe it was a lie.

The St. Paul Dispatch wrote: “She got her name from a faculty she has had of producing a ruction at any time and place and on short notice.”

Wherever the truth lay, if a man offended her, she said he was “courtin’ calamity.” And many men tried to do just that. Court her, that is. She was a pretty, blue-eyed young woman, after all.

She was also an Indian killer from her days as a scout. A woman who dressed like a man. Who drank whiskey in bars with the men. Who swore like the toughest of mule-train drivers. Who considered herself “a daring and reckless rider.”

Once she rescued a stagecoach full of passengers by leading a party of Plains Indians away from them. Afterward she circled back, took the reins from the hands of the dead driver, and drove the coach to its destination in Deadwood. Or so she said.

Eventually Calamity Jane joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, where she remained until she retired, or was fired. You decide. Calamity Jane herself told both stories.

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