Calamity Jane (Conclusion)

(Cont. from last week)

by Dan R. Conway

(Originally published in the Hysham Echo Oct. 7, 1926)

The last man Wild Bill killed was his best friend through a mistake on the latter’s part that Hickok himself regretted sorely to the day he himself fell with a bullet through his heart, treacherously shot in the back. This last killing by Wild Bill took place in Abilene, while he was marshall at that place. A tough gang of cowboy outlaws had been terrorizing the town for several days at the time Wild Bill became peace officer. He looked them up and informed them that they must cease their shooting if they desired to remain in town. They agreed.

It was then that Phil Coe, the leader, broke faith with Wild Bill. After promising that he would not do any further “smoking up” of the town, he stood on main street and fired, as he claimed afterward, at a dog. Wild Bill was in the Novelty saloon with his deputy marshall, Mike Williams. Telling Williams to stay there at all costs, Bill quickly crossed the street alone and sprang into the Alamo saloon, where the cowpunchers were gathered. In terse terms he told Coe what he thought of him. The latter walked outside to the well-curb, and in response to Bill’s question, admitted shooting. He followed this admission by firing at Wild Bill, the bullet grazing the latter’s coat.

Like a flash, Wild Bill threw down two guns on Coe and shot him twice in the abdomen. At the same instant, he turned and shot twice at a man who came running down the sidewalk in the dark, with two pistols in front of him. The stranger pitched forward with two bullet holes within an inch of his heart. It was Williams who, despite his chief’s warning to stay from the fight. Bill gathered Williams in his arms, and with tears in his eyes, laid him across a pool table. At the funeral Wild Bill was white as a sheet and pinched with sorrow over his friends’ death.

General Custer, shortly before his death in the Battle of the Little Big Horn, said of Wild Bill:

“He was a plainsman in every sense of the word, yet unlike any other of his class. Whether on foot or on horseback he was one of the most perfect types of physical manhood I ever saw. His manner was entirely free from bluster or bravado. He never spoke of himself unless requested to do so. His influence among frontiersmen was unbounded; his word was law. Wild Bill was anything but a quarrelsome man, yet none but himself could enumerate the many conflicts in which he had been engaged.”

This tribute from one fighter to another was sincerely given out of respect born of long personal acquaintance, and it sums up the opinion generally held concerning Wild Bill by those who knew him best.

Wild Bill was Calamity Jane’s ideal of a man. She first met him at Deadwood. She was then one of the belles of that wide-open camp, and she soon became his light of love. This all took place in 1876, and it was on August 2 of that year that Bill was shot in the back as he sat at a game of cards in a gambling house. His murdered, this same Jack McCaull, whose life Calamity Jane had a few months previously, saved, was tried at Yankton and hanged there.

The killing of Wild Bill is said to have broken Calamity Jane’s heart, and her careless wild and wicked life during the years that followed is said to have resulted from her grief over Wild Bill’s death. She is said to have set about to drown her sorrows in the wild excesses of the frontier camps.

The later years of Calamity’s life were spent over a “wide range.” She would bob up here and there, in Douglas or Rawlins, in Bozeman, Miles City, and Cheyenne but, every now and again she would show up at Deadwood, the scene of her happiest and most active days, and the last resting place of her friend, “Wild Bill.”

She became a confidante of all the out-laws of the west, yet she seems never to have broken the law openly enough to lose her liberty, and she likewise escaped hanging - the fate of her companions. “Big Nose” George, who headed a gang with which she was at one time associated, was hung at Rawlins by the Vigilantes, and the boots he wore at his own “necktie party” are now on exhibition at the state capitol of Wyoming at Cheyenne.

During her career, Calamity Jane is said to have been married at least three times and that some children were sent to an orphanage. One writer says that whenever she married it was said of her husband that he had married “calamity” for sure, and such seems to have been the case for any peacefulness in her marital life is not discoverable.

It is told of Calamity that shortly after Wild Bill’s death, a man in Deadwood by the name of Swarringer, who operated a dance hall, equipped her with a team, wagon and cooking utensils, and sent her to Nebraska to get some dancing girls.

Calamity returned with ten girls. She made a second trip of this nature, but was stopped en route by the noted road agent, Jim Wall, and his confederates. She became enamored with one of the gang named Blackburn, who prevailed upon her to go with them. On her return to Deadwood, she turned the team over to Swarringer and disappeared. A year later, three of the gang were captured, and with them was Calamity Jane. They were taken to Laramie for trial. Her companions received long sentences, but for some unexplained reason, Calamity was not prosecuted.

She lived for many years after this, following various occupations, and travelling from town to town and camp to camp. Calamity Jane’s death was not as her life.

Calamity Jane’s death was not picturesque, as her life had been. She tarried too many years beyond the passing of her typical “frontier” type. One old timer of Wyoming is repeated as having recalled a meeting with Calamity but a few years before her death. It happened in the 90’s. He said:

“I was taking a lone drink in one of the main saloon in Douglas about supper time one evening when an old gray-haired woman came to lean on the bar beside me. She had to make herself known, although she remembered me. It was Calamity Jane. And there in the same building where she had dealt Monte and Faro, while many a cowpuncher squandered his wages to her, she begged me for the price of a meal. That’s about the last I knew of her.

She finally drifted back again to Deadwood in 1901 entirely broken in body and spirit, and after a lingering illness of two years, during which all of her expenses were defrayed by the big-hearted people of that town, she passed away on August 2, 1903, on the same day of the month just 27 years after the assassination of Wild Bill. Her dying request was that she be buried by the side of her friend, Wild Bill; and this request was granted. Today a monument marks the resting place of the pioneer sheriff and gunman, and beside it reposes the remains of the woman who admired him above all others. Print this post