“I didn’t mean nothing by it, Miss—” The sandy-haired one looked pained and embarrassed. He seemed about to call me Miss Jane or maybe Miss Calam, but he caught on quick enough and stopped himself. “Miss Margaret.” He touched his hat, apologetic-like. “And,” he said, “I didn’t intend to ask you for… for anything of that sort. It’s only that Sam and me, we heard all about your adventures. We thought you was sort of exciting, and maybe you had some good stories to tell. You know—to keep us from falling asleep in the saddle.”
“It’ll be a long and boring ride today,” the other fellow said. He was shorter and more bullish, with brown hair that had already begun to thin. He held his hat in his hands and kept twirling it on one finger, absently, as if he wasn’t conscious of the habit. In silence, I watched his hat make a few revolutions. In my dull, still-aching state, the spinning John Bull was enough to mesmerize me.
“Folks call me California Joe,” said the tall and gangly one. He nodded to his friend. “This here is Sam Young.”
Those names reached through my vague fog of misery and snapped me to attention. These fellas had helped me from my saddle the night before. I looked at them more closely now, with greater interest. They had pleasant, honest faces, the kind you didn’t see much in the West.
I said, “What the blazing Hell made you think I’d have good stories?” Then I flinched, for my language was edging toward the blue. I had to keep my tongue in better check if I planned to stay on Dodge’s good side. The truth was, I did have good stories, and more than enough to fill up a long day’s ride. But all my stories was about my previous line of work. Those tales was thoroughly unsuitable to the new leaf I had so recently turned.
“Why, we read all about you in the newspapers,” Sam Young said.
This surprised me quite soundly. Sure as I was born, I knew I’d never done a thing worth reporting in the newspapers. But I kept my startlement in cool check and gazed at those boys, waiting for them to tell me more.
California Joe didn’t make me wait long. “You was with Custer at Big Hole, scouting against the Percey-Nezzy, wasn’t you?”
Now, I never did hear a story as unlikely in all my days. It took all my effort to contain my laughter and keep a mask of perfect calm upon my face. I had no idea whether Custer had ever fought the Nez Perce Indians a-tall. If he did, I sure as hell wasn’t there to see it. But Joe’s question brought back a vague recollection of some six or seven months before, when (in a whiskey haze) I had attempted to distract an especially vicious faro opponent with tales of my supposed exploits, all made up on the spot, and wild as a summer squall. I didn’t win that game of cards, but apparently the tales I spun in the attempt had grown legs and run off, all on their own.
“You read about my scouting in the papers?”
“Yes’m. Sam and me, we think it’s awful neat to hear of a lady scout. And to meet you in person… well!”
“Has there been any other stories in the papers? Stories about Calamity Jane, I mean.”
Had there been! As we rolled up our beds and tents together, Sam Young and Cali Joe recounted every tale they’d heard of my great and glorious adventures.
The Battle of Goose Creek. I am outside the ring of the camp site, having left my place to attend to some duty or urge. A fifteen-year-old girl, black hair and gray eyes and a frame of five-foot-one, pretty as you please even in the garb of a soldier. Young and handsome Captain Egan is surprised. His camp is surrounded by Percy-Nezzy. The air rings with war whoops and the whistling of steel axes, which fly like bullets or birds. Because I am slender and light of foot, I slink among the Indians, who are so intent on wiping out Egan and his men that they take no notice of me. Fifteen and a girl, but my eye is experienced, my head steady, for I’m a true woman of the frontier, and expect no soft treatment from life on account of my sex. I fall on my knees beside Egan—wounded, and all his men demoralized, if they ain’t already dead. There is but one good horse left in the camp. I get Egan into the saddle and swing up behind him, then ride away, knowing the country even better than the Indians do. I create a diversion (what kind? The papers don’t say) and carry Egan to a place of safety. He gives me my name: Calamity Jane. And my fame like a wildfire spreads from the Dakotas to the western line of Montana.
A diversion. I picture it: a line of girls dancing the can-can along a dry red ridge, their white thighs flashing, skirts shivering in bunches of lace and silk. The Indians don’t know what has hit them. They stare in confusion at the bouncing curls and the bright swish of velvet. The loud clack of ladies’ prim boots against stone is like no music they have heard. They goggle at ample flesh squeezed into ripe round handfuls by tight laces and stoic stays. And the music plays out over hills and canyons, Streets of Laredo in double time, so jaunty and gay it sounds obscene.
The notorious lady scout who has killed a score of Indians has staked a claim on a gold mine, the most productive Dakota has ever seen, and now she is prepared to hear the many men who come a-courting. She will consider their suits. Yes, boys: Calamity Jane is determined to settle down, and whoever can win her heart will get her gold, too. But what man is a match for the Belle of the Frontier, she who never goes without her rifle (or a pistol, at least)—she who can shoot as well as any gent? Her eye is as sharp as her face is pretty. Fellas must step lively and be on their guard if they hope to claim the prize of Calam’s great renown and her rich vein of gold.
FACTS! FACTS! FACTS! INDISPUTABLE!
Just above the advertisement that reads in bold letters, We have the best and most complete line of men’s, youths’, boys and children’s suits, overcoats, ulsters, ulsterettes, buffalo and blanket coats, snow excluders, German socks, rubber boots, boots and shoes, hats, caps, trunks, valises, blankets, quilts, etc.
One True Chapter, A Flash Light Section in the History of Calamity Jane.
(Not true at all, I’m afraid, but don’t tell the Anaconda Standard.)
A driver shot by brigands out on the stage line, the one that runs out to Deadwood. Thirty miles away from the town, and I was riding in the sage—a scouting mission for Custer or some other luminary. I heard the crack of the shot and then the thunder of hooves, and the screams of women and children trapped inside as the coach careened up the trail. I galloped alongside, and with my spry slender girlish body I leaped from my saddle to the driver’s seat, where I found a man shot dead, and the bag of gold that had been at his feet stolen clean away. (Why he had so carelessly transported gold in a sack at his feet is anyone’s guess.) Possessed of an inborn skill with horses, I brought the team under control, thereby saving the lives of the innocents within, and with Indians and robbers hot on the stagecoach’s tail, I drove it fast all the way to Deadwood and was acclaimed a true heroine, and a beauty besides, fit to steal any man’s heart. My loyal horse followed me the whole way—being much enamored of my gentle spirit, and reluctant to leave my side. When I’d seen the ladies and their children to safety, I mounted my horse and said to all who had gathered, I’m the one they call Calamity Jane! And as the sun was conveniently setting, I rode off into it, disappearing in a fiery blaze.
Sam Young and Cali Joe was so enamored of the newspaper tales that I hadn’t the heart to tell them there wasn’t a speck of truth in the lot. While they recounted the legends (breathless and thrilled), I sifted through the wild-eyed accounts and determined from where each one had sprung. A saucy remark misconstrued over cups of whiskey, or a joke told at a faro table, carried too far. Occasionally I had nothing a-tall to do with the stories; they was, as near as I could make out, wholly the invention of the newspaper men. I listened to the tales in silence, though now and again I couldn’t resist nodding along or corroborating a glorious lie with a soft and mischievous chuckle.
And all the while, I wondered what this might mean for me—sudden, unlooked-for fame, the hard stamp of notoriety. Every one of those tales had made me out to be a real beauty, the kind of girl who can win a man’s heart just by batting her lashes. If this
is what all the West believes me to be, I thought rather miserably, then I can’t help but disappoint anyone who lays eyes upon me. But Sam and Joe seemed to forgive my exterior. It was the stories themselves they loved, not the fantasy of the pretty young frontier hell-cat with a heart of gold. I might have no inkling of what my fame meant, but I’d be a damned fool and a liar besides if I tried to claim I didn’t enjoy my few small trappings of glamour.
The longer we rode together, the more I came to like Joe and Sam. They was good, decent fellas, earnest and brave—and they had known Wild Bill for some time, having met up with him on his previous expedition into the Black Hills. We stuck close together, the three of us, and their conversation and general cheer distracted me from the pain in my head as my come-down resolved. I felt much better than I had the day before, yet the come-down still had me in its grips, and Lord knows I needed a distraction something awful.
Now and then, though, both Joe and Sam lapsed into silence, lulled by the heat of the day and the rhythm of their horses’ walking, or drawn off by their own private musings to places I couldn’t follow. And in those times, I fixed my eyes on Wild Bill, watching him surreptitious-like from beneath the black arc of my sombrero’s brim.
I watched Bill emerge from a warped-glass ripple of heat, turning his mount to ride crosswise of the party’s slow current. And halt, and pause, and as his head turned the heat would rise up from the earth and distort him till he merged—shoulders into stone, hands into dry earth—with the world around and behind him. The fringe of his buckskin sleeves was the waving of prairie grass; the smell of his body carried to me on the wind, sweat and horse and the oil of his well-shined gun, sun-roughened skin and the dark rasp of wood smoke. In the distance, the mountains hung blue—layers of blue laid one atop another, and when Bill ranged out beyond the snake-line of Dodge’s party, the indigo and the violet-gray opened up to welcome him. He became a part of the hills, the embodiment of distance, and then he returned and rode close to me for a minute or two, and he was all shades of warm red, all shades of liveliness again. His auburn hair and his chapped hands. His knuckles hard and angular, skin split from weather but half-healed along their ridges. His horse was red, too, a glowing sorrel like a mountain sunset, like the evening’s last light on the face of a high stone cliff.
Whenever he came near, I felt as if the mountains and the hills was bending down to touch me, brushing me with pale fingers of bear grass in bloom. And as he rode away again, with hardly a word spoken, the land swept out to reveal to me all the vast, painful beauty of creation.
The next day, I felt worlds better. I even started to perk up some. The party broke camp early so we could make tracks before the day got too hot and the deer flies (which was thick in the high elevations) wouldn’t pester us more than we could stand. A grumble still lurked in my head, and a curious, heavy dampness seemed to weigh down my soul, but through the last of my come-down I did feel (for the first time in my life) that I could kick liquor for good and all, and become the kind of girl Wild Bill—or any other man, for that matter—might come to appreciate.
The camaraderie of Sam and California Joe reinforced that notion. We became proper chums by the third day, laughing at each other’s jokes, lending a hand whenever a hand was needed. Sam and Joe saw in me real worth—I mean the true kind, that kind that went beyond the convenient proximity of my body and my always-bargain price. Anyway, they never got a bit of what I sold to other men on other expeditions. I meant what I said to Wild Bill: I was a reformed girl. The welcome friendship of Sam Young and California Joe—without any carnal expectation attached—assured me that I had a future as a proper lady.
By that time, Dr. McGillycuddy’s hope that I would prove a poor rider was well and truly dashed. Silkie was a hardy thing, more than equal to keeping up with the soldiers’ horses, and if I wasn’t as feather-light as the newspapers made me out to be, I was still lighter than a man. Silkie found me a burden easily borne, even over the rough terrain of the Hills. My legs and behind was tough enough for the long ride; I never wearied, so if anyone tries to tell you that’s how I came to be riding in a supply wagon, you’ll know it’s an outright lie.
Poor Silkie was tough, as I said, and well experienced with steep, rocky trails. She wasn’t the only horse to slip as we descended a ridge near the strange, flat-topped, bare-rock spire the Indians called the Bear’s Teepee. But Silkie was the only horse to suffer an injury. I can’t lay the blame anywhere but at Bad Luck’s door. Anyhow, when she was back on her feet, I kicked her away from the trail and slid out of my saddle to examine her legs. She had a nasty cut along one knee; it bled something awful. Joe and Sam helped me poultice it to stop the bleeding, but Sam said, “Oughtn’t to ride her for at least a day, Margaret. Might go lame if you do.”
Joe put up a request to the man in charge, but Dodge flatly refused to lend me a spare horse to ride. He said I could sit in the supply wagon till my mare was healed up. I think he hoped the humiliation of being hauled like a sack of potatoes would take me down a few pegs and put me back in a woman’s proper place.
I didn’t mind riding in the wagon, though I had forgotten how uncomfortable it can be. A wagon’s movement is all chaos, without the fluid side-to-side and gentle bob of a single horse’s motion. There was little hope I might accustom myself to the rattling—no looseness in any of my limbs could compensate for the wagon’s ceaseless, weary rumble.
But I was far more concerned for Silkie than for myself. The black mare was my one good friend, if you didn’t count Sam and Joe—who after all was only very recent acquaintances. I felt dreadful scared that Silkie might go lame for good, and all that day, I kept lifting my head and shoulders over the edge of the wagon to watch her gait, searching for any signs of permanent injury. She followed calmly behind California Joe, who had tied one of her reins to his horn; Silkie seemed content, untroubled by her knee. But still I crackled inside with worry.
To push my fears away, I made myself as useful as I could, for I was determined that neither Dodge nor McGillycuddy nor Bill—especially Bill—should find any cause to gripe over Margaret Bird. I took out my knife and peeled and cut potatoes while the wagon jolted up the trail. I made a private game of it, challenging myself to skin a whole potato in one long, curled strip. Then I flung the peels over the side of the wagon, so they lay like white snakes basking on the trail. It would have been better fun if Sam and Joe had been with me, for without their chatter all I could think of was Bill—or rather, Bill’s absence as he rode out alone, this way and that, scouting for signs of Indians. I seldom caught sight of him from the wagon’s bed, though I encountered him constantly in my thoughts, often enough that I nicked my fingers with the knife almost as frequently as I nicked potatoes.
Evening had almost settled in by the time we reached Lytle Crick. The ford was broad and gravelly, the water not especially deep but swiftly flowing. Wild Bill and Dodge set their horses and looked at the water for a long time, discussing the matter in quiet, earnest tones. The evening blued down around Wild Bill; new-hatched flies rose up from the brush to pester the horses, making them stamp and swing their tails, but Bill wasn’t disturbed. He kept his eyes on the water and I watched him just as avidly, never caring who saw the hungry light in my face or the unwavering loyalty of my gaze.
After a time, Bill nodded. Dodge turned and barked an order to his men. A few at a time, they began crossing the stream. The horses held their heads up in a stiff show of dislike; they picked up their hooves with exaggerated care, and now and then a horse slipped on the slick rocks, with the current crashing around its feet, and almost went down. When half the party had crossed to the opposite bank, Dodge called for the wagon to ford the crick, too.
The horses pulling my wagon balked and snorted; they couldn’t be made to enter the water. Eventually, someone tied a rope around one of their heads, and the men on the other side of the crick hauled at the rope till the wagon horses splashed in. They resented every step of the crossing. I
was tense, gripping the side of the wagon with a fierce and desperate strength. I could feel the horses’ fear in my own body, for I noted how the water shuddered against the wagon wheels, pounding and sucking and dragging with the force of a fast, cold current. Now and then a rock slid beneath a horse’s hoof with a loud, hollow, watery scrape and the whole lot—team, wagon, potato sacks, and Calam—lurched and shivered with fear. But we made it past the crick’s middle, and step by laborious step, the water receded from the wheels.
I had just begun to relax—scarcely allowing myself to believe I had survived—when the damn fool men on the opposite bank let go of their rope. The horses sensed freedom on the instant; they both danced sideways, and the wagon backed and shuddered with a sudden, sickening splash. A great chorus of fearful shouts went up from the men on both sides of the crick. I had time for one scream—embarrassing in its high, frantic pitch—before the wagon tipped up on its side. Then it turned over in a roar of water and a thunder of rolling potatoes.
The cold water hit me like a fist; I flailed with my eyes closed, though it was darker than pitch anyway. I clamped my mouth tight-shut, but water surged up my nose and into the back of my throat, bringing the taste of mud with it. Distant and muffled, as if behind a heavy barn door, I heard the men hollering and the team horses screaming. Water hissed; the rocks below me scraped and groaned and it was a sound I imagined one might hear down in the belly of Hell.
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