What role have women played in the history of the Far West? In a climate of anarchist violence they started at a disadvantage, but they asserted themselves. They’ve done everything: pioneers, cowgirls, and even bank and train robbers. This introduces a further question: how did they do it? Did they succeed while preserving their femininity, or were they forced to behave and dress completely like men? The answers are varied. Etta Place, one of the two leaders of the female branch of the Wild Bunch, has been beautiful and elegant all her life; instead the other female leader of the Wild Bunch, Laura Bullion, played on two tables, as she liked and as it suited her from moment to moment: in some photos she appears in men’s clothes and flaunts an unattractive grit, in others, coiffed as a lady, she is smiling, relaxed and attractive. Instead Calamity Jane represents the extreme case of those who took the plunge by camouflaging themselves in everything in the male universe: dressed as a man, he worked as a man, swore like a man and drank like a man. Remaining a woman and heterosexual, though.
She wasn’t beautiful, Calamity Jane. He had a massive physique and rough features. However, it does not appear that he suffered from this. She experimented with various professions on the Frontier, as a great horseman and infallible marksman that she was, and this made her popular in America, and then world famous as a star of the Buffalo Bill’s Far West circus. If she has had some inner torment, one can guess, perhaps, only indirectly from some of her acts: an autobiography full of imaginative boast (but this was typical of the West), having attributed to herself various husbands that perhaps she invented, and having dreamed of a romance with another frontier hero, Wild Bill Hickok, who doesn’t seem to have matched his feelings; Jane claimed to have had a daughter with him, but who her real father was is unclear.
Yet, despite the difficulties, loneliness and poverty she experienced in the waning phase of life, Calamity Jane is by no means reducible to a speck, a cannon woman or a pathetic figure; she did what she wanted and established herself, and her earthly adventure raises continuous questions about female identity and the relationship she can have with the world, especially an extreme world like that of the Far West, but not only; his is, in a way, a story of universal significance.
A biography has just come out about her, which sheds light, as far as possible, on doubts and mysteries: by Ermanno Detti, Calamity Jane. The myth and the reality, Mimesis, 92 pages, 8 euros.