ABSTRACT
American memory has been puzzled by what to do with Calamity Jane. She has been either a movie-star heroine of a West that never quite existed, or she has become lately a drunk and a whore, a disgrace to all the good, hardworking settlers. Movies of the thirties and forties and later found Calamity Jane a handy peg on which to hang a Western. She was an endearing tomboy played by Jean Arthur to Gary Cooper's Hickok. In 1948 Stewart Holbrook wrote about Jane in his book <italics>Little Annie Oakley and Other Rugged People</italics>: "There is no shred of evidence to show she ever served, either as man or woman, in any military body of the US Army. Fictional treatments of Calamity Jane have shown a remarkable sea change over the years. In 1959, Glenn Clairmonte published Calamity Was the Name for Jane, a novelized life smoothly put together from the questioned album diary.
