My Calamity Jane Read online

  Dedication

  For the boat rockers, the rulebreakers, and the troublemakers. No one ever became a legend by blending in.

  Epigraph

  When a man hits a target, they call him a marksman.

  When I hit it, they call it a trick.

  Never did like that much.

  —Annie Oakley

  I figure, if a girl wants to be a legend,

  she should just go ahead and be one.

  —Calamity Jane

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One: Cincinnati

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Part Two: Deadwood

  Mid-Logue

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Epilogue: Denver

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Books by the Authors

  Back Ads

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Listen up, y’all. We’re gonna tell you the story of Calamity Jane. You might have already heard of CJ—she’s one of the most famous names of the Old West. She was quite the character, if you believe the stuff that was written about her in the dime-store novels and newspapers of the day. They say she dressed up in britches like a man, shooting and swearing with the best of them; that she was a Pony Express rider, a stagecoach driver, a pioneer, a scout for the US Army, a spy, a showgirl, and the love interest of many a notorious gunslinger. “The Heroine of the Plains,” they liked to call her, and if all this wasn’t exactly true, well, it made a good story, so Jane never did try to set the record straight.

  Historians, for their part, claim that in “reality” Calamity Jane was an illiterate, foul-mouthed alcoholic. They paint her as a lone wolf, a wanderer, a perpetual screwup who eventually drank herself to death and died alone and friendless, a tragic end after a lifetime of self-destruction. Not exactly a happily ever after.

  We, your faithful narrators, think Jane had a good heart and deserves a better ending, so (as usual) we have a different tale to tell. Hold on to your hats, because we’re going to take you back to 1876.

  Now, we want to warn you that the America of this tall tale doesn’t exactly resemble the history books. We’ve improved upon it, naturally. We changed people’s names when it suited us, combined a bunch of guys named Bill into one, and messed around with dates and ages. As we do. In our story, Calamity Jane’s been working in a theatrical production called Wild Bill’s Wild West (say that ten times fast). The show was one part demonstration—sharpshooting and rodeo-type tricks—and one part storytelling, in which Wild Bill Hickok, America’s first gunslinger and all-around stone-cold badass, thrilled audiences with accounts about his great adventures hunting garou.

  If you’re not familiar with the term garou, we can hardly blame you. It’s an old word, derived from garolf, which had been, over centuries, modified from yet another, even older word: werwulf.

  You see where we’re going with this.

  The garou had always been around, but they were good at hiding in plain sight. A garou looked like a human, walked and talked like a human, and really was a human . . . most of the time. But in 1876, garou bites were on the rise. There were whispers of an evil garou gang known as (wait for it) the Pack, which was headed up by a mysterious figure called (you guessed it) the Alpha. Understandably, the US government was concerned about all these people getting turned into werewolves, so they hired Wild Bill Hickok and his posse of undercover garou hunters to bring the Alpha to justice, a job that would lead to one of the wildest adventures in the history of the Wild West.

  That brings us to the three not-so-typical teenagers this story is really about: a dashing young feller trying to follow in the footsteps of his famous father, an ambitious-but-charming sharpshooter determined to prove herself, and a hotheaded but tenderhearted girl who’s fixin’ to get tangled up in a few dangerous plots of her own.

  Get ready to meet the real Calamity Jane.

  PART ONE

  Cincinnati

  (In which things get a little hairy.)

  ONE

  Jane

  As usual, they caused a ruckus when they came to town. Wild Bill liked to make an entrance. He led the group right down the center of Main Street, Bill riding way out front on his gleaming black horse, Jane and the rest following behind. Within minutes of their arrival the streets had flooded with onlookers, staring and pointing and exclaiming things like, “Wowee, that there’s the Wild Bill Hickok,” and “He’s the best sharpshooter in the West—no, the world,” and “A genuine hero, he is!”

  Bill waved grandly to the bystanders, tipped his hat at the ladies, and swept back the edges of his billowy black coat to reveal the matching pair of engraved, ivory-hilted, silver-mounted .36 caliber revolvers strapped to his hips.

  “That Wild Bill’s shot over a hundred men,” Jane overheard as they approached a gaggle of boys on the stoop of a barbershop.

  Folks tended to exaggerate when it came to Bill.

  “Well, I read in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine that he killed ten garou in a single fight,” said another boy. “With only six bullets in his gun!”

  Jane heard an incredulous snort and glanced over her shoulder at the two men riding behind her: Charlie Utter, Bill’s business partner, and Frank Butler, Bill’s son. It was Frank who’d given the snort.

  Jane crossed her eyes at him.

  Frank responded by cupping his hand under his armpit and making fart noises.

  Jane pantomimed vomiting.

  Then Frank turned his head and pretended (at least we hope he was pretending) to slowly stick his finger up his nose.

  Jane coughed to cover her laugh. Dang, he’d got her.

  “Stop it, you two,” Charlie barked. “So help me I will turn these horses around.”

  Jane sighed and swiveled to face forward again.

  “Nellie, look!” cried a lady in a pink dress. “That’s Frank Butler, the Pistol Prince.”

  “Oh! Isn’t he handsome?” breathed a second woman.

  “So handsome,” agreed the first. “He’s even more handsome in real life, don’t you think?”

  They must have missed the nose-picking. Jane peeked over her shoulder again at Frank, who weren’t so comely as all that, even if he did comb his hair regular and have all his teeth. Still, she’d never be able to think of Frank in any romantical way.

  “You see the white dog riding on the special seat behind him?” continued the woman in the pink dress. “That’s George the Poodle. He’s part of their show.”

  “I simply adore a man with
a dog,” cooed the second girl.

  From his perch, George gave a low growl. Jane agreed. This part was just so stupid, dandying up and promenading through town to get gawked at and fussed over.

  “Hey!” a young man yelled out from the door of a bank. “Ain’t that Calamity Jane, the Heroine of the Plains?”

  Well, maybe it wasn’t so stupid. That word did have a nice ring to it: hero-eene.

  “Nah,” scoffed another fellow. “That can’t be Calamity Jane. She’s not pretty enough.”

  Jane could instantly feel them looking her up and down. She knew she’d never be what a man would think beautiful; her shape was downright squarish, both body and jaw, her face burned and freckled from the sun, her hair dark and tangly as a stack of black cats. But a recent article in the Chicago Tribune had described Calamity Jane as “a lovely, spirited waif,” which had given folks certain erroneous expectations.

  “That’s a girl wearing man’s breeches who’s riding with Wild Bill Hickok,” argued another man. “It’s got to be Calamity Jane.”

  “I guess you’re right.” The first man laughed loudly. “Huh. She ain’t much to look at, is she? I can see why they call her ‘calamity.’”

  Jane’s face burned. She should brush it off—she knew that—but instead she brought her horse to a stop alongside the bank and fixed the men with a stare. They fell silent.

  What she wanted to do was spit. Jane was an excellent spitter, and it would be thoroughly satisfying to send a clean arc of spittle right onto the face of the rudest man.

  “Jane,” came that warning voice behind her—Charlie, again. Gawl-darned Charlie, who disapproved of Jane spitting. It was bad for business, he always said.

  Charlie spoiled all her fun.

  So Jane swallowed down the impressive loogie she’d been working up (which we commend her for, as your narrators, but ewwww), cried “Yah!” and galloped ahead.

  “You cain’t lose your temper,” Charlie scolded her later as they saw to the horses at the livery. “It reflects badly on the show.”

  She nodded dully. “I didn’t. I won’t.” But she knew she probably would at some point. She’d never been skilled at holding back her temper, a trait she’d inherited from her hotheaded ma, God rest her soul.

  “Folks can be mean as snakes, I know.” Charlie finished oiling Wild Bill’s saddle and gave Jane a sympathetic smile. “But at least they know your name. That’s good, Janie. That’s what we want. Recognition. Notoriety.”

  Charlie was always working on the fame thing—how to get it, how to keep hold of it once they got it, how to turn it into profit. Sometimes it was easy to forget that being their manager was only a cover for Charlie’s true occupation: he was a Pinkerton detective.

  (A little background information, dear reader, about the Pinkertons. By the time of our story, the Pinkerton agency was the largest private law enforcement organization in the United States. Pinkerton agents were mostly hired by businessmen to protect their interests, but they also served as bodyguards for Abraham Lincoln, spied on the Confederate army, and worked as “private eyes” sent to investigate crimes before we had the FBI. That last part brings us to Special Agent Charlie Utter, who’d been assigned to track the notorious garou known as the Alpha. Charlie’d been on the job for less than a year when he bumped into Wild Bill Hickok—who claimed to be retired from garou hunting but actually was an undercover US Marshal tasked with bringing down the Alpha. It made sense for the two of them to team up and start the Wild West show as an excuse to move from town to town, gathering intel. And the rest, as we like to say, is history.)

  But the Alpha’s trail had gone cold months ago, and even though being Bill’s business partner was only a cover, today Charlie was all about the show. He pulled a tall stack of papers out of a box. “Be a dear, Jane, and put these up around town.”

  Jane scowled. “It’s Frank’s turn.”

  “Frank’s off with his adoring public, I’m afraid.”

  “Simpering ladies, you mean,” Jane scoffed.

  “It’s good for business.”

  “I guess.”

  “You know what else is good for business?” Charlie added good-naturedly. “You putting up these flyers.”

  “All right.” She sighed and took the stack from him. “But you owe me.”

  He smiled. “Fine by me.”

  The trouble wasn’t in people knowing or not knowing her name, Jane thought as she made her way back toward the main street with a hammer and a pocketful of nails. The trouble was that they knew her name but they didn’t know her. Right now, for instance, people passing by assumed she was a man and didn’t give her a second glance. They didn’t think to themselves, Now there goes a genuine hero-eene.

  “Hey, mister.” Jane felt a tug at her sleeve and jerked back reflexively, but it was only a kid, come to beg, by the looks of it. Dirty face. No shoes. “You got a penny to spare?”

  She dug in her pocket, produced two nickels, and handed the coins over. Not so long ago, she’d been that kid, doing whatever she had to do to fill her empty belly.

  The boy took the money and ran off down the street without even thanking her. He’d never know that he’d been face-to-face with the famous Calamity Jane.

  If you want to know the truth, dear reader, Jane wasn’t sure she wanted to be famous. She was good at the hero-type things, if she did say so herself (and she did, quite regularly). But celebrity had come on her accidental-like, and she’d rolled with it, because she didn’t have much in the way of options as a woman. It would be enough for her, she thought, to lead a simpler kind of life, get a bit of land someday, a small cabin to call her own, some horses to raise and sell, and a few people she could call friends, maybe even family.

  She trudged up to a post and nailed the flyer to it, narrowly avoiding pounding her thumb. The word family was like a burr in her heart—it pained her to think on, but she kept thinking on it all the same.

  She’d had a family once.

  She walked to the next corner and absent-mindedly nailed up another flyer. Before she’d set off to make something of herself (at the tender age of eleven, we should mention), she’d left the youngest of her siblings, Hannah and Sarah Beth, in the care of a Mormon family in Salt Lake City. Her brother Silas had died of a fever earlier that year, another thing Jane tried not to think on. Lena and Lige, who weren’t much younger than Jane, had gone to a boardinghouse. She sent money back when she could, which wasn’t near often enough.

  She hoped they all had shoes.

  “Look out!” Right then, Jane was nearly run over by a passing carriage. At the warning she jumped back in the nick of time and ended up sprawled in the dirt in the middle of the street, the flyers strewn around her.

  “Consarn it!” she blasted after the retreating carriage. “Watch where you’re going, why don’t ya!”

  “Oh dear. Are you all right?” came a sweet voice.

  Jane squinted up at the figure who was suddenly standing over her, silhouetted by the sun. The girl was wearing a white dress with lace at the collar. She had fair-colored hair and eyes and a pair of black wire spectacles perched delicately on her nose.

  She was the prettiest thing Jane had ever seen.

  “Gosh almighty!’ Jane blurted. “You’re the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen!”

  “Oh. Well. Thank you,” the girl said in an amused tone. “Here, let me help you up.”

  Jane stared at the unblemished white-gloved hand the girl offered. She jumped to her feet. “No harm done to me,” she said. “Thanks.”

  Together they bent to gather up the flyers, which were a bit dusty but all right. As they finished retrieving them the girl straightened and read the paper in her hand out loud: “‘Come one, come all, to Wild Bill’s Wild West! Tales of Wild Bill Hickok’s Most Terrifying Adventures with Outlaws and Garou! Exhibitions of Peerless Sharpshooting and Trick Shots by the Pistol Prince, Frank Butler! Wondrous Feats with the Bullwhip, Performed by Calamity Jane, the Heroine of the
Plains!’” The girl pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Oh my goodness. You’re Jane, now, aren’t you?”

  Jane waited for the girl’s eyes to sweep over her and find her wanting, but the girl only smiled.

  “Yep,” Jane said at last. “That’s me. Most days, anyway.”

  “I’m glad to meet you,” said the girl. “I’ve been most eager to make your acquaintance since I heard you were coming to Cincinnati.”

  Jane nodded. “Uh, likewise.”

  The girl laughed. “I’m Miss Harris.” She held out the gloved hand again. This time Jane took it and shook it gently.

  “Jane,” she said. She thought it best to omit the Calamity part.

  “Now that we’ve officially met, I hope I will be seeing more of you,” said Miss Harris. “I’ve read all about you.”

  “Oh yeah? Like what?”

  “Like you’re only sixteen.”

  “That’s not true,” scoffed Jane. “I’m twenty.” (In truth, she was seventeen, but she always lied about her age. It suited her for folks to think she was older than she was, and she was so tall and brawny that they always believed her.)

  “I see,” said Miss Harris. “Well, in any case, I think it’s admirable, what you do.”

  Jane scratched at her head. “I am decent with the whip.”

  “What I mean is, you don’t let your gender define you,” Miss Harris continued primly. “You walk about in men’s clothes and go adventuring just like a man. You’re not limited by the constraints of your sex. You’re perhaps the most daring and progressive woman in America, and I find you fascinating.”

  Jane felt her face redden. “Uh, why, thank you, miss.” She found herself suddenly tongue-tied. She glanced up at the sky, where the sun was almost directly overhead. “Shoot, look at the time. I better scoot. Nice meeting you.”

  “Likewise,” said Miss Harris.

  It was nice, thought Jane as she walked away. This kind of thing usually happened to Frank, not Jane. She’d never had an honest-to-goodness admirer before.

  “Well, shucks,” she whispered to herself.

  She was almost finished putting up the flyers when she became aware that she was being followed by a man she didn’t know. Jane took off her hat and wiped her brow as if she were catching her breath, and surveyed the man from the corner of her eye. He was shorter than she was by almost a head. Young, maybe twenty at most. She could take him.