Wild Bill Hickok & Calamity Jane: Deadwood Legends (South Dakota Biography Series)($14.95Value)

Description

Myths surround these two Wild West legends synonymous with the town of Deadwood. Although Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane spent only a few weeks in Deadwood at the same time, their fame and fate have become intertwined and their relationship legendary. James D. McLaird examines the contemporary accounts that turned these two Wild West wanderers into dime-novel and motion-picture stars. Contemporary novelists and journalists created an astonishingly strong legacy for both Calamity Jane and Wild Bill, accounting for much of their notoriety. Gun fights, scouting missions, and daring escapes from enemies filled stories about the dashing pair; even their day-to-day existence seems to have been fraught with danger and excitement, teetering on the brink between lawful and unlawful. McLaird traces the role that writers and the city of Deadwood itself played in the creation of the legacies of the famous couple. Fact and fiction have become so intertwined that a definitive picture of Calamity Jane and Wild Bill is almost impossible. Their brief friendship and subsequent burial next to each other in Mount Moriah Cemetery simply added to their legendary status and made them stalwarts of Wild West pop culture and Deadwood mythology. Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane: Deadwood Legends is the second book in the South Dakota Biography Series. A fascinating read for anyone who wants to learn about how the daring real-life deeds (and misdeeds) of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane were destined to grow beyond imagination through the telling. --The Midwest Book Review This is an interesting, professional, and well-written study in the tradition of the work of Joseph G. Rosa, an Englishman whose studies of the myths surrounding Hickok and his ilk are well-known and respected for their accuracy. Anyone interested in northern Great Plains history or the West would enjoy this volume. --Great Plains Quarterly No one can doubt that Wild Bill and Calamity Jane live on into the 21st Century, whether in popular culture, such as the HBO television series Deadwood, or by helping make the actual town of Deadwood a popular tourist attraction to this day. In exploring both the fact and fiction of their lives, McLaird establishes that, individually and collectively, Wild Bill and Calamity Jane are legends in the true sense of the word. --BlogCritics James D. McLaird is professor emeritus of history at Dakota Wesleyan University. He is author of Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend and numerous articles focusing on the Black Hills and the American West.