~~This
essay first appeared in Baobab:
Columbia College Journal of the Arts (1995)
Calamity Jane’s Grave
What speaks when we
stand silent before such a memorial?
Is it a “monumental
past”? A greatness, as lived, whose
heroism…remains a
living thing…? No, for it is not “the past”
that we are being asked
to recall, but rather something closer
to the “historic”, with
its need for reverence and obedience,
for belief and
remorse…--and thus, the ports of call for field
trips, postcards,
troubled reminiscence.
--Scott L. Montgomery, “Monumental
Kitsch: Borglum’s Mt. Rushmore”
(Georgia Review, Summer 1988)
I. Field Trips
Karen and I were both
twenty, bookish middle-class townies, on our second still surreal day driving west
from Ohio Berkeley bound. It was the summer of 1979 and our kerfuffled parents
warned of Reverend Jim Jones and Commissioner Dan White (or that the Arab Oil
Embargo would push gas past sixteen bits a gallon) but fairy tale plans to seek
a life together far from family or friends had burned crisp and even around the
campfire of the college where our parents taught. And too. We probably just wanted to reinvent
ourselves. Dance on some gravestones.
The road beckoned with manufactured
awe. Indian caves. Gimcracks and phosphorous dreams. Even the gas stations were museums of that,
memorials to this. The wampum of the
wide-open South Dakota plains. Should we stop at the Corn Palace in Mitchell,
South Dakota? “No,” we agreed, with the same hauteur we’d felt while smirking
at parental offers of television sets. Going through the Badlands, we told
ourselves that classes at Berkeley could wait; what we needed was to stray from
I-90’s picket fence of tacky billboards. We figured Deadwood for an authentic
frontier town--and authentic was our
mantra--but what we found was closer to a Stuckey’s Restaurant definition of
wild and wooly. Deadwood looked like a theme park from Disneyland.
Then, round a chance
corner, we saw an inconspicuous marker for the Mt. Moriah Cemetery. The bullet
holes in the corrugated tin looked authentic! “It’s what Tom Robbins would do,”
Karen pointed out, a copy of Even
Cowgirls Get the Blues on her lap. So we turned up a hill with a grade well
beyond Wallace Stegner’s angle of repose. The cotton-speckled blue sky looked
so much like something out of Larry McMurtry’s Thalia that it hurt our
eyes. Then my foot fell to the floor
with a thud that could be heard all the way back in Ohio. Like the gently
sinking end of a bumper car ride, we found ourselves going ever so slowly backwards.
My fey girlfriend said, “Arp, we are
like Garp down his driveway in the dark!” Gravity roiled us trunk first to a
gas station. Where a fella crusty enough to have been one of Calamity Jane’s
1903 pallbearers tested the fuel pump by trying to suck gas from it. “She’s
gurn,” he said, dribbling out a mixture of spittle and petro. Turned out the
closest Toyota parts were fifty miles away in Rapid City and it was 5 p.m. on a
Friday. So we walked a silent mile down to the Greyhound Station and ordered a
fuel pump with traveler’s checks earmarked for our security deposit in
California.
Of that weekend I
retain only two ironies: we never did make it to Calamity Jane’s grave; and
don’t let anybody tell you that the saloons in Deadwood cut their sarsaparilla
with saltpeter. Sunday night, bouncing on a four-poster in the historic
Franklin Hotel, we giggle-pledged “to come back to Deadwood when we’re forty.” An impulsive pact. I don’t know, but maybe, sub rosa, we shared some relief. Neither of us had taken a kaput
fuel pump as omen to take the next stage back east.
II. Postcards
I
only know the original headstone’s inscription from some grainy,
black-and-white photographs reproduced in Roberta Beed Stolid’s Calamity Jane (1948): CALAMITY JANE/MRS.
M.E. BURKE/ DIED AUG. 1, 1903/AGED 53 YEARS.
It’s a remarkably responsible work of
scholarship in a genre which otherwise reads like 19th century dime
novels. Take this potshot I found in Watson Parker’s Deadwood: The Golden Years (1981): Her name, Calamity, perhaps came
from the various venereal calamities which may have afflicted those who patronized
her charms.” In all my reading, this was a singular theory, so I checked
Parker’s footnote and found this retraction: “The nature of her ‘calamities’ is
entirely of my own invention, the surmise of an old army medial NCO.” If not
potshots, folks with ideological agendas take a piece of Calamity Jane. In Calamity Jane’s Letters To Her Daughter,
reissued in 1976 by shameless hussy press, a questionably literate Martha Jane Canary
becomes a feminist exemplar who dressed as a man to open the doors they closed
on her as a woman. Though for sure: there
was frequent poignant need for passing in our frontier past (see Evan
Connell’s Son of the Morning Star);
but an equestrian of our heroine’s talents would just have surely recognized a
one-trick pony when she was being mounted on one.
Closer
to the bone is a macabre photograph in Stolid’s Calamity Jane. It catches Calamity posing in front of Wild Bill’s
grave only ten days before she would die of what the undertaker called
“inflammation of the bowels” (Stolid attributes her early death to a life of
hard drinking). Cutting up in petticoats and doffing her bonnet like a gallant
D’Artagnan, Calamity leans back on the iron gate that cordons Wild Bill’s plot,
as though she too wants to cheat the locals of their future admission fees.
Maybe she was drunk and of a mind to mock death, though a feminist reading
makes just as much sense. Stolid’s research shows that the occasion was
definitely orchestrated by Calamity for some purpose, though that purpose is
lost to posterity. What I noticed about the photograph once I stopped trying to
decipher its staged intent is that Wild Bill’s burial plot was already overrun,
by 1903, with unruly weeds. They poke through its iron gate like those hairs in
our noses we pretend we don’t have.
Thousands
of tourists poke their own noses around “Deadwood Gulch” each year, but I hope
their memories aren’t as sandblasted as their mementos. The postcard Calamity
Janes they mail home are wayward cousins of those sanitized mugs on Mt.
Rushmore. It’s the weeds poking through the sepulchered sentiments that should define history. Otherwise, we buy
into a vision where history, in Frances Fitzgerald’s phrase, is nothing but a
“consensus document.” Postcards become
our civics texts. Vacations acquire the Protestant ethos of a grade school
field trip.
Walking
back from the Greyhound Station, I bought my own memento in a drugstore where
Karen and I tried our first sarsaparillas: a twenty-four-year-old Calamity Jane
in mangy buckskins looks blankly into the camera. Pure theatre. A model
frontier scout. Calamity uses the barrel of a Stevens buggy gun the way a
starched collar from back East might rest his weight on a jade walking
stick. Our culture needs its ciphers.
Calamity Jane lampoons atop breezy Mt. Moriah’s hilltop, offering her life up
as a site for a crosswind of interested interpretations. But therein lays the
rub: most of the decipherers, never
encouraged to see otherwise, sail to the same tack.
III. Troubled Reminiscence
If
not now when? There is a precedent
for sculpting a bust of Calamity Jane alongside those of Messrs. Washington,
Jefferson, Lincoln, and T. Roosevelt. When sculptor Gutzon Borglum was first
approached in 1924 by the South Dakota state historian, the scheme was to
attract tourists with a monumental pantheon of western figures like Buffalo
Bill, Lewis and Clark, and Red Cloud. Arch-patriot Borglum (whose previous gig
was at Stone Mountain for the Daughters of the Confederacy) won out, though,
with his patrician aesthetic, and Calamity Jane remained at Mt. Moriah,
interred next to her long-haired lover.
Granted
historians tend to doubt both the veracity and the lucidity of Calamity’s
claimed love pact with James Butler Hickok. Addled with drink and notoriety, how easy to
let a mind dissolve into the sweet fermentation of star-crossed myth. And yet.
Fanciful or not, the side-by-side graves of these two flawed human myths might
speak less balderdash about our messy historical lives than the four Ideals
sandblasted into Mt. Rushmore.
The
white man’s legacy in the Black Hills certainly breeds no trust in pacts,
promises, or pledges. “Which God is our pious brother praying to now?” asked
Red Cloud after the signing of the Ft. Laramie treaty in 1868, which deeded the
entirety of Paha Supa to the Sioux, in what Peter Matthiessen calls “the only
unconditional defeat ever signed by the U.S. Government.” “Is it the same God
whom they twice deceived when they made treaties with us which they afterward
broke?”
The
same God was, of course, soon to be thrice deceived.
1991
marked the 50th anniversary of Mt. Rushmore’s work stoppage
(Congressional funds dried up). President George Bush flew to Mt. Rushmore that
July 3rd, in the words of the New
York Times, “to highlight the American victory in the Gulf with a telegenic
event.” Buried amongst the vainglorious rhetoric was an anecdote that slipped
through the cracks. The President quoted
a worker at the memorial from 1935-41 in response to a question about the
difficulty of wielding a 35 lb. jackhammer all day. “Oh well, my belly was so
hard in those days, my wife could dance on my stomach with high-heeled shoes,”
said one Norman (Hap) Anderson.
***
I can imagine another
attempted field trip to Mt. Moriah Cemetery. Standing in silent awe before the
memorial grave of Calamity Jane, I’d hope to commune with more malleable
contracts than death’s coda. Try to trace the tumbleweeds. The lovesick heroine
was, after all, buried next to her mythic lover, Wild Bill Hickok, because she
told the good denizens of Deadwood that
was what we planned. I’d like to think that somewhere deep in the community
soul of those turn-of-the-century Westerners there was more than just lust for
a solvent sideshow, but also some small respect for that gamble. A gentle cusp
of curiosity. What if, oh my, the gambol
was true?
As our Toyota chugged
to California the next morning, naysaying nearby Mt. Rushmore, I think we knew
two things about a pact that doth did protest too much: first, we would always
be intimates, first loves, our psyches connected; two, we probably wouldn’t be
returning as a conventional couple. And
we’ve proven ourselves prescient. Many of the conventional responsibilities of
family apply after fifteen years of building other pacts, and maybe I’m making
too much of this one. I don’t know whether Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok
were actually soul-mates. But who can know. And that’s right fine with me.
Maybe the lagniappe in history, wee or monumental, is what we make of it. Then
and when and in the ever present five years from now.
*****
THE STORY
BEHIND THE ESSAY
I couldn’t remember squat.
Figured to punt, explore how strange it was to reread my take on
Calamity Jane years before the screen of David Milch’s incomparable Deadwood (2002-06). But then I found a file. The first draft of this essay was handed in on
September 13, 1991, for a workshop at Iowa with visiting writer Carol Bly.
So how’d that go? Don’t rewrite this. And she didn’t mean it was some well-wrought
urn.
Carol’s moral compass did not suffer fools. More directive than we were accustomed to,
she’d sometimes brand our work with (real) rubber-stamped responses. And though “we” included future award-winners like
Hope Edelman, Ned-Stuckey French, JoAnn Beard, John Price, and Julene Bair, I
bet even they can still recapture a
raw (if always complicated) rankle or two from that semester.
Her typed comments on letterhead are taped to my first page. Even
Orwell once thought that’s what you
do--you get smart and write deliberately tongue-in-cheek smarted up essays. Well, I
think it would be a waste of your time here for you to do it any more at
all…and don’t write any witty phrases--they’re the very devil, because they
draw you away from your deep center. They are like drink to an alcoholic.
I bet I got drunk that night at a bar in Iowa City. The Deadwood. Probably so drunk I couldn’t read the words
she’d penned at the top of the page: Dale--As
I look this over, it seems harsh to me—yet I believe it’s a good idea. It’s not
meant harshly.
No it wasn’t I know now. And I know she was right then and is right
now. Don’t
rewrite this but I would love to hear what you mean by the “pastness of the
past.” I would rewrite it, but not
for four years, when Karen and I were now both married to our soul-mates and
the literal honoring of our lover’s pact no longer flickered.
Carol Bly passed away in 2007. But the past isn’t even past. She’s
somewhere saying, Dale, put some
saltpeter in that sarsaparilla—it’s too damn frothy. I’m trying, Carol, I’m trying.
ABOUT
DALE RIGBY
Dale Rigby is an Associate Professor of
English at Western Kentucky University where he teaching classes in Creative
Nonfiction, Documentary Film, Memoir, and Rhetoric. He has published essays in Fourth Genre, Iowa Review, Under The Sun,
Writing On The Edge, and SportLiterate, among others.
His 2011 essay, “My Playing Weight,” won that year’s Chess Journalists
of America Award for Excellence in Chess Writing, Mainstream Media.
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