Wild Bill Hickok & Calamity Jane: Deadwood Legends

James D. McLaird examines the contemporary accounts that turned Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane into dime-novel and motion-picture stars. Contemporary novelist and journalist created an astonishingly strong legacy for the pair. Gun fights, scouting missions, and daring escapes from enemies filled stories about them; 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 infamous couple. Fact and fiction have become so woven together that a definitive picture 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.