Ill Repute

In her lifetime Calamity Jane was the most famous woman in the world, and her name still evokes the spirit of the WIld West. She has been a character in countless dime novels, television shows, and feature films, and yet all of them were largely fabricated bearing no resemblence to her actual life. In this series on Calamity Jane, we hope to rectify that. In the following episodes we will profile her REAL life, and find that truth is far wilder than fiction.  In part one of our series, we chart Jane's early life. Born Martha Jane Canary in Missouri to a hopeless gambler and his teenage wife, a former dancehall girl, Jane was born to run. After the death of her grandfather, the family discovers that Jane's father had been embezzling from his own father to pay for his gambling habit, so with the threat of the law on the way, her father gathered up the family and put them on a wagon train headed for the gold and silver mines of Montana.  The world they arrive in is dangerous, crowded and filthy, justice is meted