Martha Canary, better known as Calamity Jane, was an American frontierswoman, professional scout and the best known heroine of the American Wild West. Orphan, prostitute, bullwhacker; likened to Joan of Arc and Florence Nightingale, and long celebrated in novels, plays and movies. She was also a mother, living in one of the most dangerous eras to give birth.

Disease like cholera, smallpox and dysentery were rampant before the advent of sanitation and hygiene. Poverty, malnutrition, and bad birth care are just some of the reasons it was harrowing to give birth in the 1800s Wild West. Yet it does better justice to understand how rather than childbirth being inherently dangerous, it was made so by those mitigating factors.

The overriding, touted memory of the Wild West is that childbirth was simply dangerous and that many mothers and babies died. What we overlook is that many mothers and babies survived. One of those mothers was Calamity Jane. Calamity drank, smoke, lived an immoral life, spent time with a host of miners with smallpox, and ultimately died young in her 50s. In spite of that, childbirth did not take her life nor that of her children. Depicting the Wild West’s greatest masculine heroines in the ultimate act of her biological femininity helps remind us of the maternal existence behind the paternal voice that has dominated the narrative of the historic American West. In the scourge of great calamity, humanity was still capable, and the generations it bore are its legacy.