Calamity Jane’s Letters to Her Daughter

I actually don’t see Calamity Jane’s Letters to Her Daughter as a book but more like a collection of historical documents. It’s about the letters that Calamity Jane wrote to her daughter. Which, according to the book, were supposed to be handed over to her after Jane’s death. In many ways, it’s a somber collection of texts, but often they are still hopeful about the future. I think you get a picture of Calamity Jane that doesn’t quite align with what you thought one knew about her, and that’s probably part of the point of publishing these texts.

It feels very open and honest, but despite this, Calamity Jane takes some secrets to the grave. In the last letter, written in June 1902, there is a secret she wants to tell but doesn’t dare and instead states that she will take it to the grave. This at least catches my interest! What is this secret so terrible that she doesn’t dare write about it in these otherwise so revealing letters? We’ll probably never know, just like we’ll never know Einstein’s last words since he mumbled them in German to a nurse who couldn’t understand the language.

Did they reach her daughter?

I’m unsure if the letters in Calamity Jane’s Letters to Her Daughter ever reached the daughter though. It doesn’t come clear anywhere in the book, the collections of text. However, I hope that they did. It’s a very touching story she provided in them. It’s not like you burst into tears when reading them, but there is certainly a lump in the throat many times. For example, when you read that she gives away her last fifty cents so that her friend can have a decent meal. She also seems to have been very sympathetic, taking care of various children while her thoughts always seem to be with the daughter she was forced to adopt away.

Furthermore, she admits that she has contributed to the creation of the rumors about herself even if she doesn’t really give us a clue which rumors she’s referring to. What she says is that all rumors about her weren’t as dark as they seemed to be.

Struggle

It’s evident that Calamity Jane struggled to write, and the letters have been written down only with great effort. The context can shift from one sentence to the next, and the sentence structures are very simple. It’s challenging to speculate how much of the original letter’s form has been lost in translation. Because I read a translation. But translators these days are pretty good so I think that the original feel is left in them. It is easy to read, even very easy to read. It didn’t take me very long to go through the approximately hundred pages the book consists of.

There are also quite a few pictures, both of Jane herself and her surroundings. I like this and am happy that I had the opportunity to delve into this human story. And who knows, maybe I will find more documents about this very interesting personality to read. Who, fifty years ahead of her time, lived as she pleased, swore like a sailor, and dressed in men’s clothing!