Bill & Jane

It’s agonizing to love someone romantically who doesn’t return your feelings. The object of your affection sees you only as a friend and cannot be persuaded to view you as anything other than that. Your manner of dress doesn’t make a difference, how you defend yourself in a difficult time doesn’t turn their head, nothing makes a difference. There were a number of women in the Old West who were in love with men who didn’t love them back. These women had no choice but to live with broken hearts. In the mid-1860s such despondent females were referred to as being as “lonely as a teatotler in a saloon.” Although Calamity Jane was seldom by herself she was often alone. She was in love with a man who did not love her back. Wild Bill Hickok told her how he felt on more than one occasion, but her feelings for him never changed. Calamity was among the many mourners who attended the legendary gunfighter’s funeral in August 1876. The buckskin clad woman sobbed over his grave and for months after his passing was inconsolable. Jane kept company with various men from time to time and was even married once, but her heart belonged to James Butler Hickok. They arrived in Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876 and were frequently seen together. Hickok maintained the pair were only friends, but Jane insisted they were more. On August 1, 1902, seventeen years after Hickok died, Calamity Jane passed away from pneumonia while staying at the Callaway Hotel in Terry, South Dakota. She was fifty-one. Her body was returned to Deadwood, where the town undertaker outfitted her in a white cotton dress before placing her in a cloth-lined coffin. Her last request was to be buried next to the man she was devoted to, Wild Bill. Her request was honored. It’s too bad Hickok didn’t love her. Guess she was too hard around the edges for him, too independent. Guess he thought she’d get over him and accept that he married someone else. Maybe he thought Calamity was such a strong woman she could handle a broken heart. He was wrong. Oddly enough Hickok’s wife, Agnes Thatcher Lake Hickok, is buried in Cincinnati, Ohio next to her first husband Bill Lake. Calamity once said of her feelings for Hickok, “Meeting him was fate, becoming his friend was a choice, but falling in love with him I had no control over.”