Calamity Jane: Tall tales from the Wild Wests 'Horseback Trump'

In the Wild West, you didn’t need receipts. You just needed a good story — and Calamity Jane had hundreds of them.

She said she was a crack shot. An army scout. A battlefield hero. Wild Bill Hickok’s lover. Possibly his wife. Possibly the mother of his child. She claimed she rescued a wounded captain, swam a mile-wide river with a horse, then rode 90 miles at full speed to deliver dispatches.

The problem? A huge amount of it was probably complete nonsense. Like a certain current US President...

Johnny Vaughan and Gavin "The Woodman" Woods take on Calamity Jane, the hard-drinking, chaos-magnet frontier woman who became so good at myth-making that the fake version of her life eventually became more famous than the real one. By the time dime novels, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and Jane’s own autobiography were finished, she had basically written herself into history.

What you'll hear in this episode:

🤠 Why was she REALLY called Calamity Jane? – Jane claimed it came from heroic battlefield exploits. Another explanation is much funnier: she was simply a walking disaster

🔫 The Wild West’s greatest self-promoter? – scouting, gunfighting, rescues, military campaigns… Jane’s life story gets more spectacular every time she tells it

🐎 The mile-wide river story – one horse, one freezing river, 90 miles at top speed and a tale that sounds increasingly heroic the longer you think about it

♠️ Wild Bill Hickok: husband, lover… or bloke she knew for a month? – Jane claimed romance, marriage and even a child. Historians remain unconvinced

📚 How the myth swallowed the woman – dime novels transformed Jane into an unbeatable gunslinger before she started selling her own version of the story

🎪 Fake it ’til you make it: Wild West edition – after years of telling the legend, Jane joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and literally got paid to perform it

💰 The fundraiser from hell – Jane reportedly raised money for her daughter’s education, got hammered, then left town with the cash

🎩 Plus: Deadwood chaos, gunslingers, horse stamina, bizarre frontier deaths, lorry kids and whether Calamity Jane was legendary enough for the leaderboard

If you love history podcasts, Wild West stories, American history, unbelievable true stories, historical scams and people who were spectacularly loose with the truth, this episode of Bloomin' Legends is for you.

Did Calamity Jane make the Bloomin' Legendary leaderboard — or was the biggest legend of all simply the one she invented herself?

Listen to find out, and tell us whether she deserves a place.

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Produced by Ben Fairclough

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