Karen Jones is a professor at the University of Kent. Her previous publications include Wolf Mountains: A History of Wolves Along the Great Divide, The Invention of the Park, and Epiphany in the Wilderness: Hunting, Nature, and Performance in the Nineteenth-Century American West. Her latest work of history, Calamity: The Many Lives of Calamity Jane, is now available from Yale University Press.
Martha Jane Canary was a nonconformist icon of the old West. She was also a talkative, tall-tale-telling alcoholic in the right place at the right time to make herself a legend.