Calamity Jane Arrived

I am officially throwing in the towel on the Swedish book... this sounds callous but the whole book is about a missing/killed child and I have formed no attachment to this kid. And his mother is annoying. Enough said.

Anyway, now my attention has turned to:

Growing up, I was so hungry for female role models/meaningful historical figures that when I first heard of Calamity Jane, I was excited. On a trip to Deadwood, South Dakota, when I was about 12, the word was that she was Wild Bill Hickock's "girlfriend."  But she was also her own woman -- independent, out there by herself.

Here's what Amazon says:

Everyone knows the name Calamity Jane. Scores of dime novels and movie and TV Westerns have portrayed this original Wild West woman as an adventuresome, gun-toting hellion. Although Calamity Jane has probably been written about more than any other woman of the nineteenth-century American West, fiction and legend have largely obscured the facts of her life. This lively, concise, and exhaustively researched biography traces the real person from the Missouri farm where she was born in 1856 through the development of her notorious persona as a Wild West heroine.