Down Main between W. Lewis and W. Clark Streets stands
an unassuming one-story brick building that now holds the Livingston chapter of
the Loyal Order of the Moose and an antiques store that might hold the record
for the most Barbie dolls assembled in the same room. Supposedly in the original location of
Calamity Jane’s cabin it might be the only visible trace today of the time the
legendary frontierswoman has spent in this town. The story goes that Martha Cannary
a.k.a Calamity Jane had arrived in Livingston in May of 1901 after a stint at
the Gallatin County poorhouse in Bozeman due to illness and other ailments
related to her alcoholism and malnutrition. As she settled in town, after
Buffalo Bill Cody had helped her financially to “escape” the poorhouse, she rented
a room above a saloon and immediately proceeded in going to town and into one
of her now legendary drinking binges, so bad in fact that it made her forget
where she was staying and even losing her room keys. It was also the last time
in Livingston before she was invited to travel to Buffalo, New York to take
part in a humiliating experience at the Buffalo Exposition, and eventually
drinking herself to death traveling back west for the following two years.
There seems to be an evidently lack of any signs of her several visits to a
town that she visited often and even had a small part in proclaiming it as a serious
drinking town of the West. No commemorative plaques or prominent photos in the
walls of the many bars in town today. An old porter at The Murray Hotel tells
me a story about the time he was tending bar sometime in the 1940’s. Somebody
had concocted a drink and named it “The Calamity Jane”. It was so strong, according
to him, that it conjured visions of Calamity Jane herself to whoever drank it.
The story, or the legend, goes that when you would go out the door after
several “Calamity Janes”, she would appear and call out to you: “Hey Short
Pants, can you show me the way home?”. Nobody really knows why or exactly when
they stopped serving “Calamity Janes” in town but the old porter believes, in
all probability, that it was because she had finally found a poor soul to take
her home.
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