I hate to say it, but it's all a big hoax.

Jean McCormick's claim that she was the daughter of Calamity Jane and "Wild Bill" Hickok might strike many of us today as being a fantasy taken out of a Deadwood fan-fic, it was taken quite seriously in 1941 when she came out with it.

Her claims might be confusing, so I will try and summarize them:

• Jean McCormick claims that she was born on September 25, 1873 at Belson's Landing (current day Livingston), Montana.

• Her parents were Calamity Jane and "Wild Bill" Hickok, who according to McCormick's accounts had gotten married (and later divorced).

• She was given up for adoption by her single mother (Calamity Jane) to her friend, Captain James O'Neil and his wife. They took the baby and never told her the true identities of her parents until her adoptive father was dying.

• Through her adoptive father, she was later on in life given all the correspondence between Jane and her adoptive father as well as a diary made up of loose pages that are supposed to have been written between 1879 and 1902. It is through these papers that she found out the truth.

These are the basics of the story.

But why? Why would an old woman like Jean McCormick make such claims? Well, she didn't. Historian James D. McLaird identifies McCormick's motivation to be the simple thirst for fame (being a celebrity meant getting money which she needed), government welfare (McCormick used the papers to prove that she was old enough to qualify for old-age assistance) and self-identity. After all, who wouldn't want to be the daughter of two of the most famous personalities of the Wild West? (who, according to the famous Black Hills historian Watson Parker, didn't even get along).

The papers are filled with inconsistencies and claims that are so ridiculous that they wouldn't be taken seriously by a scholar today. There is no proof of a Captain James O'Neil. Calamity Jane appears at places she couldn't have possibly have been at since there are contemporary accounts placing her elsewhere. McCormick kept changing her story, sometimes claiming, for example, that it was "Wild Bill" Hickok's cousin, not the man himself, who was her father and so on. McCormick used the loose page format of the supposed diary as a way to punish those old timers who did doubted her story or to reward those who believed in her. She did so by writing new diary pages which makes an ill or a rewarding mention of the individual in question. Whenever she met or found out about people who had known her "mother", she'd go back and write new pages with the information provided to her. These are only some of many, many issues with McCormick's claims.

The truth is that we do not have much information about the life of Calamity Jane. Writers, long after Jean McCormick's confession came out, who focused on writing works of popular history used the McCormick material at face value. Many, like yourself, were fascinated by what they read since it humanized an individual who many had heard stories about but for whom primary sources were scarce.

For a comprehensive list of claims and the entire, detailed story, I'd recommend reading chapter 15 in Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend by James D. McLaird (University of Oklahoma Press, 2005).