American frontierswoman and performer Martha Jane Cannary, better known as Calamity Jane, was BOTD in 1852. Most of the details of her life come from an autobiography she dictated in 1896 and written for publicity purposes, much of which is exaggerated or inaccurate. Thought to be born in Princeton, Missouri, her family allegedly emigrated to the west when she was a child, her mother dying en route and her father dying in Salt Lake City, Utah. Assuming responsibility for her younger siblings, she worked as a maid, laundress, dance-hall girl and prostitute to support herself. In 1876, she travelled to Deadwood in a wagon train with a cortège including James “Wild Bill” Hickok. Cannery later claimed that she and Hickok were married and had a child together, though this appears to be fiction. She became a bullwhacker, hauling goods and machinery to gold mining camps. She claimed to have been recruited as a scout for the US Army, earning her nickname after saving an Army captain in a confrontation with Native Americans. In 1891, she married Clinton (Charley) Burke, living with him for seven years. In 1895, she began touring in Hickox’s Wild West Show throughout the Mid-West. She also appeared in the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in New York, though was fired for bad behaviour and heavy drinking. She returned to Deadwood, dying in poverty in 1903, aged (probably) 51. Despite (or perhaps because of) the sketchy details of her life, she became an icon of the American West, while her masculine appearance and challenging of gender norms attracted a enduring lesbian and queer fanbase. Her story was revitalised in the 1953 musical film Calamity Jane, starring Doris Day as a trouser-wearing, impeccable coiffed Jane, Despite the sanitising of Jane’s sexuality (she nurses a secret crush on and eventually marries Hickox), the film has become a lesbian cult classic. The film’s theme song Secret Love, written by Ray Heindorf and ravishingly performed by Day, has been appropriated as a lesbian anthem. She has also been portrayed onscreen by Jean Arthur, Frances Farmer, Jane Russell, Jane Alexander, Anjelica Huston, Ellen Barkin, Robin Weigert and Emily Bett Rickards.