Author Richard W. Etulain discusses his new book, "The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane." Scores of dime novels and movie and TV Westerns have portrayed this original Wild West woman as an adventuresome, guntoting hellion. Although Calamity Jane has probably been written about more than any other woman of the nineteenthcentury 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. www.montanahistoricalsociety.org