Wild West Trans

Look. If what she wore was the standard wardrobe of the hundreds of fighting men in General Crook's huge expedition in the Powder River region of a place that would be known as Montana some years later. If she wore a thick and bulky wool jacket, cut her hair short and wild; boots, of course, and shapeless thick and heavy wool pants, we don't know; if she handled horses better than any of the other staff on the mission; if she swore more or better than men a decade or two or three than she appeared to be, then is it any wonder that no one--not one infantryman of the hundreds in General Crook's army ever guessed that under that disguise-that-was- no disguise lived a woman--young, yes, but a female. 

Crook's army was just a few days from a big fight with Crazy Horse and hundreds of the Lakota and Cheyenne Washington wanted wrestled back to the reservations where treaties demanded they were supposed to be, planting potatoes and raspberries and just staying out of the way of the thousands of white folk parading into the Black Hills or bound for Utah, Oregon, or California. 

What no one could have bet would happen did when her horse threw her down and two or three of her buddies helped her get her boots beneath her again. Somehow, one of those doughboys determined that the body they were lugging belonged to a female, a little one--she stood no more than 5'5"--and a super lightweight.

The rest of them--cavalry, infantry, stock handlers, camp cooks, the whole works--never one guessed that the kid was a she, that the twirp with the king-sized dirty mouth was nothing but a girl.  And here they were in the middle of nowhere, hunting hostiles with a dang girl along.

Word spread like wildfire. Soon enough the General heard-tell about this woman they'd uncovered in the ranks. He went to look--and sure enough if the gossip wasn't actual. "What you want us to do, sir?" the other staff said.

He gave them a clear answer. "If she can pull her weight, who cares?" he must have said, or something similar, because she stayed on for a while, long enough to tell the tale of her days as General Crook's scout, which she never was. But you can bet she loved the story because she told it a thousand times, part of her repertoire whenever she entertained in seedy joints just as overrun with men--bars and brothels all across the west. She could ride better than all of 'em, shoot straighter, and cuss like some half-potted muleskinner.

For some time she rode with Crook's army in the Great Sioux War, only woman any of them knew of. Right about then, nobody knew her name exactly. But it she wasn't snookered or just plain stubborn, she'd tell men just right out what her name was--maybe you've heard of it--Martha Canary.

A year before she had been with another company, the Jenner expedition, a foray with the frontier whose significant purpose was to do nothing more than find gold. 

The kid General George Crook let stay with the expedition had begun already then to identify herself by the name she appropriated and used throughout her life in the West. You may have heard of her?--Calamity Jane.