#old leatherstocking

[mylifethroughasquare]

Old Leatherstocking inspired photo shoot and the gentlemen noodling around. 😍😍😍😍

[gatheringbones]

[“A deep psychosis inherent in US settler colonialism is revealed in settler self-indigenization.

The phenomenon is not the same as the practice of “playing Indian,” which historian Philip Deloria brilliantly dissected, from the Boston Tea Party Indians to hobbyists dressing up like Indians to New Age Indians. Settler self-indigenization’s genealogy can be traced to the period of the mid-1820s to 1840s, what historians call the Age of Jacksonian Democracy, marked by, among other phenomenon, the blossoming of US American literature.

The giants of the era are well known to every US high schooler who has had to suffer through American Lit classes—Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and dozens of others. Among them was James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), who conjured the United States’ origin story in his Leatherstocking Tales, made up of five novels featuring the hero Natty Bumppo, also called variously, depending on his age, Leatherstocking, Pathfinder, Deer-slayer, Hawkeye. Together the novels narrate the mythical forging of the new country from the 1754–1763 French and Indian War to independence to the settlement of the plains by migrants traveling by wagon train from Tennessee. At the end of the saga, Bumppo dies a very old man on the edge of the Rocky Mountains as he gazes east. But it is The Last of the Mohicans, subtitled A Narrative of 1757, that relates the self-indigenization myth that has endured. The Last of the Mohicans was a best-selling book throughout the nineteenth century and has been in print continuously since, along with a half dozen Hollywood movies, the first in 1911, plus several television series made in the US, Canada, and Britain. The most recent Hollywood production was a blockbuster that appeared in 1992, the Columbus Quincentenary.

Cooper conjured the birth of something new and wondrous, literally, the US American race, a new people born of the merger of the best of both worlds, the Native and the European, not a biological merger but something more ephemeral involving the disappearance of the Indian. Cooper has Chingachgook, the last of the “noble” and “pure” Natives, die off as nature would have it, handing the continent over to Hawkeye, the indigenized settler and Chingachgook’s adopted son. The publication arc of the Leatherstocking Tales parallels the Jackson presidency. For those who consumed the books in that period and throughout the nineteenth century—generations of young white men mainly—the novels became perceived fact, not fiction, and the basis for the coalescence of US American settler nationalism, the settler ideology that justified the fiscal-military state.”]

roxanne dunbar-ortiz, from not a nation of immigrants: settler colonialism, white supremacy, and a history of erasure and exclusion, 2021

[banjoforpleasure]

Old Leatherstocking - O Death (Conversation With Death)

[doyourememberrocknrollradio]

Old Leatherstocking - Death and the Lady

[ronnymerchant]

THIS is the kind of stuff I was looking for in the old German film mags!

LEATHERSTOCKING (1922)- And that's Bela Lugosi as Chingachook!

[whimsywoo]

Watch Old Leatherstocking - Death and the Lady on YouTube Music

[xtruss]

Calamity Jane — Born Martha Jane Canary — Is a Legend of the American West. But was she a gunslinger? An Army scout? A rider for the Pony Express? After a century of half-truths and fabrications, historians are still struggling to separate fact from fiction in her life story. Photograph By Everett Collection, Bridgeman Images

Who Was The Real Calamity Jane? Historians Search For An Answer.

Her exploits became the stuff of legend, glamorizing life in the Old West. But Martha Jane Canary’s real life story bears little resemblance to the fictional heroine.

— By Heather Mundt | March 12, 2024

You would be forgiven in describing Calamity Jane as an iconoclast whose flouting of 19th-century female mores launched her into exceptional fame and fortune in a male-dominated American West.

It’s true the woman behind the fictional heroine—born Martha Jane Canary—was a buckskin-clad, gun-slinging, foulmouthed cowgirl whose affinity for alcohol was legendary, even among men. But that’s where facts diverge significantly from fiction.

Historians have spent decades trying to find her—methodically unraveling a century of mistruths, half-truths, and full-blown fabrication, many of them introduced by Calamity herself. She was also illiterate, leaving no letters or journals for analysis, not even a signature. So who was the real Calamity Jane?

The Creation of a Myth

“People, largely, are still in love with a romantic Old West," says Richard W. Etulain, former director of the Center for the American West at the University of New Mexico who’s written two comprehensive books on Martha Jane Canary.

It's been part of the country’s literary tradition from its inception around the early 19th century, he says. James Fenimore Cooper created the early framework for the Western as a genre in his groundbreaking Leatherstocking Tales, a five-novel frontier series that includes his famous 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans.

These were masculine stories featuring females as love interests, providing a formula for the early paperbacks called dime novels. Emerging around the start of the Civil War, the cheaply printed books sold on newsstands for no more than a dime.

With simple plots placing a hero or heroine in a dilemma, they were the perfect vehicle to spread myths about the real-life personalities of the American West—including Calamity Jane.

A Calamitous Early Life

Born around May 1, 1856, near Princeton, Missouri, Martha Jane Canary was the oldest of three children. Around 1863, the family sold their farm and headed west toward Montana, ostensibly drawn by the booming mining towns.

She told of the five-month overland journey in her autobiography, Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane, a rare kernel of truth in what’s considered an exaggerated work of semifiction.

“I was at all times with the men when there was excitement and adventures to be had,” she said. “By the time we reached Virginia City, I was considered a remarkable good shot and a fearless rider for a girl of my age.”

The Trek Ended in Heartache.

Both of her parents died within four years of the move and, by 1867, her siblings were allegedly sent to live with Mormon families in Utah. Not yet a teenager, Etulain writes in The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane that she was adrift in a pioneer man’s world.

Calamity Jane lived a nomadic life, taking jobs for a few weeks at a time before heading to the next spot whim took her. And that’s where her story begins to blend into myth.

Dime Novel Fame

By the time she’d reached age 20, Martha Canary was already well known in the “rough and ready settlements of the western plains for dressing in men’s clothes, a taste for liquor and wanderlust, and a tendency to shoot off her mouth and her guns,” writes historian Karen R. Jones in The Many Lives of Calamity.

Tthe genesis of her nickname is unclear. What is clear is that she was already known as Calamity Jane in the summer of 1876 when she sauntered down the dusty main street of Deadwood, South Dakota, on horseback in a suit of buckskin alongside Wild Bill Hickok.

Calamity Jane gained fame in the 1870s after arriving on horseback in Deadwood, South Dakota, alongside Wild Bill Hickok. The two were likely mere acquaintances but dime novels and sensational newspaper stories published many a tall tale of their dubious exploits together. Photograph By Everett Collection, Bridgeman Images

She was traveling with the most famous gunman and lawman of the West, Etulain writes, having joined his wagon train of gold seekers as it headed north toward the Black Hills.

“Calamity Jane has arrived!” local newspapers proclaimed. From that moment, her name would be intertwined with Wild Bill’s in Old West lore. The news stories that followed, embellished and sensationalized in the era of yellow journalism, flung her into stratospheric fame.

She would be forevermore the wild woman of the West, often cast in dime novels as the love interest of notorious gunslinger Wild Bill. She was also often linked with another famous Bill—Buffalo Bill Cody, whose prowess in slaughtering buffalo had become dime novel legend. Stories abounded of her performances in his famous stage show, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.

In her semifictional 1896 autobiography Life and Adventures of Calamity, Calamity also described herself as a rowdy plainswoman who rode for the Pony Express and served as General Custer’s scout.

For more than a century that followed, the depictions of Calamity Jane in media would make it even more difficult to unravel the truths of her life. In Cecil B. DeMille’s 1936 movie The Plainsman, she was a rip-roaring cowgirl who fought Native Americans alongside Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill. Some 70 years after that she was portrayed as the bawdy friend of Wild Bill and town drunk in HBO’s Western series, Deadwood.

The Real Calamity Jane

Many of the tall tales surrounding Calamity’s life are rooted in fact.

She may have served as an Army scout, her biographers found—just not for General Custer. Calamity did know Wild Bill, but not as his romantic partner. In fact, they would have been little more than acquaintances. (Hickok was assassinated at a poker game shortly after the group’s arrival in Deadwood.)

Calamity Jane was also cast in traveling shows but not Buffalo Bill’s Wild West production, says Jeremy M. Johnston, the Tate endowed chair of Western history at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, which houses what’s believed is her only remaining buckskin suit.

She was legally married once in 1888 but did shack up with several men whom she called "husband” along the way. She also gave birth twice: first in 1882 to a son, who died shortly after his birth, and in 1887 to daughter, Jessie Elizabeth. (However, whatever happened to her daughter remains debatable.)

Tales recounting Calamity’s nursing skills are also well-documented. “She really took care of anyone who was sick,” Johnson says. “Anyone who needed anything, she would step up and help them through their troubled times.”

Johnston’s own grandmother used to tell the story of Calamity Jane helping their family recover from an illness. To thank her, his great-great grandmother made Calamity a nice shirt. A few days later, however, onlookers found her in the streets intoxicated with the shirt covered in mud.

The Death of Calamity Jane

In fact, alcoholism was constant refrain throughout her life, McLaird writes, perpetuating her lifelong poverty. “Sadly, after romantic adventures are removed, her story is mostly an account of uneventful daily life interrupted by drinking binges,” he writes.

For the last seven-plus years of her life, Etulain writes in Life and Legends, she earned money as a performer and roaming saleswoman, peddling her autobiography and photos.

Calamity Jane poses at the grave of Wild Bill Hickok in Deadwood, South Dakota, in this photograph taken by J.A. Kumpf circa 1903. The famous gunslinger died that year and was buried in the same cemetery. Photograph By Graphicaartis, Bridgeman Images

She died penniless at age 47 on August 1, 1903, likely from effects of alcoholism. She’s buried near Wild Bill in the Mount Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood—and the misinformation that pervaded her life has followed in her death, Etulain writes, as even her tombstone displays an incorrect name, birthdate, and age.

But though her real life may have been more tragedy than adventure, Etulain argues that she remains an illuminating example of grit and determination.

“The loss of her parents before her teen years, the lack of education, and the downward push on many frontier women in the late nineteenth century—Calamity rose above these challenges as a young woman of energy, endurance, and fortitude.”

[tackycute]

Listen/purchase: O Death (Conversation With Death) by Clifton Hicks

[magspag]

for my mutuals who love their skellys, you know who you are

[mosertone]

Old Leatherstocking - Death and the Lady

[doyourememberrocknrollradio]

Old Leatherstocking - Death and the Lady

[crossoverworldtree]

Just Out of Curiosity, What Have Buffy and Angel Been Linked Too?

Within the show’s run and in other official canon material, Buffy and Angel have had crossover links to:

The Wild Bunch, Dracula, National Lampoon’s Vacation, The Lord of the Rings, Aliens, Buckaroo Banzai, The X-Files, Evil Dead, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Doctor Who, and Godzilla. The “Expanded Universe” Material (Dark Horse Comics before Season 8, the IDW comics, Licensed Novels) add:

Frankenstein, James Bond, The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the legendary figure of Springheel Jack, Sherlock Holmes, An American Werewolf in London, The Wolf Man, King Arthur, Zorro, The Cthulhu Mythos, Tarzan, Hellboy, Predator, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (TV Series), The Devil’s Footprints, Rosanne, Marvel Comic’s character Cytorrak (the thing that empowers The Juggernaut), Ghostbusters, the Dungeons & Dragons Multiverse, Peter David’s Fallen Angel, and Highlander: The Series. Buffy and Angel have been referenced by other series as well in the crossover sense. Those add:

Eureka, Simon R. Green’s Ghost of a Chance, Andy Barker P.I., Hack/Slash, Supernatural, Gen13, Blood and Bullets, House of the Dead 2 (movie), Marvel’s Legion of Monsters (featuring Elsa Bloodstone, Morbius the Living Vampire, N’kantu the Living Mummy, The Manphibian, Werewolf by Night, Tomb of Dracula, & Daimon Hellstrom), West Coast Avengers (featuring Kate Bishop, Clint Barton, Gwenpool, America Chavez, Quinten Quire, Fuse, Jeff the Land Shark, Madam Masque, Alloy (Ramone Watts), and Noh-Varr), and American Horror Story: Apocalypse. Those nods come in works that also reference: Carnacki: Ghostfinder, Drinking the Midnight Wing, The Monkeys’ Paw, Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter, Halfway to the Grave from the “Night Huntress” novel series, Sonja Blue, Blade (either comics or film series), Solomon Kane, and Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD. Buffy and Angel have been featured in what I like to refer to as “Megacrossover” tales as well, adding a plethora of other series to the mix. The additions include: White Zombie, The Black Coats, Arsene Lupin, Marvel’s Brother Voodoo, Child's Play, Tales of the Zombie, Revolt of the Zombies, James Bond, Angel Heart, Duke de Richleau, I Walked With a Zombie, John Thunstone, Kolchak the Night Stalker, Pirates of the Caribbean, Captian Blood, Lorna Doone, Gulliver's Travels, the works of Stephen King ("Jerusalem's Lot"), Leatherstocking Tales, Charmed, Treasure Island, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (the original short story), John Carter of Mars, The X-Files, Moby Dick, The Narrative of Arthur Gordan Pym of Nantucket, Mayfair Witches, Doc Savage, The Phantom, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Wild West (TV Series), Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, The Lone Ranger, Martin Hewitt, The Shadow, The Body Snatchers (the story on which Invasion of the Body Snatchers was based), L'Enigmatique Fen-Chu, Atlantida, The Exorcist, Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Stepford Wives, Young Frankenstein, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Pretender, Beauty and the Beast (1980s Television Series), Bionic Woman (original series), Modesty Blaze, Knight Rider (original Series), The Equalizer, The Nyctalope, Cyrano de Bergerac, The Three Musketeers, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Invaders (1950s Television Series), Blake and Mortimer (a Belgian comic), Sâr Dubnotal, Blithe Spirit (1941), Lensman, Simon Ark, Dark Shadows, Semi-Dual (The Occult Detector (1912)), Doctor Strange, John J. Malone, Kenneth J. Malone, Network (1976 film), I Dream of Jeannie, Northern Exposure, Jane Arden, The Continental Op, Nate Heller, Judex, Dr. Spektor, Some Like It Hot, Little Caesar, Scarface, Robin and the 7 Hoods, Dick Tracy, The Big Lebowski, Morris Klaw, Suicide Squad (Novel Series that began with Mr. Zero and the FBI Suicide Squad), Theodosia Throckmorton, John Thunstone, Fergus O'Breen, Rocket to the Morgue, Call Northside 777, "Bell, Book and Candle", Mr. Mulliner, Special Unit 2, The Quincunx of Time, Baal (of Renée Dunan's 1924 novel), Female Vampire (1975 Film), Doctor Omega (a Doctor Who pastiche), The Adventures of a Parisian Aeronaut in the Unknown Worlds, C. Auguste Dupin, Fantômas, The Merkabah Rider, Quantum Leap, Monk (TV Series), The Manitou (film), Simon of Gitta, Meaner than Hell, Kull, Conan the Barbarian, Steve Harrison, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Kung Fu, Indiana Jones, Batman, Something Wicked This Way Comes, House II: The Second Story, Winchester '73, The Quick and the Dead, Hombre, The Lone Ranger, The Pearl of Death, House of Horrors, The Brute Man, John Kirowan, Bran Mak Morn, Carmilla, World of Watches, Nosferatu, Underworld, Black Sunday, The Vampire Chronicles, Vampire City, The Black Coats, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Most Dangerous Game, The Vampyre (1819), The Count of Monte Cristo, Tombs of the Blind Dead, Lord Peter Wimsey, Waldemar Daninsky, Curse of the Crimson Altar, Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter, P. G. Wodehouse's Works, Viy, The Mummy (1932), Harry Dickenson, The Spider, Varney the Vampire, The Simpsons, Hellraiser/The Hellbound Heart, The Master Mind of Mars (part of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Mars series), The Wandering Jew’s Daughter, and She: A History of Adventure. Buffy and Angel also have two products that show up regularly in fiction.

One is Sugar Bombs or Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, which appear in Calvin and Hobbes, Marvel’s Runaways (featuring Nico Minoru, Karolina Dean, Chase Stein, Gert Yorkes, Molly Hayes, Old Lace, Xavin. Victor Mancha, and The Swarm), and The Incredibles 2. They also show up in the videogame series Fallout, but that is most likely an alternate universe. Morley Cigarettes are the other product that has a good travel life, enough to have its own Wikipedia Page. As such, I’ll only mention a few notable cases: Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead, Murder in the First, Platoon, Psycho (1960), The World’s End (2013), 24, American Horror Story “Birth”, The Americans, Beverly Hills 90210 (1990s series), Burn Notice, Californication, Cold Case, Criminal Minds, CSI: NY, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Dick Van Dyke Show, ER, Everybody Hates Chris, Friends, Heroes, Jake 2.0, Judging Amy, Justified, Lost, Malcolm in the Middle, Medium, Millennium, Mission: Impossible (TV Series), Nash Bridges, NCIS, New Amsterdam, Orange is the New Black, Pushing Daisies, Reaper, Seinfeld, Space: Above and Beyond, The Strain, That 70s Show, The Walking Dead, Twin Peaks, Warehouse 13, Weeds, System Shock 2, and The Twilight Zone “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”. Obviously, some of these would be alternate universes. Finally, there are two notable parody examples to bring up: Vampirella vs. Fluffy. Vampirella has had a LOT of crossovers, so she’s one step removed from Buffy at best, ergo, they probably met and given the tone of the comic, Vampi did not leave too happy with Buffy’s remarks about her outfit, or Willow. Big Wolf on Campus actually provides a rather respectful crossover, and all things considered, the title character likely met Faith before she came to Sunnydale if taken as a proper crossover. Totaling things up, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and Angel) have had 10 nods to the Cthulhu Mythos, 7 crossovers with Dracula, 5 with Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes, 4 with Ghostbusters, and 3 with Doc Savage, Solomon Kane, Evil Dead/Army of Darkness, The X-Files, and Hellboy. And all that from just Buffy and Angel. Can you imagine what you find when you got a link further than that? Or two links? Six? 

To give a hint: The Mythos can add over 200 works, Dracula 160+, 79 from Frankenstein, 17 from Ghostbusters, 24 from Hellboy, 29 from Evil Dead, and 51 from The X-Files. There is a lot of overlap, of course, but it still sets a good idea of just how big this world is. Now, all Buffy needs is a crossover with Batman, and she’ll have hit the all the major crossover series. 

[whimsywoo]

Watch Old Leatherstocking - O Death (Conversation With Death) on YouTube Music

[landrysg]

Old Leatherstocking, "Unquiet Grave" 

When twelve months and a day had passed The dead began to speak, Saying who is this who mourns for me And will not let me sleep? 

 Via The Hammock Papers: https://thehammockpapers.blogspot.com/2021/10/old-leatherstocking-unquiet-grave.html