Heroes and Heroines

I've been a fan of Mary Chapin Carpenter's music ever since her debut album, 'Hometown Girl.' There are several songs on the album that I think one would still think of as good, and one in particular, 'Heroes and Heroines,' that has beguiled me for years.

It is a delicate, beautiful song that weaves together the exploits of Charles Lindbergh ("your wings hang in a gallery sky") with that of...who?

Is there even a female counterpart to the song? There aren't many clues, but we go from illusions of Lindbergh to..."way out on the Western plains...rodeos and riding high...ladies and their men get by on six-guns and white lightning."

For years I though it might be Annie Oakley. She was a diminutive sharpshooter who toured with the Buffalo Bill Cody Wild West shows and was the basis for Irving Berlin's musical, 'Annie Get Your Gun.' Later a movie.

I tried for years to get input from someone else. I e-mailed MCC. No answer. I posted Internet queries here and there. Silence from sites that are light years away by now. I e-mailed another singer whose music I like, Susan Hamlin. She wasn't familiar with the song. (If anyone is interested in a certain kind of folk, Irish music, then Ms. Hamlin's CD, 'Younger Than the Sun' is a good one to try out. Plus, you get Yeats.)

Trying to translate lyrics is of course nothing unusual, and can be a bit of a hobby. For decades people have been dying to know who Carly Simon says is, "so vain." This one's been going on so long that people have probably died without knowing for certain. Aside from life on other planets, it's the one GREAT unanswered question.

Mary Chapin's music does not enjoy the reach of the same mystery. But it can still generate thought. Don McLean's song 'American Pie' has been successfully deconstructed by many, but the best one I ever heard was my friend's, umpteen years ago, who walked us all through it and told us, "the jester on the sidelines in a cast" is Bob Dylan after his motorcycle accident.

So, if I doubt Annie Oakley, who, if it's anyone? The only other female Western figure I could think of was Calamity Jane. (I did think of Kitty on 'Gunsmoke,' but that was a TV show.)

It was only the other day when I finally consulted the Web and learned more about Calamity Jane. The inspiration for both a Doris Day and a Jane Russell movie, a Broadway musical, she was more of a legend than Annie Oakley, who was herself still quite a legend.

Martha Jane was the oldest of her family and wound up providing for them after her parents died. She was an Indian scout, an Indian fighter, and caregiver to smallpox patients. She rode in Buffalo Bill's rodeo, and was, in general, a hard drinking, cussin' figure on the Western trail, one of the boys. Not, unlike, it seems, Hillary Rodham Clinton on the 2008 Presidential trail when she was knocking back boilermakers, talking tough, and teaching the boys a thing or two. My only guess is that they avoided any allusion to Calamity Jane in Ms. Clinton's campaign because of the name 'Calamity.' Who wants a president nicknamed Calamity?

She apparently acquired the nickname 'Calamity' when she helped a calvary officer who had been wounded from falling off his horse. On recovering, Captain Egan is supposed to have laughingly said: "I name you Calamity Jane, the heroine of the plains."

I think I found my heroine.

But it doesn't end there. Calamity Jane, by most accounts was married to Wild Bill Hickok, the lawman, gunfighter, gambler who was killed in a poker game in the Dakotas. They are buried in Mount Moriah Cemetery on Mount Moriah in Deadwood, South Dakota.

Deadwood. Home of the South Dakota Festival of Books, and the site of the opening chapter in a recent book about librarians, 'This Book is Overdue. '

South Dakota. New York's famous mayor Fiorello La Guardia was raised on Army bases in the West. His father was an Army bandmaster, and young Fiorello learned to ride horses in the Dakotas.

So, when in New York, your answers might be in South Dakota. You just can't there by subway.

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