With "Calamity Jane," the heroine, evanishing like the blown foam of her loved _Bock_, there still remained Martha Burk, the human document, the living page of thirty years of the most vivid epoch of Northwestern history. Compared to what I had hoped from my historic researches in the pages of "The Beautiful White Devil of the Yellowstone," this was of comparatively academic though none the less real interest. Reclining among the dandelions the while "Calamity" oiled the hinges of her memory with beer, I conned through and between the lines of that record for perhaps a week. Patiently diverting her from her lecture platform delivery, I gradually drew from the strange old character much of intimate and colourful interest. Circulating for three decades through the upper Missouri and Yellowstone valleys and gravitating like steel to the magnet wherever action was liveliest and trouble the thickest, she had known at close range all of the most famous frontier characters of her day. Naturally, therefore, her unrestrained talk was of Indians and Indian fighters, road-agents, desperadoes, gamblers and bad men generally--from "Wild Bill" Hickock and "Buffalo Bill" Cody to Miles and Terry and Custer, to "Crazy Horse," "Rain-in-the-Face," Gall and "Sitting Bull." She told me a good deal of all of them, not a little, indeed, which seemed to throw doubt on a number of popularly accepted versions of various more or less historical events. I made notes of all of her stories on the spot, and at some future time of comparative leisure, when there is a chance to cross-check sufficiently with fully established facts from other sources, I should like to make some record of them. These pages are not, of course, the place for controversial matter of that kind. One morning I kept tryst among the dandelions in vain. Inquiry at the saloon revealed the fact that "Calamity," dressed in her buckskins, had called for her stabled horse at daybreak and ridden off in the direction of Big Timber. She would not pay for her room until she turned up again, Patsy said. It was a perfectly good account, though; she never failed to settle up in the end. I never heard of her again until the papers, a year or two later, had word of her death.