Although they had failed to bring the parson’s family to Deadwood, the worthy citizens were undaunted in their efforts to memorialize this modest itinerant who had stumbled unwittingly into glory. A great chunk of sandstone was quarried and a local artist of more verve than ability proceeded to hack out the parson’s likeness. The statue was eventually propped over his grave atop Mount Moriah, the cemetery-museum where he lies alongside Wild Bill and Calamity Jane. Unfortunately souvenir hunters carried on their unworthy custom over the years, until finally the battered monument, no longer even recognizable, collapsed. In the Adams Memorial Hall of Deadwood, however, there can be seen a certificate signed in Preacher Smith’s very writing, and thus his handiwork lives along with his legend. All stories of Deadwood in the Black Hills come, eventually, to the great riddle of Martha Jane Cannary (sometimes spelled Canary), known as Calamity Jane. This gusty female, who rolled around the West for nearly half a century, has been the subject of more controversy and speculation than almost any other early-day character. In her lifetime she circulated a brief autobiography which successfully managed to hide the truth about practically every aspect of her history. In addition, she manipulated her drab story in such a way that a whole generation of legend-mongers accepted her as the “true love” of Wild Bill Hickok, and thus by no means to be thought of as the drunken harlot she most certainly was. By dint of careful searching, however, some few definite facts of her early life and adventures have been isolated, and upon them at least the framework of her true story has been constructed. She appears to have been born in the neighborhood of 1850—add or subtract a year—in Missouri. Some accounts have it that her father was a Baptist minister, which is an unimportant sidelight, for young Martha Jane did not stay at home long enough for any such influence to gnaw its way into her personality.[2]