In the eighties she became restless again and forsook her beloved Deadwood for two decades, roving as far south as El Paso, and on one occasion being seen in California. Her activities at this time of her life are mostly lost from sight, but it may be presumed that as whatever charms she may earlier have had faded, her interest to and in the soldiers waned. During this period she married again, this time wedding a man named Burke, to whom she bore a daughter. She soon tired of Burke, however, and drifted slowly north again, passing considerable time in Colorado and then returning briefly to Deadwood in 1895. Even at that late date the citizens of the gold town had not forgotten her, nor had the esteem in which she had earlier been held dwindled; when it was discovered that she lacked funds to care for her daughter, the townspeople passed the ever present hat and arranged for the care of the child. This act of generosity was purportedly to repay a great sacrifice which Calamity Jane had made in the earlier days, braving the dangers of the smallpox scourge of 1878 to nurse whoever was ill and without help. This particular legend has had wide currency in the West, its closest variant being the tale of Silver Heels, a dancing girl who visited the mining camps of Colorado’s South Park in the sixties. Silver Heels is popularly supposed to have ministered to the miners during a similar plague, for which bravery a near-by mountain was named for her. After placing her child in a school, Calamity, who was destitute, betook herself to the vaudeville circuit. Inasmuch as through the dime novels she had already become a well-known national figure, she was able for a while to draw large crowds. Had it not been for her unfortunate habit of getting dead drunk before show time, she might well have amassed a competence over the years. But her first contract was not renewed, and after a brief whirl at the Buffalo Exposition she returned to the West, spending the next several years in Montana. At last she came home to Deadwood, a sick and broken old roustabout. By this time she was nothing more than a bar-fly, and she lived out her last days panhandling food and liquor money from strangers. At last, on August 2, 1903, she died of pneumonia.