August marks of the deaths of two of the Wild West’s most famous figures: Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. Hickok was killed August 2, 1876, at the age of 39, and Calamity Jane died of illness on August 1, 1903, at age 51; both died in South Dakota.

During his life, Hickok was a soldier, scout, stagecoach driver, lawman, gunfighter, showman, marksman, gambler, and more. He died after being shot from behind while playing poker in a saloon. Calamity Jane was a frontierswoman known for her men’s attire, hard drinking, and skill at profanity. She claimed to have been in love with Wild Bill Hickok and even to have gone after his killer with a meat cleaver—though there is no evidence to support this; she is, however, buried near him, as she requested.

Both Hickok and Calamity Jane were famous during their lifetimes, with their legends quickly outgrowing the actual facts of their lives. Hickok gained national fame in 1867, when he became the subject of an article in Harper’s Magazine. Calamity Jane similarly became well known around 1877, when she was used as the basis for a fictional character in the “Deadwood Dick” dime novels.

After the two gained fame, they were regularly mentioned in the newspapers of the time. An excerpt of one article about Hickok from 1870 reads:

“Wild Bill is a man of great physical power and an unerring marksman. He never comes out of a fight second-best. He was at one time surprised by ten guerrillas in a cabin, where he fought and killed them all, being himself pretty well cropped to pieces with their knives.”

While Hickok died at the height of his fame, Calamity Jane outlived hers. An article published in 1903, shortly before her death, describes it thus:

“It is not the Calamity Jane of today […] that you want to remember. She of today is old and poverty stricken and wretched. The country has outgrown her and her occupation is gone. […] It is the Calamity Jane of the old days, the Indian fighter, the scout, the mail carrier, the cow puncher, the man among men, who stands heroic.”

In both of the case of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane, myth became more important than reality in the public’s perception of them, and they both still remain larger than life today.

If you’re interested in Wild Bill Hickok or Calamity Jane, look for more articles about them on Newspapers.com, especially in our South Dakota papers. Through cooperative projects with the Black Hills Pioneer and the Deadwood Historic Preservation Commission, Newspapers.com has a large collection of papers from South Dakota, where both Wild Bill and Calamity Jane spent significant time.

Come explore *four new and updated papers on Newspapers.com: the Chicago Tribune, the Fort Lauderdale News, South Florida Sun Sentinel, and the Morning Call!

Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune was founded in 1847. By the Civil War, the Tribune had adopted an anti-slavery stance and was influential in the election of President Abraham Lincoln. In 1974, the Tribune made history when it became the first newspaper to publish overnight the transcripts President Nixon had released of his infamous White House tapes. Today, the Tribune has one of the largest circulations in the country and remains an important paper in the Great Lakes region. Newspapers.com has issues from 1849 to 2016.

Fort Lauderdale News and South Florida Sun Sentinel
The Fort Lauderdale News and South Florida Sun Sentinel are two related papers from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The Fort Lauderdale News traces its roots back to a paper founded in 1911, while the Sun Sentinel began publishing in 1960. In 1963, both papers were bought by the same company, with the News as its evening paper and the Sun Sentinel as its morning paper. The News stopped publication in 1992, while the Sun Sentinel is still published today. The Sun Sentinel serves Broward and Palm Beach counties and has one of the largest circulations in South Florida. It is recognized for its investigative reporting and editorial sports coverage, among other things. Newspapers.com has issues of the Fort Lauderdale News from 1925 to 1991, and issues of the South Florida Sun Sentinel from 1981 to 2017.

The Morning Call
The Morning Call, based in Allentown, is Pennsylvania’s third-largest newspaper. It serves nine counties in eastern Pennsylvania and western New Jersey and is the leading paper in Lehigh Valley. The paper was founded in 1883 under the name the Critic but was renamed the Morning Call in 1895 as part of a contest in which the schoolboy or girl who could guess the paper’s new name would get five dollars in gold. The Morning Call was run primarily by the Miller family for most of its history, up until the 1980s. It is today known for its watchdog journalism. Newspapers.com has issues from 1895 to 2017.

Explore these and other papers on Newspapers.com!

*With a Newspapers.com Basic subscription, you can see issues of these papers through 1922; or, with a Publisher Extra subscription, access those early years and additional issues from 1923 onward.

Do you have ancestors who lived in a poorhouse? If so, newspapers are one of the resources you can use to discover what life may have been like for those family members.

Alternatively called poor farms, county farms, or almshouses (depending on the region of the United States), poorhouses were typically run by counties (or sometimes towns) as a way to take care of people who were poor, old, disabled, or homeless and who had nowhere else to go. In Great Britain, such institutions were more often called workhouses. In the United States, poorhouses began to disappear after the Social Security Act was introduced in 1935, and they had almost totally disappeared by the 1950s.

It can be difficult to find records from poorhouses, so newspapers can be quite valuable in your research. Although individual “inmates” (as they were often called) of poorhouses are rarely mentioned by name in newspapers, you can typically discover quite a bit about the poorhouse they lived in from newspaper articles and piece together a picture of what your ancestor’s life in that poorhouse may have been like. (If you’re not sure if you have any ancestors who lived in a poorhouse, try reading this helpful article by Ancestry for guidance.)

If you know the name of the poorhouse where your ancestor resided, simply search Newspapers.com for the institution’s name to bring up search results. If you are unsure what the name of the poorhouse was in a certain area, use Newspapers.com to search the newspapers in the town or county (or even state) where the poorhouse was located using search terms like “poorhouse,” “county farm,” “poor farm,” or “almshouse.” You can then narrow the results by date range (such as your ancestor’s birth and death dates) if you desire.

If a broader look at poorhouses in America interests you, the St. Louis Star and Times published a series of articles on poorhouses in Missouri in 1922 and 1923 as part of a public awareness campaign to improve conditions in those institutions. Many of these articles paint a vivid picture of what some poorhouses were like at the time and can be quite eye-opening!

Get started learning more about poorhouses by searching on Newspapers.com!