Ms. Mifflin might want to check a map--both the Black Hills and Deadwood are in South Dakota. Montana is that other state up there.

I hope I'm not the first to comment on the support for David Milch's version of Calamity Jane that Margot Mifflin has provided in her review of the book. The HBO show Deadwood actually has presented a Jane made up of several of the descriptions mentioned in the new book, and as everyone involved in researching her seems required to mention the great difficulties in attaining a high level of accuracy in that objective, the show version of her seems quite fair and pleasingly rounded.

As for Ms Mifflin's opening shot at Milch; his claims to accuracy in depicting the place and people of Deadwood need to be tempered on the anvil of this places' contradictory and heated up original source material.

Overall I like the version of Calamity Jane that Milch has given Robin Weigert to perform, as it seems a quite believable rendering of all the parts left for assembling her from the dust of the real Deadwood.

I especially like the comparison to Courtney Love, who personifies desperation for fame sans talent. I get it immediately. Thanks.

who gave men a run for their money through her cursing, drinking, riding and gunmanship (which may explain why McMurtry cut her down to size by making her half a woman)

The review makes it sound as if McMurtry has a problem with women, and that hardly seems the case, given the many strong and well-crafted female characters that he's created. It seems more a creative choice to explore fictionally a complex or contradictory historical figure, not an opportunity to assert what is supposed as his threatened masculinity.

As a public figure, Canary was the Courtney Love of her day: A talented pioneer in a man's world, she was a chronic substance abuser prone to outrageous behavior and forever linked in the public mind to a dead man whose fame overshadowed her own. The difference between them is found in Canary's private acts of kindness.

I know you want write good prose, and this sounds like good prose. But this private difference you've made the pivot point for your paragraph doesn't sound like anything you as a journalist could possibly know is true or false.

Unless you have a far more personal and private relationship with Courtney Love than you've told us about, that is. Because how else would you know about acts of hers that were private?

So tell us -- do you have some secret private relationship with Courtney Love, or are you just fudging reality a bit to make your prose sound better?