Buffalo Bill's America

Buffalo Bill Cody is fascinating figure from American history, and he's doubly interesting to me because he touches on two different areas: the Old West and show business. In Louis S. Warren's book, Buffalo Bill's America, William Cody and the Wild West Show, it becomes clear that Cody really did straddle the line between the realities of the frontier and the nostalgic reenactment of history that he would create years later.

Warren, a history professor, has written a very academic book, and some of it is tough going, but his subject never fails to be intriguing. But the first few chapters are a rather brutal debunking of the Cody legend. He grew up in Bleeding Kansas, his father a free-stater who was murdered for his beliefs. Cody would end up being a scout and a skilled buffalo hunter, but many of his claims were absolute hooey, Warren points out. The most notable of these was Cody's claim that he rode for the Pony Express, which Warren clearly states couldn't have been true. Some of these chapters are pretty harsh, but they do serve the interest of history, which is about the truth, not myths.

Cody, very early on, had the brilliant eye to cash in on the fame that dime novelists had made for him (whether this was based on truths or not) and took to the stage, starring in badly written plays (some of them were improvised tall tales of his exploits). He did kill one Indian, a Cheyenne named Yellow Hair, not long after Custer's troops were slaughtered at Little Bighorn. He took Yellow Hair's scalp, and proclaimed that it was done for Custer. What's really fascinating about this is that Cody, who had already been a star on the stage, did it in a stage costume--"black velvet slashed with scarlet and trimmed with silver buttons." Talk about blurring the line between fantasy and reality. Quickly thereafter Cody reenacted the killing on stage in a play called "The Red Right Hand, or First Scalp for Custer."

Of course the greatest part of the book concerns the Wild West show, which Cody toured successfully for several years, entertaining millions of people in the United States and even more overseas, including the crowned heads of Europe. It was a show business phenomenon that is beyond compare. Warren discusses the many layers of meaning the show had, most especially in the use of real Indians in the show. Cody was very good to the Indians, and by and large they appreciated it, and many of them and their descendants praised Cody well into old age. It was clear that Cody respected the Indian way of life, and they were never played by non-Indians (which was very common in the early days of Hollywood, when men like Jeff Chandler played Indians).

But it was also true that the theme of Cody's show was a fear of the Indian, or more precisely, the mixing of races. The Indian was always an other, and the climax of his show was most often a segment called Attack on the Settler's Cabin. The raid on hearth and home by the savage heathen was an instilled fear on the frontier, and it correlated to the urban easterner or even the completely removed European as a fear of the exotic race come unwanted. Warren takes the point to extremes when he spends thirty pages discussing how Bram Stoker was influenced by Cody in the writing of Dracula.

This book is not strictly a biography in that we find out what Cody was up to day to day. Instead it uses Cody and the show as a prism to view what was going on in the world at that time, whether it be Dracula or women's suffrage or politicians like William Jennings Bryan or Theodore Roosevelt. But Warren does give us a very sharp image of Cody the man. He married early, and while on tour he seldom saw his wife. He had many affairs and apparently was quite the drinker (but not while on tour). He hurt his reputation badly in 1904 when he unsuccessfully sued his wife for divorce (he claimed that she was trying to poison him, and he may have been right!).

After an unsuccessful foray into films, Cody packed it up for good and died in 1917, but he gave the country quite a bit of history, whether it was hiring Sitting Bull for a season, and then being involved in his arrest, or bringing Annie Oakley to the attention of millions. Though this book can be dry in spots, it is full of interesting information and figures to be the authority on the subject.