Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and The Wild West Show (Vintage)

Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and The Wild West Show (Vintage)

William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody was the most famous American of his age. He claimed to have worked for the Pony Express when only a boy and to have scouted for General George Custer. But what was his real story? And how did a frontiersman become a worldwide celebrity? In this prize-winning biography, acclaimed author Louis S. Warren explains not only how Cody exaggerated his real experience as an army scout and buffalo hunter, but also how that experience inspired him to create the gigantic, traveling spectacle known as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. A dazzling mix of Indians, cowboys, and vaqueros, they performed on two continents for three decades, offering a surprisingly modern view of the United States and a remarkably democratic version of its history. This definitive biography reveals the genius of America’s greatest showman, and the startling history of the American West that drove him and his performers to the world stage. “The most ambitious book ever published about Cody and his times. No one interested in Buffalo Bill, 19th-century show business or the many meanings of the American West will want to pass it up.” — The New York Times Book Review “Warren writes with the tireless ebullience of a scholar in love with his material. . . . The grocery tabloids missed a good thing by not being around when Buffalo Bill was king of the box office.” — The New York Review of Books “Meticulously researched and entertaining. . . . A fascinating and accessible study of a man who . . . can still teach us today about how things are not always what they appear to be.” — The Portland Oregonian “Not just a biography but an examination of the cultures of the eastern United States and Europe and their relationship with the American West.” — The Denver Post Louis S. Warren took his B.A. at Columbia University and his M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. at Yale University. He has taught at Yale, University of San Diego, and, since 1999, at the University of California, Davis, where he is currently Associate Professor of History. He is the author of The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (1997), which won the 1997 Western Heritage Award for Outstanding Non-Fiction Book, and several articles. His article on "Cody's Last Stand" in the Western Historical Quarterly won the Oscar O. Winther Award for best article (2003). Pony Express The Former Pony Post rider will show how the Letters and Telegrams of the Republic were distributed across the immense Continent previous to the railways and the telegraph. Like every other frontier reenactment in the Wild West show, the Pony Express was a chapter in the life of its hero and his country. Before audiences of thousands, the horseman-not Cody himself, but another "Former Pony Post" rider-raced "down to the grand stand at a gallop," wrote one ecstatic viewer, "checked his pony within a length, and almost before it was at standstill the rider was on the ground, the bag on another pony, and the man galloping off at full speed, in less time than it would taken an ordinary man to dismount." It was a showstopper. Of course Buffalo Bill rode the Pony Express. Everyone who perused the sixty or so printed pages of Wild West show programs could read it for themselves. "William F. Cody was born in Scott County, Iowa. He removed at an early age to Kansas, and was employed as a herder, wagonmaster, and pony express rider." The more curious might buy a copy of Buffalo Bill's autobiography, also for sale at the Wild West show. There they could read the story in detail. Left fatherless at an early age, eleven, the young Kansas boy ventured out to make money for his bereaved mother, five sisters, and infant brother. Between his eleventh birthday, in 1857, and his fifteenth, in 1861, he freighted wagons over the plains with rough teamsters, befriended Wild Bill Hickok, was captured by enemy Mormons in the government's abortive war against polygamy, survived a starvation winter at Fort Bridger, skirmished with some Indians and befriended others, prospected for gold in Colorado, and trapped beaver on the Plains. But of all the boyhood adventures William Cody claimed, those on the Pony Express were the most astonishing, and the most famous. On his way back to Kansas after failing to find gold at Pikes Peak, the thirteen-year-old boy ambled into the Pony Express station at Julesberg, Colorado, where he talked his way into his first Pony Express job. His mother feared it would kill him. "She was right about this, as fifteen miles an hour on horseback would, in a short time, shake any man 'all to pieces'; and there were but very few, if any, riders who could stand it for a great length of time." But young Will Cody took up his forty-five-mile route, and "stuck to it for two months," before he returned to Kansas to be with his mother, who had fallen ill. After she recovered, the boy and a friend tried their hand at trapping beaver up the remote reaches of th