Three New Looks at Buffalo Bill Cody

By Allen M. Jones, 11-13-05

The waves of literary and academic fashion roil according to their own inexplicable laws. In much the same way that gas stations and fast food joints congregate on certain street corners, books of a stripe tend to emerge in unpredictable clusters. While Buffalo Bill Cody has long been a staple of Western kitsch -- along with your rubber tomahawk and multi-colored headdress, you've always been able to buy Cody coloring books, a canonized hagiography or two, maybe a bobble-head doll for the dashboard -- serious treatments of his life have been few and far between.

After an unlikely dry spell, three new treatments of Cody and his legacies are currently (and coincidentally), finding their way to the front shelves. As corraled together by Russell Baker in an excellent essay for the The New York Review of Books, these three books deal, each in their turn, with a fairly traditional, biographical recounting of Cody's life, with a revisionist take in the context of Annie Oakley, and with Cody's essential role in the roots of American entertainment, in the exporting of a culture.

About Louis W. Warren's 600-plus page title, Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and the Wild West Show, Baker writes, "Warren is a history professor and a theory man; give him an arresting fact and he gives it back adorned with a thousand words of exploration and explanation. Nothing is too unimportant to be left out. Still there are rewards for staying with him, for he is an entertaining storyteller and an elegant theorizer. At one point he manages to credit Buffalo Bill with helping Bram Stoker create Count Dracula."

In encapsulating the second of these three titles, Larry McMurtry's The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and the Beginnings of Superstardom in America, Baker writes, "McMurtry looks at Cody the way a good reporter looks at a candidate for president, with a respectful but skeptical eye. He keeps us aware that the frontier adventures that Cody embroidered to create Buffalo Bill are extremely hard to verify. Was Cody indeed only eleven years old when he killed an Indian warrior?" Later, Baker goes on to add, "...McMurtry's cool style suggests that he finds something less than admirable in Cody's career. What he admires extravagantly is Cody's horsemanship. 'it was on horseback that he looked most like himself...It is hard to overestimate how far a man can go in America if he looks good on a horse..'"

Finally, as presented by Baker, the book Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 by Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes, seems to carry with it the most obvious topical relevance. Quoting information gleaned from Rydell and Kroes, Baker writes that, in Europe, Buffalo Bill's Wild West played in "as many as 130 cities a year. Transporting it required at least eighteen railroad cars. The traveling company usually included over five hundred performers and workers, plus animals, prefabricated grandstands, tents for performers and concessionaires, props galore, and the largest private electrical plant then in existence." Later, Baker goes on to point out that "Buffalo Bill's Wild West introduced America to entertainment's power to sweeten reality for the masses by turning it into make-believe."

A storyteller ahead of his time, an entertainer capable of using the machinations of publicity to create an image, a fabulist with instincts enough to present his fictions as reality, when it comes to the foreshadowing of our current culture, it seems that history is only just now catching up with Buffalo Bill.

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