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William Cody And The Wild West Show
Knopf
October 2005
On Sale: October 11, 2005
Featuring: William Cody
672 pages
ISBN: 0375412166
EAN: 9780375412165
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
William Cody (1846-1917), a.k.a. Buffalo Bill, was the most
famous American of his age. A child of the frontier Great
Plains, Cody was renowned as a Pony Express rider,
prospector, trapper, Civil War soldier, professional buffalo
hunter, Indian fighter, cavalry scout, horseman, dime-novel
hero, and actor. But Buffalo Bill's greatest success was as
impresario of the Wild West show, the traveling company of
cowboys, Indians, Mexican vaqueros, and others, numbering in
the hundreds, with which he toured North America and Europe
for more than three decades. As Louis S. Warren reveals, the
show company came to represent America itself, its dazzling
mix of races sprung from a frontier past, welded into a
thrilling performance, and making their way through the
world via the modern technologies of railroad, portable
electrical generator, telephones, and brilliantly colored
publicity-an entrancing vision of the frontier-born, newly
mechanized, polyglot United States in the Gilded
Age. Biographers have long disputed whether Cody was a
hero or a charlatan. As Warren shows, the question already
preoccupied critics and spectators during Cody's own
lifetime. In fact, the savvy entertainer encouraged the
dispute by mingling fictional exploits with his not
inconsiderable achievements to construct the persona of an
ideal frontiersman, a figure who was more controversial than
has been commonly understood. At the same time, his show
provided a means for rural westerners, including cowboys,
cowgirls, and especially Lakota Sioux Indians, to claim a
new future for themselves by reenacting a version of the
past. The most comprehensive critical biography of
William Cody in more than forty years, Buffalo Bill's
America places America's most renowned showman in the
context of his cultural worlds in the Far West, in the East,
and in Europe. A rich and revealing biography and social
history of an American cultural icon.
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