Everyone knows the name Buffalo Bill, but few these days know what he did or, in some cases, didn't do. Was he a Pony Express rider? Did he serve Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn? Did he scalp countless Native Americans, or did he defend their rights? This, the first significant biography of Buffalo Bill Cody for younger readers in many years, explains it all. With copious archival illustrations and a handsome design, Presenting Buffalo Bill makes the great showman come alive for new generations. Extensive back matter, bibliography, and source notes complete the package. This title has Common Core connections.
Army scout, buffalo hunter, Indian fighter, and impresario of the world-renowned "Wild West Show," William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody lived the real American West and also helped create the "West of the imagination." Born in 1846, he took part in the great westward migration, hunted the buffalo, and made friends among the Plains Indians, who gave him the name Pahaska (long hair). But as the frontier closed and his role in "winning the West" passed into legend, Buffalo Bill found himself becoming the symbol of the destruction of the buffalo and the American Indian. Deeply dismayed, he spent the rest of his life working to save the remaining buffalo and to preserve Plains Indian culture through his Wild West shows. This biography of William Cody focuses on his lifelong relationship with Plains Indians, a vital part of his life story that, surprisingly, has been seldom told. Bobby Bridger draws on many historical accounts and Cody's own memoirs to show how deeply intertwined Cody's life was with the Plains Indians. In particular, he demonstrates that the Lakota and Cheyenne were active cocreators of the Wild West shows, which helped them preserve the spiritual essence of their culture in the reservation era while also imparting something of it to white society in America and Europe. This dual story of Buffalo Bill and the Plains Indians clearly reveals how one West was lost, and another born, within the lifetime of one remarkable man.
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.
Buffalo Bill lives deep in American legend. A Kansas-bred farm boy, he went on to become a renowned trapper and hunter, army scout, Indian fighter, and finally a world showman and celebrity. As a man of the Wild West, he became known as a larger-than-life buffalo hunter. As an army scout, he earned the Medal of Honor for gallantry in action. But Bill was unsatisfied. Setting his sights higher yet, he traveled the country performing in Wild West stage shows, and eventually founded “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” a terrifically successful traveling production depicting cowboy and Indian life on the plains. Bill’s show earned him large sums of money and drove him to intense national prominence at the turn of the century. This is his story in his own words.
I am about to take the back-trail through the Old West-the West that I knew and loved. All my life it has been a pleasure to show its beauties, its marvels and its possibilities to those who, under my guidance, saw it for the first time.Now, going back over the ground, looking at it through the eyes of memory, it will be a still greater pleasure to take with me the many readers of this book. And if, in following me through some of the exciting scenes of the old days, meeting some of the brave men who made its stirring history, and listening to my camp-fire tales of the buffalo, the Indian, the stage-coach and the pony-express, their interest in this vast land of my youth, should be awakened, I should feel richly repaid.The Indian, tamed, educated and inspired with a taste for white collars and moving-pictures, is as numerous as ever, but not so picturesque. On the little tracts of his great inheritance allotted him by civilization he is working out his own manifest destiny.The buffalo has gone. Gone also is the stagecoach whose progress his pilgrimages often used to interrupt. Gone is the pony express, whose marvelous efficiency could compete with the wind, but not with the harnessed lightning flashed over the telegraph wires. Gone are the very bone-gatherers who laboriously collected the bleaching relics of the great herds that once dotted the prairies.But the West of the old times, with its strong characters, its stern battles and its tremendous stretches of loneliness, can never be blotted from my mind.
