http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/books/review/11ward.html

December 11, 2005

'Buffalo Bill's America,' by Louis S. Warren
Showman of the Wild Frontier

Review by GEOFFREY C. WARD

MY paternal grandmother endured many sadnesses when young and was
understandably reticent when asked for details about her girlhood. But she
made sure to pass on one vivid memory to her descendants: her banker father
had briefly been in business with Buffalo Bill, and she had once been
allowed to sit on the Great Man's buckskinned lap. My brother and sister
and I were suitably awed when she first told us about it in the early
1950's. William F. Cody had been dead for more than 30 years then, but we
all knew who he was - or thought we did.

Fact and fabrication were so tangled in the old showman's life that toward
the end even he sometimes seemed to confuse the two, and writers and
scholars have struggled to sort things out and to explain as well the
extraordinary grip he maintained on the American imagination long after he
was laid to rest on a Colorado mountaintop in 1917. Over the years, Henry
Nash Smith, Don Russell, Richard Slotkin, Richard White, Joy S. Kasson,
Larry McMurtry and many others have had their say.

"Buffalo Bill's America," by Louis S. Warren, is well written and
exhaustively researched, the weightiest and surely 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. But it is also likely to spark almost as many arguments
as it seeks to settle.

The author, a professor of history at the University of California, Davis,
separates biographical truth from fiction whenever he can. Cody's claim to
have ridden for the pony express as a boy - still a staple of children's
books about him - is apparently false, for example. But the least plausible
item in his catalog of gaudy deeds turns out to have been authentic: on
today's border between Wyoming and Nebraska in 1876, within days of
Custer's last stand, Cody really did help lead cavalrymen within sight of a
small band of Cheyenne warriors and then, while "dressed in a stage costume
of black velvet . . . trimmed with silver buttons," managed to kill and
scalp a subchief.

"The seam between truth and fiction, fake exploits and real deeds, was so
artfully sewn as to be all but invisible," Warren writes of Cody's
carefully constructed persona. "Audiences could pick and choose what they
were willing to believe, and some were never convinced that Cody was
everything he claimed to be. . . . 'He is a poseur,' wrote one reviewer,
'but he poses impeccably.' " He did indeed, and in the end, despite
Warren's best efforts, he remains in many respects the dashing enigma he
always was.

Warren is less interested in nailing Cody's lies than in understanding why
he told them. He seeks to situate his subject "in changing social and
political contexts, to read the life as, in part, an expression of its
era." To that end, he evokes each of the many worlds through which Bill
Cody made his way en route to becoming Buffalo Bill. Tall and handsome and
already costumed and coiffed as painstakingly as any eager ingénue, he was
just 23 when he began collaborating in 1869 with the writer Ned Buntline,
the first Easterner to see that there was big money to be made if the real
Cody could be turned into the mythical embodiment of the West. By then,
Cody had tried nearly every occupation open to a young Westerner on the
make: courier, teamster, horse thief, Civil War soldier, would-be
entrepreneur, gold seeker, buffalo hunter, Indian fighter, chief of scouts
and more. As Warren skillfully shows, each provided him with authentic
frontier experiences that he was able to embroider or rearrange (or
appropriate wholesale from others) for inclusion in the personal legend he
would tend tirelessly all his life.

In 1872, he visited the East for the first time and saw at the Bowery
Theater in New York an otherwise forgotten actor, gorgeously named J. B.
Studley, playing a highly colored version of him. Later that year, in
Chicago, Cody stepped into his own moccasins in a Buntline melodrama billed
as "The Scouts of the Prairie or Red Deviltry as It Is" and was an instant
hit with working-class audiences. He remained modest about his theatrical
talents but justly proud of the power of his personality. "I'm not an
actor," he told an interviewer. "I'm a star. All actors can become stars,
but all stars cannot become actors." Nor did he care much about art. The
blood-and-thunder plays in which he flourished for a decade were often
"without head or tail," he admitted, but they always offered "noisy,
rattling gunpowder entertainment, and . . . a succession of scenes of the
late Indian war, all of which seemed to give general satisfaction."

Gunpowder entertainment and Indian wars were also at the heart of the Wild
West show he invented and first took on the road in 1883. It offered
everything Western that wide-eyed Easterners hoped to see except the
landscape: horses, elk and buffaloes; roping, riding and sharpshooting;
simulated cyclones and prairie fires and gun battles and (for one season
only) Sitting Bull himself. Buffalo Bill was always in the thick of it.
Mounted on a handsome gray horse, he swept his big hat from his head to
introduce his "Congress of Rough Riders of the World"; shot glass balls
from the air; galloped to the rescue of a stagecoach and a settler's cabin
surrounded by whooping Indians; and took center stage for a deeply
affecting - and entirely imaginary - tableau in which he arrived only
moments too late to save Custer and his command from annihilation.

Warren explains how Cody and his collaborators, the shrewd showman Nate
Salsbury and the brilliant publicist John Burke, figured out how to attract
the middle-class family trade by packaging this crowded spectacle as a
panorama of unbroken Western progress from wilderness to white settlement.
" 'Buffalo Bill's Wild West' is not a show in the theatric sense of the
term," the publicity said, "but an exposition of the progress of
civilization." Cody could claim to edify and inspire as well as entertain.
He gave Americans what they wanted to see, a fast-moving history of the
West in which, as Richard White has written, "everything is inverted":
Native Americans are the aggressors, their white conquerors the innocent,
abused victims in need of rescue. Later, British and European audiences
loved it, too.

One by one, Warren examines each act of Cody's pageant in search of all it
can tell us about his audience's complex and conflicting attitudes toward
everything from race and masculinity to labor strife and overseas
adventuring. But he sometimes labors too hard to find larger meanings in
what was, for all its supposed educational value, a gussied-up circus,
meant to delight small boys and girls while keeping their parents and
grandparents amused as well. "Gosh!" Cody was once overheard to say as he
looked through a sheaf of his own publicity. "The things they write!"

I suspect he would have felt that way about some of Warren's delvings. It's
hard to believe that the clumsy Virginia reel Cody's cowboys and cowgirls
performed on horseback every afternoon was really meant to remind audiences
of "the superiority of white people in the making of domestic space, in
settling," as the author contends. It would certainly have startled Annie
Oakley, Cody's "Little Sure Shot," to learn that her "image as a virtuous
white girl, or a girl-bride, provided a regenerative female context for the
show's exhibition of lethal weapons, her femininity a stunningly ironic
paradox for a display of gun proficiency." Nor is it clear why the presence
of Cossacks and gauchos, vaqueros and Arabs and African-Americans among
Cody's Rough Riders "reinforced white supremacy as the culmination of world
history, and thereby affirmed the subordination of immigrant ghettos, as
well as the segregation of races, Jim Crow laws and the tidal wave of
lynchings which swept the nation in the 1890's."

Such overearnest, overreaching moments aside, however, "Buffalo Bill's
America" is a provocative contribution to the long-running argument over
just who Buffalo Bill was and what he and his frontier extravaganza can
tell us about who we were - and who we are.

Geoffrey C. Ward's books include "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall
of Jack Johnson."