Buffalo Bill's America:
William Cody and the Wild West Show

William Cody - Buffalo Bill - was the most famous American of his age. A child of the Great Plains frontier, Cody was renowned as Pony Express rider, trapper, Civil War Soldier, professional buffalo hunter, Indian fighter, cavalry scout, horseman, dime-novel hero, and actor. But his greatest success was as an impresario of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, which toured North America and Europe for more than three decades.

But the question remains: was Cody a hero or a charlatan? In this illuminating biography - the first critical study in more than 40 years - Louis S. Warren explores the man's genuine achievements, his many self-inventions, and the manner in which he successfully combined the two. He makes clear that although Cody exaggerated his accomplishments, he was a genuine hunter and fighter, as well as an intuitive performance genius. Warren places Cody in the cultural context of his time ad explores the ways in which the American West was the perfect environment for Cody's successful mixing of life, myth, and performance. Warren examins how and why the entertainment that Cody devised resonated with a vast trans-Atlantic public, and offered unprecendented options to American rural whites, Mexicans, and Indians to put their lives and stories together in an expression of the frontier experience.

A rich and revealing biography and social history of an enduring American icon.

Louis S. Warren is W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservations in Twentieth-Century America, which won the Western Heritage Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Book in 1998, given by the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western heritage Museum.