BUFFALO BILL’S WILD WEST: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History
By Joy S. Kasson
Hill and Wang, 319 pages, $27
In our age of hype, big hype and even bigger hype, it is probably time for a book examining the life of William F. Cody — one that describes his influence on the portrayal of the Old West in literature, graphic art and film.
Joy S. Kasson’s “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” is almost that book. It is valuable and well-researched, but it also suffers from some modern-day flaws.
Cody, a child of the frontier, bounced from job to job, as did most young men of his place and time. He drove oxen, he trapped, he prospected briefly, and he scouted and hunted, first for the Army and then for the westward-moving railroad builders.
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Finally, discovered by Ned Buntline (the dime-novel entrepreneur who opened the West in his own way as much as Daniel Boone did), Cody became Buffalo Bill, part real person, part fable. He then evolved (with the enormous help of several partners) into Col. William F. Cody, star and owner — well, part-owner — of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, an extravaganza that brought a highly exaggerated touch of the frontier to audiences in the East and in Europe.
Kasson does an admirable job of delineating this passage from farm boy/buffalo hunter to the first modern celebrity (one famous for being famous, and for what the public thinks it knows about him). Cody, as Kasson says, probably did have an innate understanding of what the public wanted, and a gift for frontier showmanship. He was fortunate to hook up with partners who used media connections to further his career.
The hype worked. And as a study of how it worked, and how Cody’s arena version of the West — much cleansed compared with the real West — not only captured the world’s imagination but also laid the track for so much future portrayal of the American frontier, Kasson’s book succeeds.
What detracts from the tale is the author’s modern tendency to insert psychological surmise. She may overstep when she calls the Wild West show “another example of the wild world of exotic others brought under the control of white, civilized authority.”
She stretches further in linking the lure of the Wild West show in England to visions of British imperialism. She goes beyond revisionism to draw parallels between Cody’s popularity during the 1890s and the rebirth of national respect for Robert E. Lee. She overemphasizes any influence Cody’s buckskin-clad persona had on the invention of the Boy Scouts. She reads too much into how characters are posed in publicity photos.
Sometimes, entertainment is just entertainment. It was, and is, done for money, not to rewrite culture. Cody and his co-conspirators invented whole genres of entertainment and hype. Give them credit for that, and let the rest of it go.