| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and the Wild West Show. By Louis S. Warren. (New York: Knopf, 2005. xvi, 652 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-375-41216-6.)
This is a notable book about a very important American and westerner, William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody. It is also an illuminating examination of the varied meanings of Cody's traveling arena show, the Wild West. More than any previous scholar, Louis S. Warren sees Buffalo Bill in the large, shifting sociocultural contexts (c. 1860–1915) of the United States and western Europe. The W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of Western U.S. History at the University of California, Davis, Warren has written a thorough, thoughtful, and valuable study, which now stands as the best investigation of this emblematic westerner.	1
Throughout his lengthy volume, Warren shows how Buffalo Bill's depictions of his life and his West were a series of "artful deceptions." Marrying fact and fantasy, Cody sought to dramatize the achievements of American civilization and some of its ambiguous losses. The author convincingly concludes: Hailing from a West that was practically a borderland between real and fake, full of charlatans posing as heroes and of everyday people invited to assume heroic poses, [Buffalo Bill] ... learned the allure of that tense space between authentic and copy, regeneration and degeneration. (p. 543)	. . .

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