Book Review

Buffalo Bill Cody has inspired rivers of ink ever since dime novelist Ned Buntline discovered him in 1869. By one estimate, there were over a billion words written about him by 1900. A genuine frontier figure, buffalo hunter, army scout, and decorated Indian fighter turned dime novel hero and stage star, he became the world's most famous American as a result of the Wild West Show with which he toured North America and Europe from 1883 to 1916. Since the 1970s, a number of scholars, including Richard Slotkin and Richard White, have turned away from traditional biography of Cody--an especially daunting task given his huge repertoire of professions and roles--in favor of cultural studies of his Wild West show and his image.

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In this energetic exploration of Cody's cultural significance, Joy S. Kasson eschews an investigation of the "real" Buffalo Bill to study "the subtle interweaving of fact, fiction, hype, and audience desire" surrounding him (p. 7). She seeks to understand the ways that his show created public memory of a West that never was, and in particular how Cody's publicists concocted a celebrity biography that made a connection "between Americans' understanding of their history and their consumption of spectacularized versions of it" (p. 8).

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