| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.1

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull: Inventing the Wild West. By Bobby Bridger. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. xx + 480 pp. Notes, index. $34.95.)
This book attempts to weave and interpret the interconnected lives of Buffalo Bill Cody and the Plains Indians, the latter epitomized by Sitting Bull, but the chieftain only emblematic of a great many Pawnees and Lakotas. These tribesmen were Cody's combatants in early years, when he hunted buffalo for the railroad and scouted for the army, only to become collegial employees in the many decades of the phenomenally popular Wild West. Sitting Bull, too, joined the Wild West briefly in the mid-1880s, and Cody attempted an unsuccessful friendly intervention during the Hunkpapa's tumultuous final days. Bridger and University of Texas Press trumpet this showman-Indian story as one seldom told.	1
In fact, this is a story of interdependence and lifelong friendships between Cody and, particularly, the Lakotas that has been repeatedly well told by leading scholars of western history, including Don Russell, Joseph Rosa, L. G. Moses, and Joy Kasson. In relation to these scholars' works, Bridger's story is an aficionado's uncompelling discovery of the complex Buffalo Bill, played out in a regrettably circumspect treatment. Bridger, foremost, is a stage performer who features in his repertoire a one-man epic titled Pahaska, drawn from Cody's life. Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull amounts to Bridger's attempt at backgrounding his play. It represents, we are told, decades of interest in Buffalo Bill.	. . .

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