The Life of Hon. William F. Cody, Known as Buffalo Bill

Editor's Introduction

1. I Am Coming. Chromo-lithographic promotional poster, 1900. Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming. 1.69.4922. A promotional poster from 1900 superimposes the larger-thanlife image of William Cody’s head and shoulders on the side of a running buffalo. It includes the simple pronouncement, “I Am Coming.”1 The focal point of the advertisement is Cody’s face; the semi-profile wears a calm but commanding expression, staring into the middle distance with a long gray mustache and beard to match the flowing hair that pours out from under a gray Stetson. By the turn of the century, the visual association of Cody with the buffalo was almost redundant. Although he went by his birth name his entire life, he was known to the majority of the public as “Buffalo Bill.” And, while the lithography of the poster faithfully represents the person of Cody, it also presents the persona (the Latin root means “mask”) of Buffalo Bill. That persona was the product of years of careful shaping by Cody and his business associates, whose image-making took the form of dime novels, newspaper stories, stage melodramas, and, of course, the traveling Wild West exhibition. By 1900 Cody had toured the United States and Europe for nearly two decades; he had performed before Queen Victoria and paraded royalty in his Deadwood stagecoach; he had upstaged the Chicago World’s Fair, bringing some four million guests to his own exhibition outside the fairgrounds; he had been the subject of countless dime novels and his media machine had inaugurated editor’s introduction xvi editor’s introduction a new era in mass culture marketing. By century’s end millions could identify Cody by his face alone, meaning that millions could read the message encoded in the image of Buffalo Bill and assign to it a sweeping narrative that places the American frontier at the center of civilization’s progress. The Life of Hon. William F. Cody, Known as Buffalo Bill is the story of what came before, of the events and experiences that provided the foundation for an image of the American West that would go national and then global in the decades that followed its publication. William Cody’s story dramatizes the invention of Buffalo Bill and the relationship between his public and private selves as the author saw them. Along the way we learn how the narrative of frontier and civilization evolved into Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, one of the most popular traveling exhibitions in entertainment history. Written when Cody was thirty-three years old, The Life recounts his early childhood removal with his family to Kansas Territory, where his father, Isaac Cody, hoped to homestead. It details the deep personal consequences of the “slavery question,” which would leave his family fatherless and destitute. From the moment of his father’s death, when Cody was just eleven years old, his autobiography recounts a classic American narrative of self-making with a central focus on a life of work. From teamster to trapper, to Buffalo hunter, Army scout, guide, and Indian fighter, Cody’s life is a succession of jobs that lead cumulatively to the persona he put forth on both stage and showground for over forty years and across two continents. Cody’s autobiography joined him with contemporaries Frederick Jackson Turner and Teddy Roosevelt in transforming the American frontier into what Richard Slotkin describes as “a mythic space [that] began to outweigh its importance as a real editor’s introduction xvii place.” For these men the frontier became “a set of symbols that constituted an explanation of history.”2 The pages of Cody’s autobiography draw repeatedly on a frontier iconography that was well-established when he wrote it. The images of Indian fights, buffalo hunting, and the Pony Express reflect popular conceptions of the West. And yet, Cody also anchors his broader popular history in the life of the plains as he experienced it. It is this movement between the personal and the mythic, between plain facts and tall tales—between William F. Cody and Buffalo Bill—that gives this narrative its fascination and its power. Cody’s West William Cody’s seventy-one years were a time of accelerating change in America, and he found himself in the midst of many of the era’s most defining events. Like the ever-shifting boundary of the American frontier, Cody’s life was characterized by frenetic...