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  • The Popular Frontier: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Transnational Mass Culture ed. by Frank Christianson
  • Roy R. Behrens
The Popular Frontier: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Transnational Mass Culture.
Edited by Frank Christianson. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. vii + 252 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $32.95 cloth.

This collection of essays is not a narrowly focused account of William F. Cody and his Wild West enterprises, but rather a view in the context of worldwide events and conditions that were taking place at the same time. Like the vastness of the American West, it reaches out to share with us a wingspread of differing takes on the man, his troupe, and their giant achievements.

The book’s subtitle refers to its contents as “transnational,” in the sense that its essays are earnest attempts to transcend the usual restrictions of ethnicities, cultures, and nations. Even the vast Atlantic is spanned, if not without various mishaps. The rich range of subjects considered include Cody the person (enigmatic, heroic, and tragically flawed), his show business legend, the diversity of the Wild West participants, the “fake news” flavor of its supposed docudramas, the astonishing range of the places it toured (US, UK, and Europe), and much more. These are discussed in relation to aspects of “mass culture” in ways that refreshingly go beyond the traditional ways of describing his life.

Inevitably, the essays are wide-ranging. They are at times amusing, instructive, and the cause for double takes. The reader is thereby encouraged to think twice about the standard depictions of Cody and the Wild West, including his “branding” components, such as his manner of speaking, the way he dressed and presented himself, as compared to such equally puzzling characters as Wild Bill Hickok, Theodore Roosevelt, and Oscar Wilde. Among its provocative readings are accounts of the public personas of Wilde, Roosevelt, and Cody in relation to long-held assumptions about manliness. There is one essay in particular that begins with a newsman’s account of a conversation with a celebrity who precisely fits our stereotypes of Wilde. We are then suddenly taken aback to learn that it is not a description of Oscar Wilde at all, but of Buffalo Bill.

One of the strangest accounts in the book is about the attempt by Italian fascists in 1939 (the year that World War II began) to claim that Cody was not an American, but an Italian named Domenico Tambini, and that he and Mussolini were from the same region of country.

There are also two thoughtful reflections about sharpshooting superstar Annie Oakley, the second-highest paid performer, who was nearly as popular as Buffalo Bill. At five feet tall, she listed her age as six years younger than she was, and carefully fashioned her costumes for the purpose of looking more girlish and chaste. She advocated women’s emancipation, in part by teaching young women to shoot. One cannot help but wonder what her views would be in current American society, with its access to high-powered guns. [End Page 98]

Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art
University of Northern Iowa
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