Buffalo Bill's Wild West
Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Buffalo Bill's Wild West presents a fascinating analysis of the first famous American to erase the boundary between real history and entertainment
Canada, and Europe. Crowds cheered as cowboys and Indians--and Annie Oakley!--galloped past on spirited horses, sharpshooters exploded glass balls tossed high in the air, and cavalry troops arrived just in time to save a stagecoach from Indian attack. Vivid posters on billboards everywhere made William Cody, the show's originator and star, a world-renowned figure.
Joy S. Kasson's important new book traces Cody's rise from scout to international celebrity, and shows how his image was shaped. Publicity stressed his show's "authenticity" yet audiences thrilled to its melodrama; fact and fiction converged in a performance that instantly became part of the American tradition.
But how, precisely, did that come about? How, for example, did Cody use his audience's memories of the Civil War and the Indian wars? He boasted that his show included participants in the recent conflicts it presented theatrically, yet he also claimed it evoked "memories" of America's bygone greatness. Kasson's shrewd, engaging study--richly illustrated--in exploring the disappearing boundary between entertainment and public events in American culture, shows us just how we came to imagine our memories.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
William "Buffalo Bill" Cody was the Wild West adventurer par excellence: he served as an army scout in the Civil War, skirmished with American Indians on the Great Plains and killed enough buffalo to help bring them perilously close to extinction. But if that were all he had done, few would remember him today. Buffalo Bill's real genius, historian Kasson , a professor of American studies and English at UNC-Chapel Hill, argues in this insightful study, was in how he capitalized on his own history. As a showman who presented a packaged, sanitized representation of the Wild West, Cody anticipated both the Warholian cult of celebrity and the "real-life" melodramas of modern television, Kasson says. And in the process, he codified the archetype of the Western hero that persists to this day. Bill's performances in his traveling Wild West shows--featuring "authentic" scenes of Indian life, re-creations of historical events (including the Battle of Little Big Horn) and the thrilling presence of Buffalo Bill himself--were, she argues, a triumph of self-promotion and self-definition. As Buffalo Bill constructed a public identity quite apart from his private life, he magnified his role in history: "In Buffalo Bill's Wild West, historical events seemed to become personal memory, and personal memory was reinterpreted as national memory." This book will, of course, appeal to a curious cross-section of Wild West aficionados and scholars of 19th-century media--but because Kasson is a perceptive and skillful writer, it is also well suited to thoughtful general readers who like good, critical histories. With prose that's never too academic, she delivers a fine analysis of an American folk hero who was at once a shameless self-promoter and an important architect of our national myth of the Wild West. 132 b&w illus.
