Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History [Paperback]

Joy S. Kasson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 17, 2001

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.

Editorial Reviews

From 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 (Marble Queens and Captives), 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 showsAfeaturing "authentic" scenes of Indian life, re-creations of historical events (including the Battle of Little Big Horn) and the thrilling presence of Buffalo Bill himselfAwere, 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 mediaAbut 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. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School-A thoroughly researched, entertaining, personal, and hu-man account of William F. Cody. Buffalo Bill was the consummate showman and frontiersman, equally at home hunting buf-falo on the prairies of Nebraska or performing privately for Queen Victoria at Earl's Court, London. He was, for generations of Americans, the real West and his Wild West Show was its true story. From his public-relations maneuvers, our images of Native Americans, Western landscapes, cowboy roundups, and sharpshooters like Annie Oakley would be born. Through carefully researched diaries, anecdotes, and other historical documents, Kasson demonstrates how Buffalo Bill created the spectacle and examines how his "subtle interweaving of fact, fiction, hype, and audience desire" fed Americans and Europeans starving for a glimpse of the "real" West. A century later, Americans would denounce the show's stereotypes as they became perpetuated in popular culture. Yet, paradoxically, Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show did preserve some history and memory of the West at the very time it was disappearing to development. The book is enjoyable as both biography and cultural history, and has extensive notes. Liberally illustrated with glossy black-and-white portraits and photographs, as well as reproductions of posters, billboards, and political cartoons, it provides a fascinating study of the man and his time.-Becky Ferrall, Stonewall Jackson High School, Manassas, VA

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Hill and Wang (October 17, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0809032449
• ISBN-13: 978-0809032440
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #232,417 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #5 in Books > Sports & Outdoors > Rodeos

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An important analysis of America's first celebrity, July 10, 2000

By 

Mark Dworkin (Thornhill, Ontario) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (Hardcover)

Joy Kasson uses the story of Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West show to tell us about the beginnings of celebrity in America. Tracing Buffalo Bill's life from Army scout through Wild West show impresario she reveals how Cody "created an American memory through entertainment" by bringing together Northerners and former Confederates in the final decade of the nineteenth century for a shared and comforting interpretation of American identity. The imperialist story the Wild West Show told was legitimizing to American's who wanted to view their destruction of native American life in their westward advancement as the justifiable acts by victims of murderous natives, now happily tamed as actors, rather than the other way around. She demonstrates how Buffalo Bill's thesis about western conquest by white Americans influenced the twentieth century interpretation of American history in many ways, not the least of which was the Boy Scouts, and particulary through the powerful genre of the motion picture, in which Cody's influence was seminal.

Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show promoters were among the first to manipulate the public through advertising and image building. Kasson has given new insight into a late twentieth century culture that produced such phenomena as an actor as president, spin doctors and focus groups, and in countless other ways blurred the line between performance and reality.

A book both scholarly and readable, Buffalo Bill's Wild West has broken new ground in our understanding of the beginnings of our celebrity culture.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A solid must-have, September 4, 2000

By 

"omohunjt" (Hannawa Falls, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (Hardcover)

After checking this book out of the library and reading some of it, we knew we had to own it. Kasson writes well for the serious amateur of the Wild West, and the scholarship appears solid. It's clearly a work of contemporary history-writing, in that Kasson is very attentive to how we re-tell our past to ourselves, how myths and celebrity develop. In this respect it resembles Paul Reddin's "Wild West Shows" (University of Illinois Press, 1999), which we also recommend. Readers who want to know what it was REALLY like on the plains will want to consult other books.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Buffalo Bill was a Major Stud Dude, December 11, 2000

By 

"hermanator1" (Ellensburg, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (Hardcover)

This is an outstanding scholarly study of Buffalo Bill and his Wild West show. Kasson deals with her subject sympathetically and never leaps to politically correct judgments. Kasson not only offers a biography of Buffalo Bill and a study of the cultural meaning of his Wild West, but also a study of how Indians and other marginalized groups figured in the Wild West show. Excellent book. Buy it.