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The Life of Hon. William F. Cody, Known as Buffalo Bill, the Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide. an Autobiography

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The Wild West was an even more heroic epoch than is commonly understood. While Buffalo Bill became a self-promoter, basic facts are clear: he was a superior plains guide and scout and Indian fighter. He really was the master hunter of buffalo from horseback. He was a Pony Express rider, with all that entailed. He was friends with Wild Bill, Custer, and other notables. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery on the battlefield (though sadly it was removed many years later because of a bureaucratic technicality of how he had been employed by the Army, not because of any change in the evaluation of the heroic deeds.

A most fascinating book. It gives one a different perspective to hear it from a participant.END

Autobiographies are at the same time the best and the worst sources of life stories. You get the authentic voice, but that voice tells you only what it wants you to believe. Both these characteristics are particularly strong here because Cody's voice is such a distinctive one and because of his status as a supreme self-promoter. So this book will not give you the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but it will give you a real insight into the mind of a man who in many ways epitomizes the culture of the historic American West. Some of it may shock you; Cody describes how he shot a mule who had annoyed him by running away, and boasts of how he scalped his fallen enemies. Hardly the stuff of popular myth. If you want to know how the west was really won, then reading this book (some of it 'between the lines') will tell you much.

Like several other biographies of this legendary Plainsman, Scout, Buffalo Hunter and Indian Fighter of the American Frontier, this book is comprised mostly of a reprint of William F. Cody's own Autobiography. What makes it a better source than many of the other reprints of Buffalo Bill Cody's fascinating 1879 acount of his early life and adventures until he reached the age of thirty-four, this volume includes an excellent foreword by another noted author and historian of the Wild West, Don Russell. His foreword makes this first complete reprinting of the original autobiography much more understandable and provides additional valuable insights into the man who coined the term "Wild West." Buffalo BIll was, without any doubt, what we often refer to as "The Real McCoy." While Cody could spin a good tale too, he was modest and humble about his own adventures. Later historians have mostly authenticated, with only minor corrections, his scary-thrilling, matter-of-fact and plain spoken recollections of his life and adventures.This is a very good read and hard to put down until the very end of the book.

This is entertaining and enlightening. Entertaining because it rattles along from one adventure to another. Buffalo Bill started work before the age of ten, seemingly doing a man's job and getting a man's pay working on "bull trains", hauling freight across dangerous Indian-infested (as they said then) territory. He was also a Pony Express rider. He became a famous army scout and one of the most famous "hunters" involved in the massacre of buffalo, killed frequently just for the fun of it, and helping to bring the numbers of buffalo down from millions to the verge of extinction.

He was a man of his times, thinking nothing of "lifting the hair" of Indians who were also apparently shot without a thought, or of burning the homes and possessions of Indian villages in order to drive them away from the latest bit of land that the paleface wanted - unfortunately driving them to territory the white man would want next.

When the book was written, Cody was still only in his mid-thirties but had been there, done that, and moved on to producing and acting in theatrical demonstrations of his exploits. He was obviously quite a man.

Fast-paced, horrible in some ways, but part of history. It is sobering to think how recent this history was. The Wild West was not so long ago.

This book is worth reading to get a glimpse into recent history. The core of the book is about Buffalo Bill's life as a buffalo hunter and Indian tracker. The accounts of casual slaughter are appalling but an interesting insight into an era when the wild buffalo herds seemed inexhaustible and the various Indian tribes were trying to figure out how to respond to the changes to their traditional way of life.

This autobiography of Buffalo Bill has it all. Bill recants his early childhood in the new frontier all the way up to his late 30s. It has action packed stories of hunting trips and encounters with Indians and stories of many famous people including Wild Bill Hickcock and General Custer. This is one book that you'll throughly enjoy as it reads as if Buffalo Bill is telling the stories to you around a campfire.

This was fun to read. For us it is history but for William Cody it is his time. Life as he knows it. Books like this help us know ourselves better.