Check the spine on the new book Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and the Wild West Show. Says "Knopf." One of the biggest publishers in America, not some university press or boutique publisher. This tells you that while Louis S. Warren's book has a definite physical heft (652 pages) and brainy weight (he professes history at the University of California, Davis), it's meant for a wider audience than just history geeks.
Buffalo Bill's America is the sweeping saga of an emblematic American life, a biography of one of our first celebrities and a surprisingly modern figure. In researching the book, Warren not only carefully re-examined the standard William Cody material, but unearthed new stuff, including Cody's 1904 divorce papers.
A former Southern Nevadan (class of 1980, Basic High School), Warren will return this weekend to give a talk about Buffalo Bill.
I imagine legions of Wild Bill fans out there are saying, Hey, why Buffalo Bill?
[Laughs] Well, it's really interesting about that. People are always fascinated by the connection between Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickock. Many people confused them. As I point out in the book, it's what William Cody intended to happen. He grafted so many elements of Hickock's life story and myth onto his own that he was actually hoping people would confuse them, because that would elevate him, in his early days.
They knew each other from the time Cody was a boy. As I argue in the book, I think Hickock was a kind of stand-in father figure for Cody for a time after his own father was killed.
Even people who knew them both, years later would say things like, "Well, Hickock was for real and Cody was for show." Hickock becomes in our memory the more authentic figure.
I don't think you can make those distinctions. They're both real people who do real things in the real West. The Hickock admirers admire the romance of that figure, who, after all, was treading the line between outlaw and lawman: Am I an outlaw or am I a lawman? You decide. Cody was a much more genteel figure. The question that he posed was, Am I a frontiersman or am I a showman? You decide. And, of course, he was both.
What drove you to write about him?
Growing up, I loved reading stories about the Old West. And there was this other kind of story I liked, strange-but-true stories. I think I read my first Buffalo Bill story in third grade. And it was like somebody had conflated one of these strange-but-true stories and an Old West story: This guy who started out as a buffalo hunter and Army scout becomes the world's most famous showman and most famous American in the world.
And then you add to that the traveling community that he created in the Wild West Show, which numbered up to 700 or 800 people in its peak days in the 1890s. They traveled thousands of miles a year and spent almost 10 years in Europe. It's just a fascinating story.
You point out that the presses keep rolling with Buffalo Bill material. How tough was it to find fresh stuff?
Yeah, he's always marketable. He was when he was alive, and he is now. That's one of the things about him that's so interesting: He turned his life story and image into a commodity, and in that sense he's a very modern figure.
A lot of the old material hasn't been examined in a long time. It was in 1960 that Don Russell published his deservedly famous biography, called The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill. He looked over the Army reports, all the things officers ever said about Cody, and accepted them at face value. A lot of historians just accepted that and went on to talk about the meaning of Cody's image.
I do quite a bit of that in my own book, too. But to me the interesting thing is bringing the two sides together: the real life and then how the symbols get created from what actually happened.
So in tracking down what really happened, I went through all that old material. But I also found a ton of new material relating to the show. I found lots of wonderful material from Indian performers in the show. I interviewed descendents, and their family stories were fascinating.
How long did the book take?
I got the idea in 1997, but I really got into it in 1998. I wrapped it up in November 2004.
What surprised you the most?
I started off with the premise that people around Cody found him useful for telling their own stories and that they found themselves wanting to be part of the story he was telling. Then I got away from that, thinking, "No, that's too naïve and too simplistic." But I ended up coming back and thinking that's absolutely right. I guess all of that surprised me.
Also, the fun for Cody was representing himself as a version of a Western hero, but it's perfectly OK for him if the audience doesn't all agree. And in fact, he learned very early on in his life that the way to be famous is not to get everyone to agree about you, but to get them to argue about you. Because then you're at the center of the conversation. I found that so interesting, because that's such a modern thing in a lot of ways.
Are there echoes of Buffalo Bill's America now?
In so many ways, we're still living in this space that he occupied. That is, arguing about the meaning of America and the meaning of American history. These are fundamental American traditions. There are a lot of people around who will say there was a time when we didn't argue about it. That people who do are kind of subversive.
And I would argue exactly the opposite. That when there aren't arguments about the meaning of American history, that would be completely untraditional. I think much of the meaning of America is that democratic discussion. That's one of the things that Cody intuitively understands.
[Here, Warren explains the episode in which Cody killed and scalped an Indian he called Yellow Hand. Re-enacting that onstage, in a precursor to his Wild West Show, Cody was roundly criticized.] Later, when he enacts that scene in his Wild West Show, I think the audience can accept it a little easier because there are real Indians playing Yellow Hand, and they get up after the battle scene and ride off with Buffalo Bill, and everyone realizes that now they're friends.
We're still in this space in so many ways. Today, Americans really have to think all the time about what's real and what's fake. It's harder now, there's so much more media. Consequently, we're much more skeptical on the one hand, and on the other hand so overwhelmed with skepticism that it's hard to get outraged by fakery.
Your parents were involved with historical preservation efforts here. So when you come back and see the heedless way Las Vegas treats its history, what do you think?
So many people come from elsewhere that they're still trying to fashion a collective sense of their history. And that's really up for grabs. Always. The way I see it, you've got all kinds of people making very strong cultural statements about history. You've got historical preservationists who are saying, "This is who was here, and we've got to honor the achievements of these people." Indians, Mormon settlers and so forth.
And then you have other people who say, "No, the real story of Vegas is Bugsy Seigel."
The fight often comes down to which history appeals to the most people. That's a very traditional thing, too. One of the things Cody is trying to do, I argue, is create a national story that's more inclusive than previous stories. At the time, the most accepted version of American history was that English people came and settled New England, and from there America spread out. And if you weren't a descendant of New Englanders, you really didn't have a place in this story. Cody was trying to provide a story that more people could feel was theirs. And if he could, they would buy tickets and he would get rich. And it worked.
He claimed his show was not a show. It was an "educational exhibit." A lot of that is hokum, right? A way of making the middle class comfortable going out and being entertained. In a lot of ways, Vegas history confronts the same issues.