Volume 52, Number 17 · November 3, 2005
The Entertainer
By Russell Baker
Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and the Wild West Show
by Louis S. Warren
Knopf, 652 pp., $30.00
The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and the Beginnings of Superstardom in America
by Larry McMurtry
Simon and Schuster, 245 pp., $26.00
Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World,1869–1922
by Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes
University of Chicago Press,209 pp., $26.00
William F. Cody was a frontier go-getter who was good with horses and mules and good to look at. Until show-business hokum turned him into Buffalo Bill there was nothing about him to suggest he would ever amount to anything very special. Youthful energy and readiness to gallop off on bizarre errands through dangerous territory came with a frontier boyhood, but in an era when America was rich in extraordinary achievers, Cody seems to have been no better fitted for glory than a thousand other high-spirited youngsters riding the high plains.
Review, 4019 words
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