i n . p r i n t: Pistol Packin' PR

Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History. By Joy Kasson. Hill and Wang Publishers, 320 pages, $27.

by Jason Smith

illiam Cody rode hard, drank hard, and shot straight into American pop culture as Buffalo Bill.

In the 1870s, Cody worked as a scout-for-hire with the railroads and the army, steering troops through the plains, hunting buffalo, and tracking indians. Cody was a showman from the start; early on he made a name for himself by staging shooting contests, horse races, and hunting trips for his fellow plainsmen.

Twenty years later, Cody was a superstar. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show—billed as "America's National Entertain-ment"—was thrilling millions all over the United States, Canada, and Europe. People flocked to the show to see Cody and his Congress of Rough Riders reenact infamous indian skirmishes. Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull kept the crowds oohing and aahing.

The show flourished in part because of the PR behind Buffalo Bill. "This was a publicity machine for making a modern celebrity," Joy Kasson says. Kasson, professor of American studies and English, argues in her new book that the Wild West Show took celebrity to a new level by promoting Cody, the person, as a symbol.

Consider the advertisements for the show. As the Wild West toured, Cody's PR team traveled ahead to blanket barns and fences with posters announcing that the show would soon arrive. Eventually the posters depicted nothing more than Cody's face superimposed on a running buffalo, with the words "I AM COMING" looming below. Cody's notoriety was such that the same poster was used in France.

he show itself combined excitement, adventure, fiction, melodrama—in short, it was an idealized, exaggerated glimpse of America's western frontier, and the public ate it up.

"His audiences really believed on some level that they had gotten to know what the West was like," Kasson says. Further, Kasson feels Cody's show actually helped create America's memories of the wild West.

She writes, "Buffalo Bill's Wild West became the truth about America when it was believed as the truth by Americans and others around the world." It helped that Cody and his savvy PR team insisted that the show was educational—and authentic.

By the early 1900s, the film industry was growing up with Buffalo Bill. "Not only did Cody participate in the making of early westerns himself," Kasson writes, "but the plot, characters, incidents, and personnel of the Wild West made an almost seamless leap from the arena to the early film studio."

"Where do we get our concept of the old West?" Kasson asks. "From historians, from travelers, from the entertainment media, from the western film—and all of those, I think, were deeply influenced by Buffalo Bill." Kasson points out prominent Americans who have borrowed a page from Buffalo Bill: Teddy Roosevelt used the term "Rough Riders" for his company in the Spanish-American war. John Wayne embodied the western hero with his patriotism, bravery, and masculinity. Ronald Reagan promised that America would "stand tall in the saddle."

Kasson argues that Cody's show remains culturally significant because it used mass media to blur the lines between fact and fiction, history and melodrama, and truth and entertainment. "The organizers and promoters of Buffalo Bill's Wild West understood and deployed techniques of image creation, salesmanship, and promotion that would soon become the standard for everything from breakfast cereal to political candidates," she writes. "Buffalo Bill's fingerprints are still found all over our culture."

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