That’s Entertainment

He was Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson. He was Michael Ovitz and Michael Eisner rolled into one; his own publicity machine; his own agency; his own star, his own studio on wheels. He created the first American multimedia spectacular, “a living diorama,” Joy S. Kasson calls it, a show that had its own special effects, including “a cyclone that whirled all the actors and props away.” On a poster featuring his distinctive face inset in the body of a charging buffalo, the only words necessary were, “I am coming.” There could be no question who was arriving, for he was the Swoosh of his moment, a celebrity cowpoke who had branded himself.

And what a long moment his would be. For three decades, his Wild West Show, promoted as “America’s National Entertainment,” brought the earliest version of Disneyland to Americans. Audience members could even ride in “the Deadwood Stage,” while it was attacked by Indians whose “savagery” was authenticated by the fact that many of them had been fighting the U.S. cavalry on the Great Plains not long before.

William F. Cody spent almost half a century blurring the lines between reality and fantasy in his own life and his country’s--and that was an accomplishment. Wielding an out-sized version of the history he had been a part of, he pioneered the earliest reality programming, and that is the real subject of “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” a meditation on the roots of popular culture. A fine reporter of the past, Kasson has gathered fascinating material on the man who, in producing a pageant of American triumphalism, helped create the commercial world of entertainment that today we take for granted.

Born in a log cabin in Iowa in 1846, Cody had a classic American career. Before assuming the moniker “Buffalo Bill” (“Guillaume Bison” to his French fans) and becoming the country’s first modern celebrity, William Frederick Cody had been a soldier, trapper, farmer, teamster, buffalo slaughterer for the railroads and scout for the U.S. Army in the Indian wars as well as for aristocratic European hunters looking for a genuine primitive experience in America (French chef in tow). A restless man in a restless time, a fine shot with his Springfield rifle, which he called “Lucretia Borgia,” he had played, at best, a bit part in the history of the West before he met Edward Judson, alias Ned Buntline, a Civil War veteran who wrote “dime novels,” the Tom Clancy of that era. In 1869, Buntline featured Cody in a fantasy adventure he dubbed “Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men,” launching him into the America that counted most--back East. There his career, much embroidered, would become synonymous with the West.

In an industrializing, urbanizing land, in the wake of a bitter Civil War in which more than a tenth of the male population had died, Eastern audiences were ready to be thrilled by--but also to mourn--a disappearing American world they had, in fact, never known. So while scouting in the summers, Cody took to the stage in the winters, playing a fantastic version of himself to ever-fuller houses. (A poster for these early plays, reproduced in the visually charming Royal Armouries catalog of Cody-ana, touts “the Most Refined and Meritorious SENSATIONAL DRAMA ever written”--an early version of having it both ways--while promising to throw in a Mexican trick burro, a genuine “Indian Scout and interpreter” and a couple of live bears.)

Cody was back scouting for the 5th Cavalry in 1876 when news of Custer’s death at the Little Bighorn arrived. A few days later, in a short, sharp firefight, he evidently shot a Cheyenne warrior named Yellow Hair--what actually happened is murky at best--and proceeded to scalp him. Though the fight was of no strategic significance and the Indians unrelated to the Sioux who had killed Custer, Cody, as Kasson tells us, immediately saw himself in a “performance” of national importance. He wrote his wife, “I have only one scalp I can call my own, that fellow I fought single-handed in sight of our command and the cheers that went up when he fell was deafening.” He promptly rushed to the telegraph office with a news report he had helped compose for papers in the East. Yellow Hair (also called Yellow Hand) was promoted to the status of “chief”; the fight to a noble, hand-to-hand duel; and Cody’s bloody souvenir to “the first scalp for Custer.”

It was essentially on that scalp, soon to be sensationally exhibited in theaters where he reenacted the killing of Yellow Hair, and on his own news report, which was “used to authenticate his dramatization of the event,” that he would launch his Wild West Show. His life, already mythologized, would soon become the centerpiece--and proof of the authenticity--of the show, a pageant of triumphalist history featuring savage Indian attacks, civilized conquests, wild animals, “cowboy fun” and trick shooting. He brilliantly authenticated this dime-novel version of America by hiring as performers Indians and cavalrymen, scouts and cowboys, many of whom had actually been there, done that. Among them, the most famous was Sioux chief Sitting Bull, present at the Little Bighorn, who left the reservation for the Wild West’s 1885 season (sagely retaining “the right to sell his own photographs and autographs”).

Nothing more served to “validate” Cody’s show as “the real thing” (“reality eclipsing romance,” as the promotional material put it) than the actual warriors who had fought on the Plains and a small herd of buffalo that gave Easterners a feeling for the “vanishing West.” At first, Cody presented his acts as bulletins from the front lines of an ongoing war. But by the 1890s, after the Wounded Knee massacre, the show that had more or less single-handedly created the West as most Americans would “remember” it, “took its place as part of America’s national memory.”

Kasson skillfully shows us Cody as performer, icon, impresario. And what a show he put on. Fifty-two railroad cars were necessary to bring it to town, as the Armouries catalog informs us. (Cody’s methods of transport were so efficient that the Imperial German Army’s staff evidently studied them.) Eleven acres were needed to set up the show, two miles of rope and 1,000 metal spikes to put it in place. There were a small army of performers, hundreds of horses, 18 buffalo, 10 elk, five Texas steers and a couple of bears.

Box office was, as they say, boffo. The six-month 1893 season pulled in an estimated 6 million spectators, figures that, factored for population growth, would cause today’s studio executives to drool, and in the good years, profits followed in the millions. But Cody, often generous to a fault, couldn’t hang on to his money. A classic American speculator, he poured it into land, ranching, silver mines and early Western tourism (not to speak of booze). Everything failed, which didn’t matter much in the good years. After all, until he lost financial control of himself early in the 20th century, he was his own lucrative property.

In the days before documentaries and movies, Cody’s fantasy had the look and the feel of reality. And Cody played the press like an instrument. He specialized in the equivalent of the photo op, and reporters responded with an enthusiasm that is, well, embarrassing. “It is not a show. It is a resurrection. . . . It is in secular life what the representation of Christ and the apostles proposed to be in religious life, except that in this case there are no counterfeits,” wrote one. But the press played him, too, for all it was worth. His divorce proceedings, for instance, were a scandal fit to print.

His was the biggest show in town and, by the late 1880s, that town was the world, for he had the urge to globalize. He took the show to England (Queen Victoria herself attended), and then he was the toast of the Continent. A man who never saw an image he couldn’t manipulate, he brought his American publicity methods with him. As one British commentator put it (in feeble verse), “Every hoarding is plastered, from East-end to West, / With his hat, coat, and countenance, lovelocks and vest.” His was the first glorious sally abroad of the entertainment culture that would someday conquer the world.

By the time he was done, he had invented the West, created the Audience and in a sense laid the foundations for Hollywood. In his last years, he even enlisted former participants to re-fight the Plains wars on film, producing a 2 1/2-hour extravaganza that failed at the box office. But if he didn’t succeed on screen, most of the conventions he developed--and the West as he had re-imagined it--did. The approximately 7,000 westerns filmed since would be unimaginable without him.

Kasson can be a canny interpreter of popular culture. She is splendid on the way Cody returned an audience, embittered by a meat-grinder of a Civil War in the heartland, to a romantic frontier and cleansed war itself of its horror through a scout’s noble combat against an easy-to-identify enemy. In our time, George Lucas similarly rehabilitated war as entertainment by transporting a dirty, divisive conflict into the distant reaches of space and time. (For most Americans of Cody’s day, after all, the West was something like “Star Wars’ ” planet Tatooine and the Indians about as familiar as the patrons of its famed bar.) Unfortunately, Kasson too often weakens her book by falling back, perhaps with an anxious glance toward her professional peers, on a deadening language that has in recent years enveloped historical scholarship. Whatever Sitting Bull may have been doing, for instance, he was certainly not exploring “issues of representation and self-representation” in his contacts with whites. And was the display of “exotic peoples” at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition really the “ideologically inflected presentation of indigenous culture”? Such language not only replaces insight but devalues the lived life.

Only in retrospect can we predict the future. Buffalo Bill Cody was our entertainment future in formation. His sole celebrity peer was Teddy Roosevelt, who cribbed the very name of his famed “Rough Riders” from the Wild West Show’s “Congress of Rough Riders of the World.” And Roosevelt became only a president, putting him in a line that ends less than dramatically in George W. Bush or Al Gore; Buffalo Bill, on the other hand, became, as Kasson argues, our first modern celebrity, putting him in the line that triumphantly rules our lives.

Cody created a modern “reality” based on imagery, publicity, fantasy, spin, sensationalism, history, nostalgia and--think of Yellow Hair’s scalp--a literal pound of flesh. There’s something familiar about that, isn’t there? When he died, essentially bankrupt in 1917, telegraph lines were “cleared” so kings and presidents could pay homage to the man who had devoured the West and turned it into prime-time entertainment. Now that the rest of the world is being devoured, all those agents, directors, studio executives and entertainment moguls out there who would like to know where they came from might consider Kasson’s book and dream a little about a time when one man could do it all.