Two American idols who put a little wild in the West

The Colonel and Little Missie

Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and the Beginnings of Superstardom in America

Larry McMurtry

Simon & Schuster: 246 pp., $26

*

In 1900, as Larry McMurtry tells us, William F. Cody was one of the most famous people on Earth. The man known as Buffalo Bill was the featured hero of hundreds of dime novels. There were photographs and posters of him everywhere. His celebrated Wild West show had been seen by countless people in America and Europe. Children idolized him, of course, but he was also a hit with presidents and royalty, up to and including the greatest icon of that soon-departing age, Queen Victoria.

Next to Buffalo Bill himself, the pertly engaging sharpshooter Annie Oakley, who would later enjoy an unusually lively posthumous existence via Irving Berlin’s musical “Annie Get Your Gun,” was pretty much the chief star of Cody’s Wild West show. The tiny, trim, ladylike Annie was clearly a far cry from the brassier character created onstage by Ethel Merman. Contrasting the personalities of the “Colonel” and “Little Missie,” which is what Cody and Oakley politely called each other, McMurtry sums them up neatly: “Buffalo Bill Cody was outgoing, generous, gushing, in a hurry, often drunk, and almost always optimistic; in manner Annie Oakley was his polar opposite: she was reserved, modest to the point of requiring a female embalmer, so frugal that many of the troupers believed that she lived off the lemonade that Cody ... served free to all workers. Quakerish, quiet. But she, like Cody, was a showperson through and through.... “

Novelist, essayist and screenwriter McMurtry (author of “Lonesome Dove,” “Terms of Endearment,” “The Last Picture Show,” “Streets of Laredo” and “Texasville,” to name just a handful) is one of our ablest and most amiable chroniclers of the American West. As a shrewd observer of the American scene, he also takes a keen interest in the phenomenon of celebrity. So it’s not surprising to find him in this book combining his two interests as he revisits and reconsiders what is known about the lives of these two early “superstars.”

The Colonel and Little Missie were certainly not a couple, and indeed don’t even seem to have had an especially close professional relationship: The term that best seems to characterize their association would be mutual respect. Both had grown up poor -- virtually destitute in her case; a more ordinary mix of hard times and better in his. Both had learned to kill game and sell meat to support themselves and their families.

Cody (1846-1917) was a genuine product of the West who, like many rural boys back then, started working at age 11. Messenger, cowboy, hunter, trapper, scout, guide and rider on the Pony Express, Cody shot buffalo and fought Indians (as, McMurtry reminds us, they were called back then), but he also saw the looming threat to the survival of both. Although one of the legends that Cody created was based on the showdown in which he claimed the first scalp in revenge for the killing of Custer, in McMurtry’s considered opinion Cody pretty much got along with his supposed enemies. Unlike some of his bloodier-minded contemporaries, he was not bent on genocide. And as the Sioux and other tribes found their way of life collapsing around them, Cody’s Wild West show provided quite a few of them with job opportunities. Indeed, as the West began to fill up with settlers in the decades after the Civil War, frontiersmen like Cody were becoming something of an endangered species themselves. Cody rose to the challenge by transforming his personal experiences into a show.

Along with his frontier skills, appealing personality and love of the West, what helped make Cody a superstar, McMurtry emphasizes, was how extraordinarily handsome he was. Nor, it seems, could he have succeeded without the help of a hardworking manager named Salsbury and a smart press agent named Burke.

The Ohio-born Annie Moses (1860-1926) was fiercely competitive; she never threw a match, even when contending with royalty. She was a straight shooter in every sense: forthright, candid and independent-minded. As a child, she’d been farmed out to work for a horrible couple she called “the wolves,” so all her life she was haunted by the fear of poverty and joblessness. Hard work, frugality and charity were her guiding principles. Her one big act of dishonesty was to lop six years off her age so as not to seem older than an up-and-coming rival female sharpshooter.

“In our day,” McMurtry notes, “we have come to expect superstars, particularly female superstars, to behave badly, at least to the help.... But this was not always so. Both Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley were deeply loved, not least by their help.”

This relaxed, sometimes rambling, always entertaining book is neither a full-scale dual biography nor an in-depth analysis of stardom. Revisiting some of the questions that have bedeviled previous biographers and historians, McMurtry displays an easy familiarity with his sources and characteristically down-home common sense. His unruffled manner, coupled with his understated but infectious love for his subject, makes for a pleasantly nostalgic trip down the cultural memory lane.

*

Merle Rubin is a contributing writer to Book Review.