Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History

This is an outstanding scholarly study of Buffalo Bill and his Wild West show. Kasson deals with her subject sympathetically and never leaps to politically correct judgments. Kasson not only offers a biography of Buffalo Bill and a study of the cultural meaning of his Wild West, but also a study of how Indians and other marginalized groups figured in the Wild West show. Excellent book. Buy it.

After checking this book out of the library and reading some of it, we knew we had to own it. Kasson writes well for the serious amateur of the Wild West, and the scholarship appears solid. It's clearly a work of contemporary history-writing, in that Kasson is very attentive to how we re-tell our past to ourselves, how myths and celebrity develop. In this respect it resembles Paul Reddin's "Wild West Shows" (University of Illinois Press, 1999), which we also recommend. Readers who want to know what it was REALLY like on the plains will want to consult other books.

Joy Kasson uses the story of Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West show to tell us about the beginnings of celebrity in America. Tracing Buffalo Bill's life from Army scout through Wild West show impresario she reveals how Cody "created an American memory through entertainment" by bringing together Northerners and former Confederates in the final decade of the nineteenth century for a shared and comforting interpretation of American identity. The imperialist story the Wild West Show told was legitimizing to American's who wanted to view their destruction of native American life in their westward advancement as the justifiable acts by victims of murderous natives, now happily tamed as actors, rather than the other way around. She demonstrates how Buffalo Bill's thesis about western conquest by white Americans influenced the twentieth century interpretation of American history in many ways, not the least of which was the Boy Scouts, and particulary through the powerful genre of the motion picture, in which Cody's influence was seminal. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show promoters were among the first to manipulate the public through advertising and image building. Kasson has given new insight into a late twentieth century culture that produced such phenomena as an actor as president, spin doctors and focus groups, and in countless other ways blurred the line between performance and reality.A book both scholarly and readable, Buffalo Bill's Wild West has broken new ground in our understanding of the beginnings of our celebrity culture.