American Experience

Narrator: For many of the women the sight was overwhelming: U.S. cavalry appearing over the horizon, closing in on their encampment near Wounded Knee. Some of them began to cry; the men tried to comfort them. The soldiers marched steadily forward.

The high wailing of the women blended with the tinkling bells of a merry-go-round, with the sounds of the cars that were still arriving, and of the spectators who had come in from all over Nebraska and South Dakota. At the center of it all was one of the most famous people in the world: William Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill.

The sixty-seven-year-old Cody was directing his first movie — a reenactment of the Wounded Knee massacre — and doing what he had always done: blurring the line between truth and entertainment, history and myth.

Buffalo Bill Cody had lived both sides of that line. He had grown up in the real West, knew the sorrow and cruelty and courage that had created it. But he understood that the West was something more, even for those who would never see it…and that he could be the hero in the story they wanted to live.

Paul Fees, Historian: That myth of the West, all of those things that we tend to think of as the Western adventure, somehow it was all wrapped up in the person of Buffalo Bill.

Louis Warren, Biographer: He connects us to a story that is at the heart of the American experience. And he made the American West into the American story.

Narrator: In 1866 the twenty-year old William Cody was adrift in the wake of the Civil War. His boyhood home was gone, most of his family dead. He left behind the remains of his past and joined the flood of young men heading West. “I sighed for the freedom of the plains,” he later recalled; “I started out alone for Saline, Kansas, which was then the end of the track.”

Paul Fees, Historian: Kansas must have been an enormously exciting place. Lots of soldiers suddenly out on their own, the railroads building, the army moving out on the plains to resume their war on the Plains Indians, yeah, a very interesting place for people on the make. And Cody certainly was on the make.

Narrator: He was at home with the tracklayers, bullwhackers, speculators, and cowboys who congregated in the towns that were springing up as the rails pushed West. Life was exciting and sometimes dangerous but after all, he’d spent much of the Civil War riding with Union irregulars — rough customers…he could handle himself.

Charles Scoggin, Writer: He was well over six feet tall. Very attractive. And this is a time when the average height was like, you know, five and a half feet. So he really he stood out in a crowd.