American Experience

Narrator: Easterners pictured frontier life as a heroic struggle to bring civilization to the West and subdue Indian savagery. In fact, a demoralized army was stuck in an ugly war, fighting an elusive enemy in unfamiliar terrain. Scouts were crucial, and Cody was good. As the war with the Plains Indians heated up in the late 1860s, Cody would fight in more battles than most full-time soldiers.

He liked scouting: it was adventuresome and it paid well. What’s more, it was stable enough that Louisa brought their daughter and rejoined him at Fort McPherson. The next year the couple had a second child, a boy they named after the famous scout, Kit Carson.

But Cody always had his eye on the horizon, looking for the next chance. In the summer of 1869 that chance turned up in the person of a New York writer who went by the name of Ned Buntline. Buntline had plenty of reasons for using an alias: on more than one occasion he’d neglected to get rid of one wife before marrying another, and despite this surplus of wives had found the energy to kill a man in duel over a yet another woman. But he was also one of the most successful writers of the day.

Charles Scoggin, Writer: Buntline is looking for somebody to write a book about. And it was going to be Wild Bill Hickok by most accounts. Hickok either wasn’t available or refused to talk to him or what have you. And he decides to write a book about Cody which is called “Buffalo Bill: King of the Bordermen.” The book finally gets serialized in one of the New York publications. And at that point Cody suddenly becomes a real celebrity.

Narrator: Buffalo Bill joined a growing band of frontier heroes, idols of a public fascinated by the West. For most Americans that West existed only in dime novels and story papers. But the wealthy and well-connected could live out their Western fantasies. Soon, eastern sports were saddling up to hunt buffalo, led by famous scouts like Buffalo Bill.

Louis Warren, Biographer: But very few of these men knew how hard this actually was. The most common mishap was for a hunter to shoot his own horse through the head. One guide said the safest place to be with a party of dudes is nearest the buffalo. And Cody was hunting with these men and they adored him. Because not only did he look the part of a Western hero, but he cultivated his skills as a horseback hunter in ways that few other people had. One of his biggest critics actually said I saw him shoot sixteen buffalo from the back of a horse that was frightened of buffalo using sixteen shots. It was the most spectacular exhibition of buffalo hunting he’d ever seen. That’s what these dudes are paying for in part is to be in the company of somebody who’s like that.

Narrator: Cody was brushing elbows with men from the most rarefied circles of society. Their adulation was new to him; he was becoming aware of his own charisma, and of how far that might take him.

Just three years after Louisa had moved to Fort McPherson, Cody left the family behind again: he took Ned Buntline up on an offer to come to Chicago. Instead of telling his stories to well-heeled tourists, Buffalo Bill would bring the West to audiences who could only dream of the frontier.