Thank you all for coming out tonight. Its great to have such a terrific crowd. Book tv is here, cspan. So, yeah. Lets hear it for book tv. We dont have an applause light so patty is going to wave her hat during the lecture at which point you burst into applause. You guys on the balcony will get confetti and you can throw it out at odd intervals and convey the whole spirit of this event. And people at home watching this on book tv will know how wonderful this lecture is. That would be excellent. As usual with william cody the best way to start is with the story. In the spring of 1883 william buffalo bill cody a onetime buffalo hunter and army scout, already a well known performer, held the first dress rehearsal for what would become Buffalo Bills wild west show in nebraska. According to an eyewitness when the deadwood stagecoach trundld into the arena buffalo bill invited the town council wlug the mayor, a beloved but notorious blusterer to ride in the coach. For the first two passes around the show grounds the coach rolled merrily along and its occupants waved to the crowd. On the third pass, the pawnee indian performers swept into the arena on horse back. The coach passengers were expecting it but the mules had not been advised of this part of the program according to the eyewitness. The animals surged forward, the indians in hot pursuit, the driver barely able to keep the coach wheels on the ground as it rounded the turn. When buffalo bill and his cowboys suddenly went into action as the rescue party, nobody had told the pawnees to break off the attack. Terrified by several dozen howling men on horse back and the thunder of guns firing blanks the mules picked up the pace. As the coach, indians, scouts, and cody swept past the crowd again the mayor stuck his head out the window, waved his hands, and shouted, stop help stop let us out the driver had all he could do to keep the stage on the circular course without rolling it over. The mules didnt halt until they were thoroughly winded. At that point the enraged mayor coach and made for buffalo bill, ready for a fight. Fortunately, before he could reach cody, a local lawyer named frank evers climbs to the top of the coach. Look at them, gentlemen, he announced. Pointing to the dazed town council and the infuriated mayor. He proclaimed his pride in these men who risked their lives for your entertainment. Clothier now turned back to the coach and went after evers, who escaped. It was an uncertain beginning for an entertainment with which the already famed buffalo bill hopes to catch what he called the better class of customers. The first year on the road unfortunately wasnt much better. Kesspite the fact that the show already included many of the actions that made it famous, horse races, sharp shooting displays, buffalo hunt, and of course the attack on the deadwood stage. That year when the show season ended in chicago, audiences were sparse. One reviewer marveled at the audacity of william cody and his partners, who seemed to have assembled a show of ferocious looking prairie terrors for the entertainment of street urchins. Not for the first time nor for the last cody was nearly broke. And yet, as we know, Buffalo Bills wild west went on to fabulous success, becoming the best known representation of the American West and, more than that, the best known representation of the united most of the world. In subsequent years this traveling community numbered as many as 700 people. The show entertained north americans and europeans for 33 years. At various points appearing before the queen of england and many other notables. Codys success in Brennan Europe validated American Culture and American History as respectable entertainment and frankly as culturally significant. He was far more than the nostalgic historians and biographers have claimed. He was a National Icon and international celebrity. Back home in the closing decade and a half of the 19th century the popularity of buffalo lls wild west was all the more remarkable gench popular anxiety at the time. Picture a nation bitterly divided between two Political Parties who are almost evenly matched from the stolen election of 1876, to the election of 1900, parties who fought bitterly over elections t every level of government. The Industrial Revolution brought on fierce labor unrest. From the great strike in 1877 during which the Pittsburgh Railroad station was burned to the ground as you see here to the haymarket bombing of 1886 some people called it what is sometimes referred to as the irst terrorist strike in modern america. Certainly was called that at the time. And the pullmans strike. There were a huge number of altercations between labor and capital. What seemed to be a low level stage of civil war. Between 1881 and 1904 there were an estimated 37,000 ecorded strikes. Meanwhile all those middle class men and women moving to the cities faced a series of challenges of their own, leaving farms and moving to the cities to take up jobs in offices. Middle class white men in particular were becoming clerks and managers and feared becoming over civilized in the parlance of the time. Feared that while their fathers knew nature and knew the farm they shuffled paper and they erent really men. Amidst these upheavals codys how was popular on the political right. He adored the wild west show and many of his most famous paintings of the west are based on scenes in the show. He would visit the show especially in new york and borrow cowboys and indians for poses in his studio. But it was also popular on the left. Among the wild west show fans was edward abling, the soninlaw of karl marx, and an eminent socialist in his own right. Edward abling was the first theorist to come up with a diagnosis of the cowboy condition in which he said the cowboy is as much of a slave to the capitalist as the Massachusetts Mill hand. Was sort of a cowboy it prolitarian. He loved the wild west show. He first saw it in new york. He wrote rave reviews of it. He spent time with the show when it visited london. He would say have i not spent days and nights in camp with them, been present at saddle up time and behind the scenes . Ridden outside the deadwood coach, slept in Buffalo Bills tent . Without question, Buffalo Bills wild west was the greatest generator of western myth prior to the invention of the movie. It not only made cody wealthy it made him the most famous american in the world by 1900. It didnt end until 1913 when he lost the show in bankruptcy court. Even then cody wrote his famed other shows until 1917. On news of his death, that year poet e. E. Cummings called to mind his vision of cody from the show. Codys signature act in the wild west show was to ride fast around the arena top speed while an assistant also on horse back threw balls made of amber into the air and cody would blast those balls from the air using his rifle. E. E. Cummings recalled Buffalo Bills defunct who used to ride a water smooth Silver Stallion and break one, two, three, four, five pigeons just like that. Jesus, he was a handsome man. So what went wrong that first year . What did cody do to make the show successful . Most of all, what does all that success tell us about america in william codys time . To answer all these questions, which are many of the questions that energized me when i began this book, the whole problem of explaining how a man goes from frontier kansas to becoming the most famous showman in the world is such a strange story. I grew up in nevada and as a child i liked two kinds of stories most of all. One, stories about the wild west. I would read books about the 19th century west and the wild west show. The other kind of story i liked was the collection of strange but true stories. It usually features tales about big foot and all kinds of other things. But this story about this guy who went from kansas to showmanship playing himself seemed the weirdest story of all in some ways. Ho was he . Born William Frederick cody in 1846 in iowa he moved to kansas as a young child. After the death of his father, young will cody became a boyhood teamster. He was an antislavery jay hawker in the bleeding kansas troubles and in 1864 he joined the union army and fought briefly in the south. After the war he became a buffalo hunter for the Kansas Pacific Railroad and distinguished himself as a scout for the army in the plains indian wars. In 1869 he was discovered by the dying novelisted in bunk lieberman which was the pen and of a well known writer judson or buntline was renowned as the most well paid writer in america, rumored he was making 20,000 a year at the time he went west probably to find somebody to write about. He was probably looking for someone else. Probably wild bill hickock, possibly the scout frank north. And he found william cody instead. He published a story called buffalo bill, king of the border men, which was serialized in the story paper the new york weekly. By this time cody was also a hunting guide to Army Officers and wealthy tourists many of whom arrived in kansas wanting to hunt buffalo. In 1872 general sheridan invited him to guide the great plains hunt of the grand duke of russia also accompanied by george a. Custer. Thats custer on your left and the grand duke alexis in the middle. The man on the right is william cody, who wasnt actually in the studio that day. He grew kind of jealous about the picture later on and in his publicity took the photo of custer and the grand duke and had himself spliced in just to make the heroic trio work. After the hunt with the grand duke alexis, cody accepted an invitation from some of his hunting clients, including the publisher James Gordon Bennett jr. Who is the publisher of the very influential newspaper the New York Herald to visit new york society. While in new york, he saw a play in a theater not unlike the one were in where an actor named j. B. Studly was playing buffalo bill in a play alleged to be about buffalo bill ace life. According to cody he was sitting in the balcony in a box and the actor j. B. Studly announced in the middle of the play, said, ladies and gentlemen, or actually gentlemen because it was pretty much an all male audience at the time. He said, with us tonight is the real buffalo bill. And the crowd brought the house down. Cody professed great embarrassment but was ultimately persuaded later that year that he should return to new york and play himself on the stage. First he went west again, scouted for the army again, and was awarded the congressional medal of honor for fighting the sioux. It was that fall of 189 the 2 that he 1892 that he returned to the east and began his stage career in plays about the redemption of the good woman from the clutches of evil in which buffalo bill alleged the story was actually true and would say these stories are about my life and in fact they were highly fictionalized and hed always play himself. Buffalo bills combination was the name of his Theater Company. For the duration of the 1870s then he toured with this Theater Company throughout the United States. Returning to the plains in the summer to scout for the army or to guide wealthy tourists on buffalo hunting expeditions. Thats buffalo bill cody in the middle and the man on the right, on the left ised in bunkline. The man on the far right is texas jack who was another Frontier Army scout who turned his life into turned to this and career of acting playing himself. What inspired cody to mix historical action and reenactment in this way . Without spending too much time on that question i think it is important to understand exactly codys sense of cultural longing and his intuitive grasp of a few particulars about American Culture. The first thing he understood that gave him an advantage over so many other would be performers was the importance of a storey and it was a very is particular story. Most americans knew the west as a setting for that story which was the story of the progress of civilization. Hich was usually told in Elementary School classrooms, public lectures, popular articles in newspapers, from near the beginning of the 19th century onward that story was usually told in four parts. That is that all civilization it was thought advanced through stages of development beginning with hunting and progressing to herding and then going on to and finally commerce which would bring urban and trade. This is a very famous painting from 1892, American Progress in which you can see the story mapped out for us here. The hunters on the far left are indians and theyre being pushed off the screen by the forces of progress who are arriving miners here but, most importantly, down here i love this part. Farmers who are plowing their way west. The plow is in the road and it would take a little while to get out there but theyre not going to quit. Theyre the ones who bring in their train all of this development. We have the goddess of liberty who is stringing the telegraph wire and along with her is coming the railroad. In the far distance advancing west is a city and the commerce. Another way to think about this story is that the wilderness was being demessty kated and turned into a garden and somehow the savage, dark wilderness would be turned into productive farm fields and all of this technology would somehow combine to create a grand and glorious and hopefully eternal yomans republic. Just as important as the that was the story of the nation. Just as important to codys success here is he took that tory as his own story. The nation developed in stages and so do i. I was a hunter he would say. I became a rancher. Then i got domesticated he would say and he would talk about the house he had. Ill talk about that in a few moments, and his family and so forth. So that the story of the nations progress becomes internalized to himself. Just as important to all of that was codys intuition of public doubts about this story. How could you know what was actually happening out west after all unless you went there yourself . You relied on newspapers, on dime novels, on theater productions. On paintings. Thats how you knew what was going on out west. How did you know that stuff was true . Because there was an explosion of printed material in the 19th century. The Steam PoweredPrinting Press makes its debut. Really expands after the middle of the 19th century. And millions of pages of newspaper print, real estate ads, autobiographys which are often fictionalized. By all of these things off the presses and the great challenge becomes how do we know what were reading is true . This development of what we call print culture was one of the things that encouraged the Development Also of a lot of fraud in particular in the west. There was no place like the west for finding advertisements for great land deals, the railroads sent out advertisements saying you can come and settle on this beautiful green land and have a great farm. You all know how the story often went. You ended up on land that was a little less than ideal for farming shall we say . Cody understood, though, Something Else about the problem of fraud and print and representation. From being in the west he came to understand that artful deception, if it was staged as entertainment, could draw a public crowd that wanted to be amused. And he learned this in part from his experiences in the west and in part from his travels in the east. Where the most popular entertainer of the day was probably p. T. Barnum. P. T. Barnum, who developed a form of entertainment in which the hoax was elevated to kind of an art form. What p. T. Barnum would do was to create some attraction, in this case the fuji mermaid which was the head of a or the sewn rather of a monkey to the tail of a fish. It was a hideous thing but it was so carefully sewn together you couldnt tell where the stips were stitches were. Barnum swore that he bought the thing from a sailor who came from the south seas and he would say i dont know if its true. I dont know if its legitimate. I have no idea. But take a look. 25 cents. Take a look. 25 cents right here. You can go on in. And the crowd loved it. Because they could go in and investigate the thing and make up their own mind. Even when they thought he was not presenting a legitimate attraction they enjoyed the spectacle of a carefully wrought hoax. And they appreciated his willingness to let them make up their own minds about it. As long as you werent claiming to sell the unvarnished truth and as long as your attraction was well presented enough to inspire uncertainty and fairly priced the audience would not dessert you. Barnum would say, for example, the public is inclined to be amused even when they are aware of being deceived. And it was a kind of a great spirit of mid 19th century democratic spectatorship that the audience member had the power to discern reality but beneath all those layers of fakery and if you could make a spectacle out of that you had a really live attraction. For most americans to go west was to explore the degree to which those popular representations of the west captured western reality. Those who recorded their often in the west explained to their readers what they should believe about other things they had read and what they should not. If you read accounts of emigrants on the overland trail during the gold rush, theyre which advice about guide books you can believe and which are fraudulent. There is lots of this kind of experience of the west. Meanwhile, various individuals in the west began to make popular attractions by staging of r lives as ongoing shows western progress, dime novel plots brought to life, and inviting tourists and other spectators to decide for themselves whether the act was true or not. A past master of this form of entertainment was a friend of codys and sort of his mentor in 18671868 in hays, kansas. James butler hickock known to friends and enemies as wild bill who would often instead of dressing like this which is the way many 19th century men in kansas were dressing, you add a suit jacket