Famous for Being Famous

“Our entertainment don’t want to smack of a circus,” William Cody wrote to an early partner in his Wild West show. “Must be on a high-toned basis.” According to American Experience: Buffalo Bill, Cody’s ambition stemmed from self-interest as much as integrity, an estimable ego and a canny business sense. Already “one of the most famous people in the world” when he embarked on the enterprise, Cody has since come to represent the merging of myth and commerce that now defines the “American West.” And while Rob Rapley’s hour-long documentary takes Cody as its focus, it is most compelling when it considers his context and effects, the ways his story—sensational and mundane—shaped both the national past and the future of celebrity.

Structured in the usual fashion—expert talking heads and photos or artwork under a slow-zooming camera—the documentary makes a convincing case for Cody’s part in the history of American self-inflation. Narrator Richard Ben Cramer recalls that Cody, born in Kansas in 1846, fought as a Union soldier during the Civil War. In 1866, he was “adrift,” his childhood home destroyed and most of his family dead. Like many young men of his age and experience, he headed “west,” with a brief stopover in St. Louis to marry Louisa Frederici (“Golly,” says historian Paul Fees, “In her pictures, she’s almost sultry looking,” by way of explaining Cody’s attraction to her). Still, he was restless and ambitious, taking a job that would send him far from home, as a scout with the U.S. Army from 1868 to 1872. In this capacity, he went looking for deserters, Indians, and bison. He also met up with a deputy marshal named Wild Bill Hickok.

According to Cody biographer Louis Warren, he drew inspiration from Hickok’s flamboyant showmanship: “He begins to wear his hair long, wear buckskin, and tell the same stories, only he features himself at the center rather than Hickok.” When these stories were picked up by a New York writer named Ned Buntline, Cody “suddenly became a real celebrity,” says Charles Scoggin. Here the documentary notes consumers’ ongoing fascination with “the West,” available in dime novels and newspaper serials, as well as “tours,” by which “the wealthy and well-connected could live out their Western fantasies.” As a guide, Cody honed his equestrian and shooting skills, so that he could shoot at bison while astride a galloping horse. As Cody became popular among the tourists, Warren says, he “became aware of his own charisma and how far that might take him.”

Cody’s own show developed over years, taking a couple of particularly interesting turns. First, his association with Buntline, as a writer for his stage shows, troubled him, apparently because Buntline was a member of the Know Nothing party, that is, a hardcore nativist and strongly anti-immigrant. As Warren tells it, Cody, “for reasons of his own, didn’t want to go there.” (The documentary briefly suggests but doesn’t quite explain these “reasons,” by noting his father’s anti-slavery activism, as well as the fact that an apparently pro-slavery neighbor stabbed him to death in front of eight-year-old Cody.) Leaving Buntline behind, Cody started telling his own stories, grand and audacious, and at least initially based on his own experience following the massacre at Little Big Horn in 1876.

News of Custer’s last stand ignited a desire for revenge in “the public,” according to the documentary, a desire fanned by media of the time. Cody first made a literal effort, donning his stage costume and going forth with soldiers in search of Indians to kill. He did shoot and kill a warrior named Yellow Hair, and reportedly scalped him as well, an event that he turned into a story for the stage, “The Red Right Hand or Buffalo Bill’s First Scalp for Custer.” In taking on the stage name and rehearsing his own adventure for audiences, Cody entered into a new dimension of fame and self-invention. Indeed, he became a “star of frontier melodramas, lowbrow spectacles featuring the rescue of a white woman form the clutches of Indians, confederate sympathizers, Mormons or the like.” In 1883, his own show became known as “The Wild West.”

Group portrait of frontier celebrities. (Denver Public Library, Western History Collection)

It was a hugely profitable entertainment (in 1885, it made some $100,000), and in 1886, Cody took it to Europe (Patricia Nelson Limerick says the show might be understood as “the end of the American Revolution,” as it seduced Europeans who still saw the U.S. as “a problem,” for its recent revolt as well as its evolution into “a swaggering, confident nation”). The numbers are somewhat astonishing (17,000 carloads of rock and earth, a band, butchers, bakers, and blacksmiths, plus over 200 cast members who included Native Americans and Annie Oakley (whom Fees “celebrates” by discounting the work she put into her own show, calling her , “a natural shooter. She never seemed to aim. She simply pointed toward the target and blew it away”). Cody, the documentary asserts, “invented a genre of celebrity. One reason he was able to do it was there was now an infrastructure where you could have international celebrities,” meaning the telegraph and cheap printing. Cody, the documentary proposes, discovered “that you could be famous for being famous.” 

As emblem of “America” and embodiment of notoriety, Cody was selling a heinous but immensely popular story, the defeat and demonization of Native Americans. As they endured increasing hardships, Cody cast them as “savages” who would lose again and again to the representatives of “white civilization.” One such employee was Sitting Bull, who joined the show for a year in 1885. As Juti Winchester observes, the famous Lakota chief “was kind of the focus figure for the [white] public’s horror and anger over Little Big Horn.” While Sitting Bull drew crowds, the hundreds of other Native American cast members were also treated like minor celebrities in Europe. The documentary suggests further that the encampment that was part of the hours-long “experience” of the show, introduced white consumers to real-life Native Americans. Buffalo Bill doesn’t detail this possible exchange, though it does raise the possibility that some individuals came away enlightened about another culture rather than only having racist fantasies reconfirmed.

One of these individuals, according to the documentary, was Cody himself.  As he “no longer billed himself as the ‘Terror of the Red Men,’ and he had stopped boasting about the first scalp for Custer,” he apparently lost interest in at least one aspect of his show. Still, “The Wild West” popularized an enduring version of American history, one in which “the superiority of white civilization was a given, and its victory inevitable.” The documentary begins and ends with the 67-year-old Cody’s effort to make a film based on Little Big Horn, noting his failures as a director (relying on long shots to show scope, rather than closer shots to develop “emotion”). Buffalo Bill is most effective when it examines the contexts that produced and were produced by Cody. The story he told again and again was surely spectacular, but it was also, in numerous ways, wrong. When Warren closes by saying, “We’re still in love with that story and we still need it,” it’s worth wondering who this “we” might be.