The Life of Buffalo Bill

This was fun to read. For us it is history but for William Cody it is his time. Life as he knows it. Books like this help us know ourselves better.

Like several other biographies of this legendary Plainsman, Scout, Buffalo Hunter and Indian Fighter of the American Frontier, this book is comprised mostly of a reprint of William F. Cody's own Autobiography. What makes it a better source than many of the other reprints of Buffalo Bill Cody's fascinating 1879 acount of his early life and adventures until he reached the age of thirty-four, this volume includes an excellent foreword by another noted author and historian of the Wild West, Don Russell. His foreword makes this first complete reprinting of the original autobiography much more understandable and provides additional valuable insights into the man who coined the term "Wild West." Buffalo BIll was, without any doubt, what we often refer to as "The Real McCoy." While Cody could spin a good tale too, he was modest and humble about his own adventures. Later historians have mostly authenticated, with only minor corrections, his scary-thrilling, matter-of-fact and plain spoken recollections of his life and adventures.This is a very good read and hard to put down until the very end of the book.

Autobiographies are at the same time the best and the worst sources of life stories. You get the authentic voice, but that voice tells you only what it wants you to believe. Both these characteristics are particularly strong here because Cody's voice is such a distinctive one and because of his status as a supreme self-promoter. So this book will not give you the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but it will give you a real insight into the mind of a man who in many ways epitomizes the culture of the historic American West. Some of it may shock you; Cody describes how he shot a mule who had annoyed him by running away, and boasts of how he scalped his fallen enemies. Hardly the stuff of popular myth. If you want to know how the west was really won, then reading this book (some of it 'between the lines') will tell you much.

The Wild West was an even more heroic epoch than is commonly understood. While Buffalo Bill became a self-promoter, basic facts are clear: he was a superior plains guide and scout and Indian fighter. He really was the master hunter of buffalo from horseback. He was a Pony Express rider, with all that entailed. He was friends with Wild Bill, Custer, and other notables. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery on the battlefield (though sadly it was removed many years later because of a bureaucratic technicality of how he had been employed by the Army, not because of any change in the evaluation of the heroic deeds.A most fascinating book. It gives one a different perspective to hear it from a participant.END