At the turn of the 20th century, the most famous American on Earth was Buffalo Bill.
More than anyone else, he cemented our common conception of the Wild West.
A whopping 70 million Americans and Europeans saw his touring Wild West rodeo show
during the over 30 years that it ran in the late 18 and early 1900s.
And though the world knew him as a showman,
he had had a long and adventurous history with the West before he ever found stardom.
William F Cody, the man behind the myth, was born in 1846.
His father and brother were dead by the time he was 11
and with no real safety net or chance to get a proper education, he had to work.
So he did what he knew, which was riding,
and was working for the newfound and short-lived Pony Express at the age of 15.
In his late teens, he briefly fought in the Civil War
and then he went to work for the Kansas Pacific Railroad Company,
hunting the abundant population of buffalo to feed the railroad workers.
He got the nickname Buffalo Bill after supposedly killing 11 buffalo with 12 rifle shots.
Impressive as that is, I'm personally waiting for when he comes on Dude Perfect
and kills 12 buffalo with just 11 rifle shots while upside-down and blindfolded.
Come on Bill, step up your game!
After acquiring his snappy nickname, he—again supposedly—
proceeded to kill 4,000 buffalo in 18 months.
Now, while that amount of buffalo corpses is objectively horrifying,
all of that hunting went into actually feeding the railway workers,
and the really neat thing here is that even as early as this,
before traveling shows were ever a twinkle in his eyes,
you could still kind of get a sense of the adventure and spectacle
that could be found in Buffalo Bill's version of the West.
Unlike the hunters who camped out on a hill and sniped away like lame pansies,
Buffalo Bill hunted on horseback and actually rode up in between the buffalo, getting close to his targets.
Even as early as here, Buffalo Bill made something as simple as just gathering food exciting.
In 1868 Cody became a chief civilian scout for the US Cavalry
because he could ride long distances insanely fast.
On one occasion part of the army got lost during a brutal winter storm
and despite sub-zero temperatures and impossible visibility
he managed to go out there, find and rescue the soldiers,
permanently damaging his left eardrum in the process.
I can't imagine anyone but someone as adventure-hungry as Buffalo Bill ever going out to search for them.
In a similarly perilous but infinitely more controversial point in his career,
Buffalo Bill often joined his counterparts in the army during raids and battles
against the Native Americans whose land the United States was, well, actively invading.
The west wasn't empty plains, after all, and you can't just manifest destiny your way across a continent
without running into people who've lived there before you.
At best that's impoliteness and at worst that's actual genocide,
or as Andrew Jackson calls it, fun!
Anyway, I will get into the abundantly problematic history and myth surrounding
Cowboys and Indians (oh God it just feels gross saying it) in a later video,
but for now let's focus on the fact that Buffalo Bill
regularly stepped outside of his job description as a civilian
and participated in the actual fighting which ended up winning him a Medal of Honor.
So that's neat!
It was about this point in time that the persona of Buffalo Bill,
the brave hunter and scout who paved the way for westward American expansion,
started getting really popular in and outside of the West.
Little books called dime novels, which were basically late 19th century comics,
were already telling stories about him in the early 1870s when Bill was just in his mid-20s.
The demand for stories about this rough-and-tumble new world just over the western horizon
was so high that on two big occasions several east coast millionaires
and later the Grand Duke of Russia came to the frontier to hunt buffalo with Bill himself.
This was Bill's first taste of not just being the subject of outside intrigue
but of he himself presenting the spectacle of the West.
In 1873 Bill actually played himself in a stage play in Chicago
because there was better money in acting than actually being Buffalo Bill.
When one of Bill's sons tragically died, he came back West
and then proceeded to help the army with another campaign against the Native Americans.
By this point his popularity was so big that even one of the Cheyenne scouts, named Yellow Hair,
recognized him as Buffalo Bill and challenged him.
May not have been the most pleasant fan interaction,
but at least it's more original than asking for an autograph and a selfie, so uhh, props!
Bill was quicker on his feet and on the trigger and killed Yellow Hair,
taking his headdress as a scalped prize,
which emboldened the US Cavalry to charge forward.
But the weird thing about this whole episode was that he wasn't wearing his typical frontiersman outfit,
he was wearing his co-opted vaquero costume from the stage play he was in.
This whole sequence was one big weird moment of the real world and the show world blending together.
After that campaign, Bill and some friends decided to ditch the indoor stage
and put on outdoor rodeos with parades, competitions and demonstrations.
This was the backbone of what became his soon to be world-famous Wild West show.
And aside from Buffalo Bill himself,
by far the most prominent performer in the several hundred person troupe was Annie Oakley,
arguably the single best sharpshooter, possibly ever.
Annie toured with Bill for 17 years,
during which she performed across Europe
and for several prominent royals and heads of state.
Among myriad other feats, she's best known for her over the shoulder hand mirror shot,
which is nothing short of badass.
Annie Oakley also donated most of the money she made to charities that help orphans,
and in general her own story is really fascinating,
but at the risk of getting superbly off-topic and at the cost of sexist sidelining,
let's return to the show.
Now permit me some analytical gymnastics here,
because Bill's show was essentially the equivalent of a Wild West Medieval Times,
except actually more exciting for the viewers,
because, instead of several-hundred-year-old knights in shining armor,
the Wild West performance was showing off the kinds of things
that were going off right now just over the horizon.
Aside from that, the spectacle and the pageantry were very similar.
Sword-wielding knights in armor and helmets were replaced with gun-toting cowboys in chaps and a hat.
But the comparison sort of holds because Bill's show portrayed cowboys
not as the simple cattle herders that they historically actually were
but as the heroic defenders of the Western world that people imagined Bill to be.
So the problem here is that, while the show was more or less true—ish—to Bill's own experiences,
its picture of the typical cowboy was by and large overblown and over-romanticized
because Bill wasn't the typical cowboy.
The awkward thing here for our understanding of history
is that Bill was very dedicated to using his show as a platform to teach people about Western life.
So aside from the hunting and shooting demonstrations,
he'd show stagecoaches, Native Americans setting up camps,
and all these little slices of Western life that were all pretty solidly true.
His image of the West was mostly grounded in fact,
but it was just tinted—or tainted, depending on your perspective—
by that larger than life character of Buffalo Bill.
And that image of the West stuck because Hollywood loved Bill's style of showmanship.
So much of the Westerns people in the 20th century saw were extensions of Bill's performances.
However, Hollywood also did a lot of whitewashing
and leaned way too heavily into the Cowboys versus Indians thing,
but again, I'll talk about that in a later video.
And speaking of Cowboys and Indians,
Buffalo Bill himself had a fascinating relationship with the Native Americans.
It's honestly a really mixed bag.
On the one hand, he actively campaigned into their sovereign lands
and created some of the Native American stereotypes
that became increasingly nasty as Hollywood picked up steam,
but on the other side of that he went to great lengths to include Native Americans in his shows,
he treated them well, and he gave their culture a respectful presence on the world stage.
Later in his life he and several Native groups had strong and mutually respectful relationships.
Like I said, it's fantastically tricky.
On the more domestic side of things,
Bill spent the latter part of his life pouring tremendous amounts of money
into the infrastructure of the West that he helped settle.
A lot of his investments didn't pay off in his lifetime
and he had to work pretty much right up until he died in 1917 to pay off his debts,
but in the long run his generosity really went a long way.
And that right there is the story of Buffalo Bill.
At the height of his popularity his show was touring all across America and well into Europe too.
For better and for worse, Buffalo Bill is the man who romanticized the Wild West.
As far as his life goes the show is pretty true to his experiences,
but given he himself was such an exceptionally adventurous character—
so much so that his long-suffering wife could never get him to settle down in one place—
it's impossible to hold up his experiences as anything close to the widespread reality.
It's like saying that every European in the Middle Ages was a knight
or that every American is Batman.
That would be awesome, albeit impossibly confusing, but it's just not the truth.
Besides, we all know there's obviously only one real Batman:
TVs Adam West.