Corey Spillers History 4635 Midterm Book Review March 22, 2012

The book, Buffalo Bills America, is a great book discussing fact and myth of the west and of the life of William Codys or, as in the Wild West Show, Buffalo Bills. First we look at the author of this well written book. His name is Louis S. Warren. He is a W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of Western United States History at the University of California, Davis. Here he teaches environmental history, the history of the American West, and U.S. History. He completed his undergraduate school from Columbia University, and got his Ph.D in history at Yale. He has written or edited numerous books on the American West. His book, Hunters Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America won him the Western Heritage Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Book awarded by the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center. He is well qualified in the area of Western American History. The book itself is very precise and coherent. It takes place within the 1800s, between the 1830s to the early 1900s. This period of time is when Americans began to venture out into the new frontier that is the West. This is when families either decided to leave the crowded streets of cities or they could not find land in the rural areas of the South. They packed up and moved west towards open land and chose to live off the land and be independent. Warren does not focus on

this movement but on the exploits of William Codys life and his Wild West Show that gave the world a mythical view of the American West. He looks into what was actually the truth and what was fiction about the travel show. He starts with Codys childhood and works his way through some of the big moments through his life. Every now and again Warren will flash forward to compare what really happened to Cody and what Cody says happened in his show. This makes it easier for the reader to make the distinction immediately without waiting to compare the two multiple chapters down the road. He methodically and consistently moves along Codys life in this fashion, not changing his style too often so that the reader will not become confused. Warrens style makes Codys life, truth or myth, easy to understand and makes it an easy read, though at some points it may became stale or monotonous. Warren finds a new exploit of Codys show that grabs the readers attention. Warren stresses in this book how Buffalo Bills Show gave Eastern Americans and the world a distorted, mythical view of the west. In my view he seems to stress the social aspect of Codys show. His fictional and factual shows gave society a view of the west as a gun slinging war against heroic cowboys against Indians, criminals, Mormons, and excreta. In actuality, majority of the Western America were hard working people who were making a living on their own terms in isolated towns throughout the frontier. Warrens primary reason for his book was to draw the distinction between man and myth of William Cody and Buffalo Bill. He planned to show the reader that our modern view of the west grew out people like Cody bending the truth in his travelling shows and dime novels doing the same through print. Warren wants the reader to see that the west was not just gunslingers, Indians, and white Indians as Cody and others made it out to be. Warren brought to my attention that a lot of Buffalo Bills stories were true in some ways, but either they did not happen to him or he change some details. One example was Cody

saying he rode for the Pony Express for a year, when Warren stated the year he claimed the express was not even around yet. Another example Warren brought up was Cody being at Fort Bridger during the Mormon rebellions. Cody said he drove cattle to the fort until Indians scattered them and he turned back to take wagons to the fort. Warren found facts that stated the cattle drive left a week before the wagon train, and as the cattle were being scattered the wagons had already left. Putting a whole in the idea that Cody was at the fort during the rebellion. Louis Warren approaches his book impartially. He does not seem to be lenient to either side of Codys mythical of factual life. He seems slightly sympathetic to Codys decisions throughout his life. Warren understands why Cody made the choice to bend the truth or make up stories in the first place. Cody was trying to keep his audience captivated in the stories of the west and of the image of himself as Buffalo Bill. He was a man in the late 1800s who was trying to keep his income up to make ends meet. This sympathy enhances the story of Cody. Warren tells both sides of the story, what actually happened and what Cody says happened. He goes into detail on why Cody made the decision to change or take other stories for himself. Giving the reader view points from all angles of the story. In doing this, Warren does a fairly good job of not putting himself in his book. While he understood why Cody did what he did, Warren did not always seem to agree with the decision. Warren did his research from around the late 1990s up until 2003. During this time he took a historical research method approach. He searched through other authors books and articles on the subject or anything similar. He used articles from magazines and newspapers like Oregon Historical Quarterly, New York Times, and Kansas Historical Quarterly. He also used some primary documents like letters from farmers and military documents of what occurred at forts and in the wars with the Indians. These sources greatly enhance the books credibility. He

has what appears to be hundreds of sources, some possibly overlapping. Majority pertains directly with Codys life, Buffalo Bills Wild West Show, and other information that is vital to the foundation of the story Warren is trying to tell. With the endless pages of sources at the end of the book it appears he has done some very thorough research into this subject. With all these sources it is difficult to tell if he overlooked any important source or not. With all the information he gathered, it appears to be well more than enough to explain his position of William Codys life as real or fiction. With these sources he was able to make a very detailed and informative book. Louis Warrens Buffalo Bills America is a great book. As you read it you realize that the author did as much research as he could possibly do. He details everything from different points of view. I feel Warren organized this book the best possibly way. He starts with Codys childhood and its stories with quick glimpses of how Cody, as an adult, told them. He allowed the reader to make quick dissimilarities between the truth and the mythical. He wrote this book to all anyone to read it. It is easy to follow and just as easy to understand. I really enjoyed reading this book. The book does get repetitive from time to time. Warren finds himself telling the same story or mentions a fact about the same person on occasion in throughout the book. There were sometimes I found myself unable to put it down. This because Warren kept bringing in new information that would discredit the way Cody recalled some of his stories. On the other hand, he also found information that backed up some of his stories. So while reading the book you wonder if what Cody is saying is true or his he embellishing a little bit. I would highly recommend this book to others. Anyone who enjoys western stories, tale tells, or how knows of Buffalo Bill and the wild west shows of that time will enjoy this. Historians and history enthusiast would benefit the most from this book because it will give them a different

perspective on the American West and how people how came out of it exaggerated so of the stories and gave the world a mythical view of how the west was won and how it worked. If not for that reason then it is always good to continually educate yourself on any and every subject, especially as a history fan.