Buffalo Bill, Media Mythmaker

There's Buffalo Bill the reality. And generations of scholars have gradually sifted through the documents to pin down who William F. Cody was and what he did. And then there's Buffalo Bill the legend, a much more elusive phenomenon--indeed a kind of Fun House mirror room, a never-ending generator of images including the ones Cody himself devised (unlike his "ancestors" Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson, whose images were mainly ghostwritten).

Cody was canny enough to see, maturing as he did simultaneously with the emergence of national mass media in America, that he could tailor perceptions of what he stood for and what he did as a show biz entrepreneur. The Buffalo Bill exhibition at the Oakland Museum testifies, in part, to his skill at that.

But inevitably, the larger significance of the Wild West according to Cody has attracted the attention of interpreters of the American scene. And they have been struck by the fact the Buffalo Bill was the first media celebrity in our history.

Of course, Buffalo Bill did owe his initial fame to others: Gen. Phil Sheridan, who introduced Cody to influential Eastern "dudes" come west for hunting parties, and Ned Buntline, who wrote the first stories glorifying Bill's exploits. Cody himself took it from there, however, performing his Wild West show before 50 million people in hundreds of cities around the world and appearing in scores of advertisements for rifles, cigars, hats and bourbon. It would have been nearly impossible for anyone living in turn-of-the-century America not to know about Buffalo Bill.

The late 19th century United States has lately been characterized as the original "developing nation," working out in its institutions what it means to be modern. And intuitively, perhaps, Cody seems to have grasped that in modernized societies, the media are the metabolism, the mechanism through which individuals learn what the collective agenda is or should be, unlike traditional societies where notions of the proper way to live are passed on within the family, the congregation or the tribe.

Cody had already taken his show on the road by the time historian Frederick Jackson Turner asked, in 1893, what would happen to the American character once the frontier disappeared, as the 1890 census showed it had. In simplest terms, Buffalo Bill's media mythmaking demonstrated how you could create a psychological frontier in popular entertainment that would act as the safety valve that the actual physical frontier had provided up til then.

Needless to say, Buffalo Bill didn't consciously set out to become a media celebrity to protect the mental health of the increasingly penned-up urban masses. Hindsight shows us now what was actually happening: the U.S. was becoming an industrial nation and the Spanish-American War announced as well our emergence as a world power. If you look carefully at the career of William F. Cody as a media entrepreneur, you can see how he was very shrewdly riding both those crests of change.

Cody had stumbled upon a sure-fire enterprise. He was doing for popular entertainment what Armour was doing for meat-packing--selling everything but the pig's whistle. With the skills of a Barnum, Cody kept an eye peeled for any and everything that would thrill those urban crowds whose humdrum lives in the newly boring routines of office and factory needed compensation for their own growing lack of wide open spaces.

It is not irrelevant that his first big job--the one that got him his nickname--had been killing buffalo to feed the crews building a section of the transcontinental railroad. And when he featured the Congress of Rough Riders in his Wild West show, he presented not only American cowboys and Indians but also Bedouin Arabs, South American gauchos, Russian cossacks and even amid Spanish-American war hysteria, Filipinos. "Rough Rider" has a classic ring, of course, and Cody and Teddy Roosevelt actually squabbled over credit for the term. But looking back now, it is clear how shrewdly Cody modified his Wild West entertainments to take into account new American geopolitical intentions. As Buffalo Bill had led in the pacification of the North American continent for industrial progress, so the implications were clear, the rest of the globe would soon be opened to the same civilizing forces. First the Plains Indians, then the (Third) World.

Even the occasional setbacks that Progress encountered were not too much for Cody to handle. Custer's Last Stand was a kind of 19th century mini-Vietnam, when some Indians bluntly refused to submit to White Manifest Destiny. Yet when Cody returned West to work for the Fifth Cavalry in eastern Wyoming shortly after Custer's defeat, he wore his glamorous black stage costume. So when he led an attack on some Cheyennes and the famous brave Yellow Hand was killed, Cody melodramatically collected the brave's scalp and held it aloft, exulting, "First scalp for Custer!"

Back on the eastern stage, he let the audience know that his black outfit was the very same one he'd been wearing in the act of avenging Custer. Any entertainer who could touch that nerve had Big Magic. In fact, Cody was pioneering the penchant for instant history that television would later perfect in the genre of the docu-drama.

Was there ever a main chance Buffalo Bill failed to mind? On a cover of The Rough Rider magazine, Cody shamelessly linked photos of himself and TR under the legend, "Men who have Led the Rough Riders of the World in Civic and Military Conquests." Anticipating Cecil B. DeMille, Cody was a stickler for historical accuracy, but the mythic dimensions of his messages were strictly a function of interplay between his audiences' psychological needs and his instincts as a showman.

Until the 1960s, when long-neglected red, black and brown voices in the American choir finally began to be heard, the special pleading of Cody's "entertainment" was scarcely noted. And not until Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976) did we begin to have truly alternative versions of the Buffalo Bill heritage. True, Altman's Indians can do no wrong, just as the traditional White Man was never to blame. But we begin to get a more sophisticated version of both Buffalo Bill and his place in our national experience.

It is worth pointing out as well that, as Buffalo Bill rides into Kevin Roche's handsome concrete corral, a UCLA history professor is getting rave reviews for a new book that shows "How Myth and Memory Affect U.S. Diplomacy" as Business Week reports it.

Delving into the murky underside of the nation's foreign affairs in The American Style of Foreign Policy, Robert Dallek finds obscure, non-rational impulses that compel the U.S. to act out on the global stage basic unresolved tensions within the national character--hidden motives that spring from a struggle deep within the American psyche.

He contends that the reality of a tightly organized, conformist social order in 20th century America conflicts with the memory and myth of an unfettered, self-reliant, rural society that once was. He theorizes that Americans are unwilling to forgo the material benefits for which they have sacrificed much of their frontier freedom. Thus, he says, they symbolically project into their relations with other nations a kind of nostalgic model of what they would like to be.

Just so. The Wild West shows were the hot media events of the years 1883-1913 because they coped with such contradictions between belief and fact, and Buffalo Bill became a media celebrity because he knew how to satisfy those audience needs.

Later on, the movies would take up the myth-making process--William S. Hart, Tom Mix, and a host of Saturday matinee gunslingers--and radio domesticated singing cowboys like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Given the expectations gap between the promissory notes of the American Dream and what most of us have most of the time, the media and the myths will go on dazzling us. But William F. Cody was the first to sense the gap and have the moxie to help us deal with it.