William Cody 1846—1917, a.k.a. Buffalo Bill, was the most
famous American of his age. A child of the frontier Great Plains,
Cody was renowned as a Pony Express rider, prospector, trapper,
Civil War soldier, professional buffalo hunter, Indian fighter,
cavalry scout, horseman, dime-novel hero, and actor. But Buffalo
Bill’s greatest success was as impresario of the Wild West show,
the traveling company of cowboys, Indians, Mexican vaqueros, and
others, numbering in the hundreds, with which he toured North
America and Europe for more than three decades. As Louis S. Warren
reveals, the show company came to represent America itself, its
dazzling mix of races sprung from a frontier past, welded into a
thrilling performance, and making their way through the world via
the modern technologies of railroad, portable electrical generator,
telephones, and brilliantly colored publicity–an entrancing vision
of the frontier-born, newly mechanized, polyglot United States in
the Gilded Age.
Biographers have long disputed whether Cody was a hero or a
charlatan. As Warren shows, the question already preoccupied
critics and spectators during Cody’s own lifetime. In fact, the
savvy entertainer encouraged the dispute by mingling fictional
exploits with his not inconsiderable achievements to construct the
persona of an ideal frontiersman, a figure who was more
controversial than has been commonly understood. At the same time,
his show provided a means for rural westerners, including cowboys,
cowgirls, and especially Lakota Sioux Indians, to claim a new
future for themselves by reenacting a version of the past.
The most comprehensive critical biography of William Cody in more
than forty years, Buffalo Bill’s America places America’s
most renowned showman in the context of his cultural worlds in the
Far West, in the East, and in Europe. A rich and revealing
biography and social history of an American cultural icon.
關於作者:
Louis S. Warren is W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of Western
U.S. History at the University of California, Davis. He is the
author of The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in
Twentieth-Century America, which won the Western Heritage Award
for Outstanding Nonfiction Book, 1998, awarded by the National
Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center.
目錄:
PART ONE
One: Pony Express
Two: The Attack on the Settler’s Cabin
Three: The Village . . . The Cyclone
Four: With the Prince of Pistoleers
Five: Guide and Scout
Six: Buffalo Hunt
PART TWO
Seven: Theater Star
Eight: Indians, Horses
Nine: Domesticating the Wild West
Ten: The Drama of Civilization: Visual Play and Moral
Ambiguity
Eleven: Wild West London
Interlude: Broncho Charlie Miller
Twelve: Wild West Europe
Thirteen: Ghost Dance
Interlude: Standing
Bear
Fourteen: Cowboys, Indians, and the Artful
Deceptions of Race
Fifteen: Buffalo Bill’s America
Interlude: The
Johnson Brothers
PART THREE
Sixteen: Empire of the Home
Seventeen: Showdown in Cheyenne
Interlude: Adele
Von Ohl Parker
Eighteen: End of the Trail
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index