'Buffalo Bill' glories in fact and fiction
"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend," a character famously says in John Ford's Western "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance."
PBS' redoubtable "American Experience" makes a point of printing both fact and legend in a new profile of "Buffalo Bill," William Cody, airing at 9 p.m. Monday on WTTW Channel 11.
In that, it's a little soft on the Wild West showman. This isn't a warts-and-all profile, but a glowing portrait with a few blemishes. Yet America loves a huckster, and Americans love to be fooled -- if only up to a point -- and Buffalo Bill continues to hold a fond place in the national consciousness on that score.
Cody grew up in "Bleeding Kansas," where his father was stabbed for expressing anti-slavery views in public and eventually died from the injuries. Most of the members of his ill-fated family died early, and by the age of 12 he was on his own, supposedly working as a scout alongside "Wild" Bill Hickok.
After serving with Union irregulars as a teen during the Civil War, he again met Hickok as a fellow scout, and when Hickok gained notoriety back East as the subject of a story in Harper's and in penny-press novels, Cody got the idea to do the same, teaming up with writer Ned Buntline, who brought him to Chicago to do a play called "Scouts of the Prairie." The play was an amateurish affair, and when Cody found he got a better response just ad-libbing with stories -- real and imagined -- from his frontier experience, he had no need of Buntline anymore and went off on his own.
That's why "American Experience" glories in both legend and the selected known facts, because Cody himself evidently got to a point where he couldn't tell the difference. He was a bona fide boffo buffalo hunter, and he went back out West and took an Indian scalp after Custer's Last Stand, then brought the scalp back to brandish it in new stage productions that no doubt embellished his actual accomplishments.
The show eventually developed into Buffalo Bill's Wild West, and by 1886, with Annie Oakley and even Sitting Bull hired on, it drew a million people in New York City. Mark Twain and P.T. Barnum were both admirers, and after that Cody took the show to Europe for years, performing for Queen Victoria and the pope before returning to the States in time for Chicago's Columbian Exposition in 1893. Denied a part in the expo proper for being "too crass," Cody simply opened up shop nearby and played to 3 million spectators, with Cody clearing $500,000.
Cody was full of contradictions. "Buffalo Bill" touches on them without really delving into them in detail. The Wild West show trafficked in the domination of white settlers over American tribes in re-creations of attacks on the Pony Express and the like, but at the same time it employed tribesmen like Sitting Bull and gave them a decent wage. Cody all but abandoned his wife, Louisa Frederici, for decades, and his attempt to divorce her tarnished his reputation with charges of alcoholism, philandering and even (gasp!) blasphemy. (The American public was evidently ready for a man to brandish an actual scalp, but not for him to be divorced.) Then the couple reconciled in their later years.
Most of all, Cody made millions, yet proved just as gullible as any of his customers in falling victim to scam after scam. Although he maintained, "I don't want to die a showman," he was forced to work into his dotage, even after his Wild West show went bankrupt, and died in Denver in 1917.
Cody is a uniquely American figure, and "American Experience" packs his story -- both real and imagined -- into the hour documentary, but that doesn't leave writer-producer Rob Rapley the time to dig any deeper. Like the Wild West show itself, it tells a simple story and keeps the darker ramifications at arm's length. "Buffalo Bill" tells an engaging yarn, but a viewer expects more from "American Experience."