New Perspectives on The West

William F. Cody (PBS, 2001)

When I reviewed the PBS New Perspectives on THE WEST website I found a huge amount of biographical information on people that I’ve heard about over the years, but knew very little about.  For instance, as a child I heard stories about “Buffalo Bill” but I never knew he was actually William F. Cody which is another name I remember from childhood.  As it turns out, Cody was given the nickname “Buffalo Bill” in 1867 after he began hunting buffalo “to feed the construction crews of the Kansas Pacific Railroad.  By his own count he killed 4,280 head of buffalo in seventeen months.”  The legend says that he was given the nickname after winning an eight-hour shooting competition with William Comstock, who also hunted buffalo.  Cody, who served as the Fifth Calvary’s chief of scouts, took part in sixteen battles which earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1872.  So here I learned that these two names that I knew throughout my childhood actually turned out to be one person with a very interesting life story (PBS, 2001).

While Cody was gaining a real life reputation for bravery in battle, the life of his alter ego, “Buffalo Bill” was turned into a novel by Ned Buntline, whose pen name was E.Z. C. Judson.  Cody then took on this role in stage productions that made his character a true legend.  It was after this that Cody organized “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” which was an outdoor performance that depicted the most spectacular elements of frontier life, including a real buffalo hunt, an Indian attack with real Indians, a Pony Express ride, and a reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand in which people who had actually been a part of the battle participated (PBS, 2001).

This was just one of the biographies on this website, but the others are just as interesting.  For anyone who wants information on  people like Kit Carson, Crazy Horse, Looking Glass, Sacagawea, or any other legendary people, this is a great site to visit: http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/.  This is a great site for this course because it gives us another view of the people we read about, other than just what is included in the textbooks.  

After reading this biography it confirms what I talked about in the discussion post relating to the “white man’s” disregard for the sanctity of life.   As a way of increasing his popularity, Cody wrote about the death of Chief Yellow Hair, or Yellow Hand as he was also known, with a complete lack of empathy, and was concerned only with the monetary gain that they story might produce.  “On this occasion, Cody added a new chapter to his legend in a "duel" with the Cheyenne chief Yellow Hair, whom he supposedly first shot with a rifle, then stabbed in the heart and finally scalped "in about five seconds," according to his own account. Others described the encounter as hand-to-hand combat, and misreported the chief’s name as Yellow Hand. Still others said that Cody merely lifted the chief’s scalp after he had died in battle. Whatever actually occurred, Cody characteristically had the event embroidered into a melodrama--Buffalo Bill's First Scalp for Custer--for the fall theater season” (PBS, 2001).

PBS. (2001). William F. Cody "Buffalo Bill". PBS. Retrieved June 10, 2014, from http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/a_c/buffalobill.htm