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William F. Cody’s Wyoming Empire: The Buffalo Bill Nobody Knows

by Robert E. Bonner, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2007, $32.95.

Scores of books have been written about William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, but Robert E. Bonner, a history professor at Carleton College, takes a look at a side of the frontiersman few historians have dared to analyze: Buffalo Bill, land developer.

The town of Cody and much of north- western Wyoming has long been recognized as Cody Country. Cody is home to the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, and tourists often hang their hats at the lodges the scout established: Cody’s Irma Hotel and Pahaska Teepee Resort, near Yellowstone National Park’s east entrance.

Bonner, who grew up in the Big Horn Basin, reconstructs how Cody, as president of the Shoshone Irrigation Company, tried to develop the area as promoter, financier, perhaps even huckster and charlatan, or at least a bully who often left his associates at wit’s end. “Thoroughly established as a celebrity before he went into the development business, Buffalo Bill naturally used the one to further the other,” he writes. “He brought Cody to the nation first through the ingenious device of painting scenes of the upper Shoshone River country on the backdrops of the Wild West show’s stage sets. Advertising brochures for the Cody Canal were available at every stop, and the Colonel took to speaking of his love for the Big Horn Basin in…interviews across the country.”

Critics of Cody will find plenty of ammunition here. Never a great businessman, he was out of his league in the world of finance. But this isn’t a ruthless attack of the legend. Bonner notes: “He was a complex man, and his life should be approached with respect for that complexity.”

 

Originally published in the April 2008 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here