San Antonio College Library

Attempts to discern the truths behind the legends built up around his career.

Cody describes his Wild West Show in England, sharing performances for British nobility and royalty, press coverage, and his role as an ambassador of American culture.

"William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody was the most famous American of his age. He claimed to have worked for the Pony Express when only a boy and to have scouted for General George Custer. But what was his real story? And how did a frontiersman become a worldwide celebrity? In this prize-winning biography, acclaimed author Louis S. Warren explains not only how Cody exaggerated his real experience as an army scout and buffalo hunter, but also how that experience...

This film presents a portrait of the man who made the American West into the American story. For most Americans in the mid-1800s, the Wild West existed only in dime novels, but a young man from Kansas who had roamed the prairies in the war with the Plains Indians came to embody the picaresque frontier hero. As the frontier was rapidly disappearing, he realized he could market his life as entertainment, and millions around the world would pay for a...

What we know of Buffalo Bill Cody (1846-1917) is more myth than man. Yet the stage persona that took audiences by storm was based on the very real encounters of William F. Cody with the American West. This autobiography, infused with the drama of dime novels and stage melodramas that would transform the author into an American icon, recounts a boy's move to the Kansas territory, where his father hoped to homestead, and his subsequent life on the frontier,...

The great Native American warriors and their resistance to the United States government in the war against the Plains Indians is a well known chapter in the story of the American West. In the aftermath of the great resistance, as the Indian nations recovered from war, many figures loomed heroic yet their stories are mostly unknown. Dewey Beard, a Lakota who witnessed the Battle of Little Bighorn and survived the Wounded Knee Massacre, led a remarkable...