Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley fondly recalled in McMurtry’s ‘Colonel’

Few famous Americans have been more misunderstood than William Frederick Cody, the plainsman-turned-showman who was indisputably the nation’s first superstar.

The so-called “Last of the Great Scouts” died nearly 90 years ago, but he is always with us, as the novelist Larry McMurtry persuasively argues in “The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley and the Beginnings of Superstardom in America.”

There never was anyone quite like Buffalo Bill, or Annie Oakley for that matter. The Colonel (it was a honorary title) and Little Missie (as Cody called her) set the standard for superstardom – that most American of institutions. Significant innovations in transportation and communication made that possible. They were household names. No one, McMurtry believes, has ever rivaled them.

Barnum admired Cody. Mark Twain did, too. Queen Victoria came out of mourning to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Even the pope went to see the show.

For many Americans, well into the century just finished, Buffalo Bill was the American West. His West was our West. His Wild West – he never called it a show; to Cody it was not a show, not a circus, not fake – was a dramatization of something that was real to him, or had been real and was no longer.

There probably are Americans who think of Cody as a despotic, racist ravager of the plains – an Antichrist to the “Dances With Wolves” West we now cherish. But anyone familiar with his life knows that Indians, including Sitting Bull, liked Cody. The old Sioux holy man (who joined the Wild West for a year) was especially fond of Annie Oakley, too.

Oakley was hard as nails. She shot a cigarette out of Kaiser Wilhelm’s mouth on a dare, drank only lemonade (it was free to members of the Wild West) and was cheap, as the poor often are. She lived a long life.

Her shooting exhibitions were the stuff of legend. But then so is much of our American West.

In the tradition of Buffalo Bill, McMurtry never lets mere facts get in the way. But his affectionate and thoughtful meditation on Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley, and the beginnings of superstardom, is a pleasure to read, and he is right about the big stuff. They don’t make them like that anymore.