l it ended in 1916. In one year alone, 1899, the show covered 11,000 miles in two hundred days, giving 341 performances in 132 cities. The show was enormously successful and profoundly powerful as a shaping force in the way America saw the west.The problem, of course, is that the show did more than entertainit also became a sort of travelling museum and the definitive word on a vital period of Americas past. What lessons, exactly, did the show teach and whose values did the Buffalo Bill show endorse? The program of the show, a website notes, presented itself as a source of knowledge, authority, and authenticity about the west. (http://xroads.virginia.edu) This mixing of fantasy with reality, of myth and history, belied the official sounding nature of the show and its program, not to mention the visual nature of the presentation, which must have seemed real. The blending of fact and fiction, not surprisingly, carried over to Cody himself, as many became confused with him and the character of Buffalo Bill. More important to history, though, the stereotype of the American Indian was reinforced, night after night, as Buffalo Bill and his cast of nearly 500 actors played out scene after scene where the Indian was nothing more than a mounted warrior destined to lose to the American individual, taming the frontier, as it were, in a justifiable conquest. While some historians have pointed out that the Indian cast members were paid good wages and generally treated well, the stereotype has prevailed of the savage Indian and the American individual. This, to put it mildly, has been damaging to the historical consciousness of America. These myths have continued to be played out, once again nightly, on television and in the movies. The myth of frontier values and raw independence has continued to this day. Buffalo Bill, sadly, was as influential as any other in defining the American frontier experience.If the commercialization of American...
