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Historical person

Buffalo Bill

Buffalo Bill, born William Frederick Cody, was an American scout, hunter and showman whose career became one of the most influential popular representations of the nineteenth-century frontier. He worked as a military scout and acquired the nickname “Buffalo Bill” through hunting bison for railroad crews.

From the 1880s Cody toured the United States and Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, combining staged battles, riding displays and marksmanship with appearances by performers including Annie Oakley and, for a time, Sitting Bull. The show helped create enduring myths of the American West.

Hourly History’s Buffalo Bill follows William F. Cody from frontier work and army scouting to the creation of the Wild West show that made him an international celebrity. Annie Oakley shows how Cody’s organisation turned Oakley’s shooting skill into one of the spectacle’s best-known acts, while Sitting Bull examines the extraordinary decision to employ the former Lakota resistance leader in the same arena of staged frontier memory. The Wild West places Cody’s show within the larger transformation of western conquest into popular entertainment. In fiction, John Jakes’s Homeland uses Cody and his touring spectacle as part of the public culture encountered by the Crown family, while John Boyne’s The Congress of Rough Riders plays more self-consciously with the myths that Buffalo Bill helped create and export.

Series

Historical novels and book series featuring Buffalo Bill (2 series)

House of Winslow in Order

by Gilbert Morris 40 books 4.4(8,071)

The House of Winslow is a forty-volume family saga tracing descendants of an English religious dissenter from the Mayflower era to the Second World War. Across three centuries, the Winslows take part in colonial settlement, revolution, western expansion, industrial growth, overseas missions, modern entertainment and global war. Each…

All books in this series

The Crown Family Saga in Order

by John Jakes 2 books 4.3(12,154)

The Crown Family Saga follows a German-American family in Chicago as immigration, industrial wealth and new forms of entertainment transform the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Beginning with young Pauli Kroner’s arrival from Berlin, the novels explore the household of brewery magnate Joe Crown…

All books in this series

Standalone books

Standalone books featuring Buffalo Bill (1 book)

Non Fiction

Non Fiction featuring Buffalo Bill (4 books)

Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.