“BUFFALO BILL”

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVII, Issue 21504, 17 November 1939, Page 2

“BUFFALO BILL”

THE TRUTH AND THE LEGEND It is a little difficult to see why the celebrated Buffalo Bill stories should have been forbidden in Italy as unsuitable for young Fascists, says the “Manchester Guardian." One would have thought rather that such a virile life would have been held up for their admiration. Not that Buffalo Bill entirely deserved his fame. He was outclassed by such adventurers as Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Frank North, and Wild Bill Hickok, who called Buffalo Bill “a long-haired son-of-a-gun.” His reputation was largely built up by three “Press agents,” Buntline, Burke, and Salsbury. Buntline saw that the staid Eastern States craved blood and thunder from the Wild West, and it was Buffalo Bill who supplied it. The first story Buntline wrote was read by Bill with amazement. But the tales caught on . Burke then came in, and from his fluent pen flowed a series of “Half-Dime Buffalo Bill Novels.’ Although containing many hair-raising exploits which never happened, thev eventually made Buffalo Bill a worldfamous figure. The facts of his life are simple. As

William Frederick Cody he was born in lowa, United States, in 1846, becoming in turn pony express driver, army scout, and Indian tracker. During the Sioux War of 1876 he slew in single combat the Cheyenne chief Yellow Hand. It was when killing buffalo (at the rate of 69 a day) as meat for railroad builders that he received his sobriquet of “Buffalo Bill.” It was these exploits which, with many additions, were woven by Burke into the famous thrillers and which later formed the basis of the Wild West

Show, produced by Salsbury’, with which Cody last century “conquered ’ Europe. His declining years were burdened with debts ahd disasters. He died in 1917 and is buried at the top of Look-Out Mountain. Colorado, in a tomb blasted by dynamite from thi solid rock.