For more than thirty years, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody entertained audiences across the United States and Europe with his Wild West show. Scores of books have been written about Cody’s fabled career as a showman, but his involvement in the film industry—following the dissolution of his traveling show—is less well known. In Buffalo Bill on the Silver Screen, Sandra K. Sagala chronicles the fascinating story of Cody’s venture into filmmaking during the early cinema period. In 1894 Thomas Edison invited Cody to bring some of the Wild West performers to the inventor’s kinetoscope studio. From then on, as Sagala reveals, Cody was frequently in the camera’s eye, eager to participate in the newest and most popular phenomenon of the era: the motion picture. In 1910, promoter Pliny Craft produced The Life of Buffalo Bill, a film in which Cody played his own persona. After his Wild West show disbanded, Cody fully embraced the film business, seeing the technology as a way to recoup his financial losses and as a new vehicle for preserving America’s history and his own legacy for future generations. Because he had participated as a scout in some of the battles and skirmishes between the U.S. Army and Plains Indians, Cody wanted to make a film that captured these historical events. Unfortunately for Cody, The Indian Wars (1913) was not a financial success, and only three minutes of footage have survived. Long after his death, Cody’s legacy lives on through the many movies that have featured his character. Sagala provides a useful appendix listing all of these films, as well as those for which Cody himself took an active role as director, producer, or actor. Published on the eve of the centennial anniversary of The Indian Wars, this engaging book offers readers new insights into the legendary figure’s life and career and explores his lasting image in film.

Buffalo Bill Cody was bigger than life. He was also braver, handsomer, and kinder—in short, just about perfect, as any reader of Prentiss Ingraham’s dime novels could tell you. Along with his nearly 600 novels and plays, Ingraham (1843–1904), Confederate colonel and mercenary, penned a biography of his hero. The Buffalo Bill Cody who emerges from this book is not so very different from the paragon in Ingraham’s novels, but as Cody’s close companion, Ingraham had the inside story on this iconic figure of the American West. Add to that the dime novel–writer’s bravura style, and Ingraham’s Buffalo Bill Cody: A Man of the West becomes an irresistible work of Americana, in many ways an apt portrait of its larger-than-life subject. And because both men were firsthand witnesses to historic moments—the struggle between slavers and abolitionists, the Civil War, the building of the railroads, the Indian Wars, the golden age of circuses—the biography offers a close-up perspective of life on the American frontier. Published here with an introduction and notes by Cody aficionado Sandra K. Sagala, who transcribed and edited the text of the biography from the original that was serialized in 1895 by Duluth Press, and illustrated with line drawings by one of Ingraham’s contemporaries, Buffalo Bill Cody: A Man of the West is at once a unique view of an outsize figure of the Wild West, an original document of American history, and a performance as entertaining as any the self-styled cowboy and showman Buffalo Bill Cody ever staged.

“What we want to do is give our women even more liberty than they have. Let them do any kind of work that they see fit, and if they do it as well as men, give them the same pay.”—William F. Cody, 1899 With rough-riding cowboys, sure shots, and fantastic reenactments of battles and train robberies, Buffalo Bill Cody brought the myth of the Old West to life for audiences all over the world—and some of the most popular cowboys in his Wild West Show were young ladies. Cody surrounded himself with strong, intelligent, talented, beautiful women—and this revealing portrait tells the stories of his life and of his relationships with many of the trick riders, sharpshooters, and other women associated with the show for which he was famous.

In this never-before-told history of Buffalo Bill and the Mormons, Brent M. Rogers presents the intersections in the epic histories of William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody and the Latter-day Saints from 1846 through 1917. In Cody’s autobiography he claimed to have been a member of the U.S. Army wagon train that was burned by the Saints during the Utah War of 1857–58. Less than twenty years later he began his stage career and gained notoriety by performing anti-Mormon dramas. By early 1900 he actively recruited Latter-day Saints to help build infrastructure and encourage growth in the region surrounding his town of Cody, Wyoming. In Buffalo Bill and the Mormons Rogers unravels this history and the fascinating trajectory that took America’s most famous celebrity from foe to friend of the Latter-day Saints. In doing so, the book demonstrates how the evolving relationship between Cody and the Latter-day Saints can help readers better understand the political and cultural perceptions of Mormons and the American West.

The story of how William F. Cody, army scout, Indian fighter, stagecoach driver and buffalo hunter, became an acting sensation with his Wild West show, playing to millions of people in America and Europe for over 30 years. This account highlights the tours of Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Includes details of the many towns and villages visited by Buffalo Bill and how the residents reacted to this incredible spectacular. This entertaining account of Buffalo Bill's tours of Britain is richly illustrated, with many previously unpublished photographs, cartoons, and posters.

A visionary new approach to the Americas during the age of colonization, made by engaging with the aural aspects of supposedly “silent” images Colonial depictions of the North and South American landscape and its indigenous inhabitants fundamentally transformed the European imagination—but how did those images reach Europe, and how did they make their impact? In Sound, Image, Silence, noted art historian Michael Gaudio provides a groundbreaking examination of the colonial Americas by exploring the special role that aural imagination played in visible representations of the New World. Considering a diverse body of images that cover four hundred years of Atlantic history, Sound, Image, Silence addresses an important need within art history: to give hearing its due as a sense that can inform our understanding of images. Gaudio locates the noise of the pagan dance, the discord of battle, the din of revivalist religion, and the sublime sounds of nature in the Americas, such as lightning, thunder, and the waterfall. He invites readers to listen to visual media that seem deceptively couched in silence, offering bold new ideas on how art historians can engage with sound in inherently “mute” media. Sound, Image, Silence includes readings of Brazilian landscapes by the Dutch painter Frans Post, a London portrait of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison’s early Kinetoscope film Sioux Ghost Dance, and the work of Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of American landscape painting. It masterfully fuses a diversity of work across vast social, cultural, and spatial distances, giving us both a new way of understanding sound in art and a powerful new vision of the New World.