When Dr. Joy Kasson was a little girl and part of the first television generation, like most other U.S. children, she spent countless hours watching Westerns - Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger and playing cowboys and Indians with her brothers and friends. She also played beneath the bronze buffalo in Chicago's Garfield Park, admired museum wildlife dioramas and later, as part of the nation's burgeoning car culture, toured the Badlands, the Rockies, Yellowstone and the Great Salt Lake with her vacationing family.
"I recall having a cowgirl outfit and watching Gail Davis on television as Annie Oakley," Kasson wrote in the introduction to her new book "Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory and Popular History. "It seems to me that my friends and I imagined the West as unselfconsciously as the audiences did at Buffalo Bill's shows: Western adventure was a thrilling but safe form of entertainment, with a relatively uncomplicated story line and a predictable happy ending."
Buffalo Bill, the longhaired sharpshooter and impresario who died the year her father was born, "still rode through my grade-school curriculum on a spotless white horse surrounded by an unmistakable aura of heroism."
Kasson wrote the 273-page book, just published by Hill and Wang, to help satisfy an abiding scholarly curiosity about the way modern popular culture emerged at the turn of the 20th Century and "how our understanding of American history has been shaped by entertainment spectacles like Buffalo Bill's Wild West." She is Bowman and Gordon Gray Professor of American studies and English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Before radio, television and movies, William F. Cody was arguably the most famous American of his time, Kasson said. His show, which toured the United States, Canada and Europe, thrilled millions, including heads of state, and colorful posters promoting it were everywhere. Tall, handsome and an advertising genius, the former army scout brought together trick shooters such as Annie Oakley, Civil War soldiers, Mexicans, Arabs and such famous native Americans as Sitting Bull and Black Elk in a never-before-seen combination of history, action and melodrama - both fact and fiction.
Sitting Bull's dignity, intelligence and -- especially -- popularity with the American public, incidentally, helped prevent the show from going bankrupt in 1885.
Despite his detractors, Cody was the real thing -- an army veteran who won the Medal of Honor, a buffalo hunter and an actor but especially an entertainer -- who made and eventually lost a fortune, she said. He held the respect of Native Americans, founded the town of Cody, Wyo. and established a worldwide conception of what the American West was like that's lasted more than a century.
His show heavily influenced thousands of later movies and television shows, and the way he dressed, in Stetson hat, boots and fringed buckskins, can be seen today in every country and western bar, every rodeo and just about every state in the nation.
"During his lifetime, only Theodore Roosevelt was equally charismatic as an American action hero known to millions, and Roosevelt showed that he had learned much from Buffalo Bill. The Congress of Rough Riders of the World had been part of Buffalo Bill's Wild West for five years before Roosevelt stormed San Juan Hill; the future President rode to military and political power on the trail blazed by the consummate showman."
Kasson's book is heavily illustrated with photographs of posters promoting the Wild West, newspaper clippings and portraits of Cody, Native Americans and others. She drew information chiefly from collections at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, the Denver Public Library and Yale University, but also from many other sources.
"Buffalo Bill's Wild West helped to shape both the substance of an American national identity and the tools for its cultural dissemination, Kasson wrote. "...Before Theodore Roosevelt established that the virtues of the strenuous life should be the basis for national pride and political success, Buffalo Bill had brilliantly propounded the thesis that American identity was founded on the Western experience: triumphant conquest of wildness through virtue, skill and firepower.
At the same time, and equally important, the Wild West sanitized this narrative. In its fictionalized historical representation, Americans could savor the thrill of danger without risking its consequences, could believe that struggle and conflict inflicted no lasting wounds and could see for themselves that the enemy 'other' would rise from the dust, wave to the crowd and sell souvenir photographs at the end of the day."
The UNC-CH professor's book is intended to shed light on the origins of 20th Century popular culture and celebrity hero-worship and to raise intriguing questions about our understanding of the American past, she said.
Note: Kasson can be reached at 919-967-3532 (h) or 962-4064 (w). She will give Triangle area readings at McIntyre's Fine Books and Prints Aug. 12 at 11 a.m., at the Regulator Bookshop on Sept. 6 at 7 p.m. and at the Bull's Head Bookshop Sept. 19 at 3:30 p.m.
Contact: David Williamson, 962-8596.