The reasons why we believe he had this destructive influence are due to the fact that Buffalo Bill served as an example of the ideal of the American hero. He was someone to look up to as a model citizen. And yet he was known since very young as an “Indian Killer”, which was an image perpetuated primarily by Ned Buntline’s Buffalo Bill: King of the Bordermen. Besides, his persona was constructed from exaggeration and warping of facts, to the point where we today can’t know what the real Buffalo Bill was really like.
The Native characters in his stage shows were only there to be portrayed as violent savages and to display their mistreatment and genocide as entertainment. The popularity of his stories and shows and, again, the regarding of the character of Buffalo Bill as a hero and as someone to admire, perpetuated the idea of Native Americans as being lesser than the violent colonizers that took their land and their lives. Simultaneously, Cody and the crew of the shows were profiting from this parody of the destruction of so many cultures. Regardless of the small positive impact that they may have had on the actors’ lives, the reasoning behind it was to be able to have better publicity and to attempt to further “civilize” them, again perpetuating the idea of them as savages. Buffalo Bill was also famous for killing bulls, and such a large number of them that it becomes significant enough to impact Native lives, as he and other white Americans took away one of their sources of sustenance.
Not only this, but this Buffalo Bill persona was, above all, a character. It was built on Cody’s life and constructed with added heroics and altered stories that painted him as a hero, and this started to bleed into the many biographies written about him. Cody himself began this process of blurring the character with himself, thus making it so that the real man was and is remembered as a hero for a multitude of things he never actually did, and most likely hiding a lot of unsavory details. In fact, he sued his wife for attempted poisoning and tried to divorce her, and this event brought to light allegations about his repeated infidelity that at least temporarily tarnished his carefully built reputation. This certainly casts doubt on the idea of Cody being an advocate for women’s rights in any significant way, if this is how he behaved with his own wife.
In the end he was a man who profited from lies and created a public image that did not correspond with reality, and depended on the suffering of others to build up his own fame as a hero.
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