Long-Hair Horse Opera

THE LIVES AND LEGENDS OF BUFFALO BILL (514 pp.)--Don Russell--University of Oklahoma ($5.95).

Before Gunsmoke came along to stun the child mind, there must have been a bad moment in the youth of every American now in the cardiac bracket when he realized that Buffalo Bill was a bit of a fraud. He simply could not have done all the heroic things that he claimed to have done. Today's child will probably be surprised to learn that Buffalo Bill was not a phony--or just a legend like Paul Bunyan --but a real man, and an intelligent and able one at that.

The University of Oklahoma Press, which is dedicated to documentary studies of the horse and cow and the culture of the men who rode the one or punched the other from Abilene to the Embarcadero, has now done its share to restore the picture of William F. Cody. Even the reader who knows one thing less about the horse than the sad English lady, who knew only two,* will concede that Author Don Russell, an encyclopedist by profession, has contrived a creditable and perhaps definitive biography from a mass of flapdoodle and dime-novel apocrypha. The fact that the prose is pure wampum should not bother anyone.

Hangover in the Army. The dude reader first notes a certain irony in the circumstance that the solemn and formidable apparatus of U.S. scholarship has been turned loose on a man who was a great liar in the Mark Twain style and was always surprised if some pedant tried to ride herd on his maverick facts. Stratfordians have unearthed a great many variants-- on the spelling of Shakespeare's name; Buffalo Bill's biographer rustles up 14: Coady, Cody, McCoady, etc., and Buffalo Bill probably could not have cared less. He might have resented the fact that Author Russell discovered that his celebrated long hair was filled with lice when he was a boy and even more deeply resented the revelation that later, when B. B. was in show biz, he wore a wig that came off during the introduction of his Wild West show.

As a frontier boy in ante-bellum Kansas, Cody seems to have gone to five schools, to none for very long, fell into the company of badmen called the Jay-hawkers, stole horses, developed a taste for "tanglefoot," and woke up with a hangover in the Union Army. Scholar Russell is well dug in behind about 500 footnotes and a bibliography of 259 items, but perhaps the reader should look for the odd bits: the unforgettable character who used his slain enemy's ear as a watch fob; the horse thief who won Bill's admiration by running 18 miles barefoot through snow and prickly pear; the U.S. Cavalry troop with which Bill rode and whose main commissary item was a five-gallon demijohn of whisky and Old Tom Cat gin; the Indian called Young Man Afraid of His Horses. There are the fascinating photographs and lithos, including one of Buffalo Bill with 10 correspondents covering the Indian wars--the war correspondents wearing their own scalps and, in the tradition of their calling, looking far more bellicose than Combatant Cody.

Boffola Bill. But about those buffalo. Buffalo Bill killed 4,280 of them on contract at $500 a month for the Union Pacific Eastern Division Railroad. He used a Springfield recoil rifle, and sometimes at the end of a hard day's work his shoulder was so swole up he could hardly get his buckskin shirt off. As an Indian fighter, he got on well with the aborigines except when orders called for him to shoot them. Once, with a slight head wound, he spent 40 hours in the saddle. This kind of thing won him the Medal of Honor (which Congress took back when it found out that he was a civilian).

Sooner or later, the U.S. nudges its heroes into the entertainment industry, and it was by this natural process that B. B. graduated from putting on buffalo battues for Eastern businessmen or helping the visiting Grand Duke Alexis of Russia to shoot a bison, into running a sort of circus called Buffalo Bill's Wild West. The cast included a platoon of P.W.s of the Indian wars, genuine buffalo, innumerable horses, a prairie fire (with steam instead of hazardous pyrotechnics), Annie Oakley shooting the tailfins off illuminated pigeons, a real stagecoach robbery, and as a grand climax, a re-enactment of Custer's Last Stand. The boffola show snowed the U.S. as well as Europe and its then-crowned heads but not Buffalo Bill, who kept his sense of humor to the end; he called his last horse McKinley, and the presidential eponym followed him to his grave with reversed stirrups.

It is only 43 years ago that Bill was buried at the top of Lookout Mountain in a solid granite crypt, cement-lined as protection against possible body snatchers from rival resorts, which also claimed the hero--Cody, Wyo., North Platte or Omaha, Neb. While 3,000 cars ground their gears up to the graveside, the only horse present seems to have been McKinley. Through all the razzmatazz and unimaginably distant hoopla, the legend is still genuine of a real man--scout or showman, but perhaps best left with e. e. cummings' wistful memory rather than the scholars':

Jesus

he was a handsome man

and what I want to know is

how do you like your blueeyed boy

Mister Death

* I know two things about the horse And one of them is rather coarse. * The Encyclopaedia Britannica lists five. The Dictionary of National Biography cites a source for 4,000.

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