AI Summary
5 min readThe first Wild West story was written by John Smith, but the mythology that William “Buffalo Bill” Cody would later commandeer was forged earlier, in the 1820s, when James Fenimore Cooper modeled Hawkeye on Daniel Boone, and Boone himself was quoted saying he was “an instrument sent by God to settle the wilderness.” By the time Cody was born in 1846, Americans already knew what a frontiersman looked like. Cody spent the rest of his life making sure they saw him in that role—first by living it, then by staging it for the world.
The Frontier Before Cody
Westward expansion was not merely a post-Revolutionary afterthought. According to historian Paul Andrew Hutton, it was a cause of the Revolution itself. The British Proclamation of 1763 reserved land west of the Appalachians as Indian territory, partly to control the fur trade—the oil of the eighteenth century. Land speculators like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin resented this restriction, and pioneers like Daniel Boone ignored it outright, pushing through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky. “It was a flood that just swept across the mountains,” Hutton says.
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What you'll learn
- 1 Frontier Legends | Buffalo Bill Cody
- 2 (00:36) **Introduction: The Death of a Legend** - President Theodore Roosevelt calls Buffalo Bill Cody "an American of Americans" upon his death in 1917, and the nation mourns a figure who came to epitomize the rugged frontiersman.
- 3 (02:50) **Roots of Westward Expansion: The Proclamation of 1763** - Hutton explains how the British ban on westward settlement after the French and Indian War became a direct cause of the American Revolution.
- 4 (04:20) **Land Speculators and Surveyors** - George Washington and others gambled on western lands despite the Proclamation, using agents to stake claims and buying up soldier land bounties at pennies on the dollar.
- 5 (05:44) **Routes West: The Cumberland Gap and Daniel Boone** - Boone pioneered the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap, and 300,000 people followed him into Kentucky, making Boonesboro the "outpost of liberty" during the Revolution.
- 6 (07:15) **Manifest Destiny and Its Cruel Irony** - Hutton explains the ideology that God or nature ordained American control of the continent, with total disregard for Native and Hispanic peoples already living there.
- 7 (09:25) **The Birth of Frontier Mythology** - Hutton traces the frontier hero archetype from John Smith's Pocahontas story through James Fenimore Cooper's *Last of the Mohicans*, which made Daniel Boone the model for Hawkeye.
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Show Notes
Few people are more closely associated with the Western Frontier than William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Born in 1846, Cody came of age during the era of Westward expansion. As a young man, he began scouting for the 5th Cavalry and eventually built a reputation as a skilled frontiersman. He later took his exploits to the stage and then created Buffalo Bill’s Wild West arena show, which carried the image of the American West around the globe.
In this episode, Lindsay is joined by Dr. Paul Andrew Hutton, author of the New York Times bestseller The Undiscovered Country: Triumph, Tragedy and the Shaping of the American West, and Tate Chair of Western History in the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, to discuss Buffalo Bill’s central role in shaping the mythology of the Wild West.
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