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Rating: 
Summary: An Authentic Voice
Review: Autobiographies are at the same time the best and the worst sources of life stories. You get the authentic voice, but that voice tells you only what it wants you to believe. Both these characteristics are particularly strong here because Cody's voice is such a distinctive one and because of his status as a supreme self-promoter. So this book will not give you the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but it will give you a real insight into the mind of a man who in many ways epitomizes the culture of the historic American West. Some of it may shock you; Cody describes how he shot a mule who had annoyed him by running away, and boasts of how he scalped his fallen enemies. Hardly the stuff of popular myth. If you want to know how the west was really won, then reading this book (some of it 'between the lines') will tell you much.
Rating: 
Summary: You can almost smell the buffalo cooking in the camp.
Review: The Wild West was an even more heroic epoch than is commonly understood. While Buffalo Bill became a self-promoter, basic facts are clear: he was a superior plains guide and scout and Indian fighter. He really was the master hunter of buffalo from horseback. He was a Pony Express rider, with all that entailed. He was friends with Wild Bill, Custer, and other notables. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery on the battlefield (though sadly it was removed many years later because of a bureaucratic technicality of how he had been employed by the Army, not because of any change in the evaluation of the heroic deeds.A most fascinating book. It gives one a different perspective to hear it from a participant.END
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