Buffalo Bill

The NYT runs a good review of Buffalo Bill's America, by Louis S. Warren. In general, the reviewer praises the book, but also chides the author for pontificating observations that could've come straight from the multi-cultural department of any public university.

It's hard to believe that the clumsy Virginia reel Cody's cowboys and cowgirls performed on horseback every afternoon was really meant to remind audiences of "the superiority of white people in the making of domestic space, in settling," as the author contends. It would certainly have startled Annie Oakley, Cody's "Little Sure Shot," to learn that her "image as a virtuous white girl, or a girl-bride, provided a regenerative female context for the show's exhibition of lethal weapons, her femininity a stunningly ironic paradox for a display of gun proficiency." Nor is it clear why the presence of Cossacks and gauchos, vaqueros and Arabs and African-Americans among Cody's Rough Riders "reinforced white supremacy as the culmination of world history, and thereby affirmed the subordination of immigrant ghettos, as well as the segregation of races, Jim Crow laws and the tidal wave of lynchings which swept the nation in the 1890's."