I remember my mother speaking about the Twenties when she was a young girl that in that time the Bufallo bill shows were still a reality...after all the show was in Brussels some years before WWI...
And Buffalo Bill was still a legend overhere in Belgium as in other countries of Europe...being in a performance for Queen Victoria...and for the first time a British queen greated the American flag...
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/buffalo-bills-wild-west-show-opens
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_West_shows
And it was all with real Indians and scouts and cowboys only a mere seventeen years after Custer's battle...
And about Cody (Buffalo Bill)
http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/a_c/buffalobill.htm

And some footage of more than 100 years old:




http://nationalcowboymuseum.org/explore/buffalo-bill-man-myth-media/
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/buffalo-bills-wild-west-show-opens
http://codyarchive.org/life/wfc.chronology.html


And some critics:


http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/sitting-bull-buffalo-bill-and-the-circus-of-lies-a7207541.html



And the reality according to History Channel...




There are a lot of episodes worth looking at in that series, but I haven't them seen yet...

Tomorrow about Bill's trip to Germany and the encounter with Karl May the German ficiton writer, who was never in the US, but still a favourite of my young years...
And some more comments on the real Cody...

Kind regards, Paul.

It was interesting that Queen Victoria attended a performance. Sometimes actors of other shows had been asked to perform at Windsor Palace.

My father-in-law saw Cody in Glasgow when his 'The Drama of Civilisation' (!) show played there for 4 months in 1891-2. There's even a statue of him on the site of the showground where his troop, including Annie Oakley, performed.





During his stay Cody donated some artefacts to the city, one of which was the Lakota Ghost Dance shirt, taken, it is said, from a dead warrior after the Battle of Wounded Knee. The shirt was displayed in Kelvingrove Museum from then until its repatriation in 1999.