Before Paris and Nicole

Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley aren't just relics of the Wild West, argues "Lonesome Dove" author Larry McMurtry -- they're America's original celebrities.

By Jonathon Keats

Jun 16, 2005 | At the end of the 19th century, Buffalo Bill Cody was arguably the most famous man in the United States, because he looked sharp while riding a horse. And Annie Oakley was arguably the most famous woman, because she looked comely while firing a gun. Commonplace as such superficiality may be -- characteristic of celebrities from Ronald Reagan to Paris Hilton -- the popularity of Cody and Oakley is hard to fathom in our megaplexed, multichannel, celebrity-saturated society. Not only were they, as Larry McMurtry notes in "The Colonel and Little Missie," our first superstars. Adjusted for ego inflation and the explosion of media bandwidth, they were also, and will likely remain, our foremost.

Exactly who Cody and Oakley were, though, becomes less clear with each attempted biography. The greater the scrutiny, the less certain their history. Every detail is questionable. With his novelist's eye and footing in the West, McMurtry is positioned to deliver as good a book on the pair as we're likely to get. He has succeeded for the most part, by telling us all that isn't known about them, that we might more fully appreciate the extraordinary story of their fame.

Annie Oakley isn't quite as much of a mystery as Buffalo Bill. Having apparently led a less eventful life, there are fewer events concerning her that may be apocryphal. Still, we can't be certain even of her real name: While we know that she changed it to Oakley -- after a respectable neighborhood in Cincinnati -- nobody is quite sure whether she was born Phoebe Ann Moses or Phoebe Ann Mozee. As for the year of her birth, it seems to have been 1860, though for most of her life she insisted on 1866. What nobody doubts is the desperate poverty of her childhood in Darke County, Ohio. McMurtry puts it best when he writes, "Charles Dickens had nothing on Annie Oakley."

Somehow she figured out how to shoot. One story claims that, as a young girl, she picked up her father's shotgun and hit a squirrel between the eyes. Another story makes the creature a bird, and holds that the recoil broke her nose. Either way, the animal probably became supper, and by the time she turned 15 she was bringing in game full time for a local grocer.

Or not quite full time: Like any good shot, she also entered skeet competitions, as ubiquitous in 19th century rural America as pickup basketball games are in Chicago or Detroit or New York today. That's where she met her future husband, the marksman Frank Butler. We don't know for sure whether she beat him at their first meeting by two clay pigeons or one. We do know that he became her manager, and, within a few years, she was an international superstar.

Buffalo Bill became famous first, though, and provided the stage upon which Oakley's legend was made. He had a 14-year head start. William Frederick Cody was born in Iowa in 1846, and, while not as bad as Oakley's, his childhood in the bloody Kansas territory would also have given Dickens a run for his money. ("In these parts," McMurtry notes, "the Civil War lasted something like twenty years, rather than four.") Then, in the same spontaneous, inevitable way that Annie got her gun, Buffalo Bill landed in the saddle. His first job, at age 11, was delivering messages for the Western freighting firm that would shortly found the Pony Express.

That did not make him, as legend has it, a part of the Pony Express, let alone its star rider. The mount he was assigned was a mule, and the extent of his run -- from freight yard to telegraph office -- was all of three miles. McMurtry believes that, by the time the Pony Express came along, 14-year-old Cody had advanced enough to become its youngest messenger, but the best proof McMurtry can muster is only that it makes a good story. (All the supporting evidence from Cody's day, as McMurtry ably demonstrates, is not the least bit plausible, and the documentary evidence is spottier than Buffalo Bill's arithmetic.) None of which would make much difference -- since nobody has ever doubted Cody's skill as a rider -- except for the fact that he pretended to have been a Pony Express messenger, for more than 30 years, as the centerpiece of his performance in "Buffalo Bill's Wild West."

In his world-renowned entertainment -- which seems to have been a cross between a vaudeville act and a military parade -- he also pretended to have done a bit of Indian killing. In particular, he was fond of showing how he'd taken "the first scalp for Custer" while he was employed as a scout by the Army. If he did so, it was in 1876, shortly after the massacre at the Little Big Horn had left Gen. George Armstrong Custer dead alongside 250 of his men.

Next Page: Annie's pout was more endearing than her shooting

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