Before Paris and Nicole

According to Buffalo Bill, the scalp belonged to a Cheyenne chief named Yellow Hand, whom Cody caught early one morning leading a raid on the Fifth Cavalry. Yellow Hand challenged him to a duel. "We fired at each other simultaneously. My usual luck did not desert me, for his bullet missed me while mine struck him in the breast. He reeled and fell, but before he had fairly touched the ground I was upon him, knife in hand, and had driven the keen-edged weapon to the hilt in his heart. Jerking his warbonnet off, I scientifically scalped him in about five seconds."

This turn of events has been refuted by many people, from modern historians to eyewitnesses in Cody's own brigade. One account holds that Cody shot the Cheyenne's horse and a fellow cavalryman hit the Indian. A differing account has another scout -- Baptiste "Little Bat" Garnier -- killing the warrior in a ravine, and leading Cody to the body several days later because Buffalo Bill wanted a souvenir for his wife in North Platte, Neb. Lulu Cody got the scalp all right, and Buffalo Bill used it in shows for the rest of his life, persistently calling the warrior Yellow Hand, when in truth the man's name was Yellow Hair, and calling him a chief, when he was a mere lookout. "In fact Yellow Hair had not been a famous Indian," McMurtry writes, "he became famous with his death."

Indeed, the same was true of the Pony Express, which was made mythic posthumously as part of Buffalo Bill's show. And it was true of Cody's role as a hero of the West as well -- he called himself a colonel because he liked the title -- although of course he was alive and well at his center-stage apotheosis. "[I]t's easy to forget that the narrative of his life is one story and the narrative of his fame is another," McMurtry writes. Easy to forget, and essential to remember.

Then why the outsize celebrity? Annie Oakley was a good sharpshooter and Bill Cody was a good scout. Nobody ever disputed that. But by no means was either the best, even in these dubious areas of achievement. Others shot more clay pigeons than Annie. Many others slaughtered more Native Americans, to say nothing of buffalo, than Cody. But, had they been better at what they did, had that been the basis of their fame, they certainly wouldn't have been superstars.

More than she was for her shooting score, Oakley was endearing to audiences for her pout when she missed a tossed penny and for how she kicked the ground with her boot when she hit the mark. As for Buffalo Bill, had he been a real Indian fighter, out taming the frontier, he wouldn't have left the plains to perform in London, with a troupe of Native Americans, in front of Queen Victoria. "Buffalo Bill's Wild West," which traveled the world in various guises from the 1880s until Cody's death in 1917, was presented as historical reenactment -- Cody never called it a show -- but the only history it really reenacted, by interminable repetition, was the history it invented.

In truth, the West was not won but lost, irretrievably, and Cody and Oakley became legends by turning it into a myth, almost perfectly devoid of authenticity. McMurtry notes that "Buffalo Bill's Wild West" was popular, against all predictions, in cities such as San Francisco, because people living in such still-remote outposts "might prefer, for an hour or two, the fantasy rather than the reality." He seems mystified, though, by testimonials by the likes of Mark Twain, who asserted that "[d]own to the smallest detail the show is genuine ... wholly free from sham and insincerity." He wonders whether Twain was drunk when he wrote those words. Twain probably was -- a safe bet any day -- but McMurtry's perceptiveness unaccountably deserts him at this juncture: Like Buffalo Bill, Twain was a storyteller, and recognized the truth that legend makes of itself.

Indeed, "Buffalo Bill's Wild West" was a more appropriate moniker than Cody may have recognized. By the turn of the century, the Wild West was more or less Buffalo Bill's own possession, and, along with Annie Oakley, he was its chief asset.

Today we condemn celebrities for their shallowness. Their appearance is their talent. They're a cultural null set. But, if we are to believe that Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley are meaningful -- to acknowledge that we are a product of the stage-set Wild West they brought us -- we would do well to give the likes of Paris Hilton more credit. The emptiness of celebrity is the vessel of our collective legend. Superstardom is our heritage.

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