Listen | How Buffalo Bill shaped the West – and the Western

Although he’s now larger than life, Buffalo Bill was, in fact, a real person who hunted buffalo, scouted for the U.S. Army and developed a wildly popular traveling show of sharpshooters, cowboys and other “rough riders.” It was a beloved pageant that catapulted him into global fame. In 1908, Buffalo Bill’s show arrived in Seattle.  

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Cascade PBS’s resident historian Knute Berger explored all of this in a recent episode of the Mossback’s Northwest video series, but there’s much more left to discuss.  

In this episode of Mossback, co-host Stephen Hegg joins Berger to more deeply understand who Buffalo Bill really was; unpack the genesis of his traveling show and what it meant to audiences everywhere; dig up firsthand accounts of his Seattle shows as well as that of copycat “Cheyenne Bill”; and interrogate the colonialist narrative that Bill and his supporters perpetuated and that still exists today.