Buffalo Bill Cody is and always will be the symbol of the Golden West. As a scout and plainsman he helped build the West, and through his famous Wild West Shows he gave to the world epic pageant of a period in United States history that has never been equaled.

Young Billy, as his mother called him, was only eight years old when his family moved from Iowa to Kansas, but from then on, Bill Cody‘s life was one long, thrilling, breathtaking series of adventures. He was nine years old when he got his first job herding cattle for twenty-five dollars a month. Two years later, as the youngest member of a bull train, he earned a man's pay, killed his first buffalo and gained the respect of the older men, when he saved them from an attack by the Redskins. At fourteen, much against his mother’s wishes, he joined the Gold Rush to the Pike’s Peak county, and at fifteen he became the youngest rider on the Pony Express that carried the mail from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, a wild and hazardous ride through hostile Indian country.

Bill Cody was reared amid trouble—frontier fighting, Indian uprisings and massacres, hunting the wild buffalo, rounding up cattle and horses, and the bitter fight between the slavery and anti-slavery groups for the political possession of Kansas. Among the great men who knew, honored and loved Buffalo Bill, were Wild Bill Hickok, Generals Custer and Sheridan, Sitting Bull, Kit Carson, Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald and Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune. But it was Buntline, the dime novelist, who gave Colonel William F. Cody the idea for his Wild West shows, which brought to life the vivid and thrilling story of the real West, and which were received in Europe and America with wild enthusiasm.

Buffalo Bill was a colorful and tremendous personality, and he left his imprint over the entire land. He could fight "Injuns fair and square," but he couldn't fight duplicity and deceit. When in his later years he found himself in financial distress through his implicit trust and faith in people, checks and money poured in from all over the land, and children, hearing of their heroes troubles, sent pennies, nickels and dimes. Then the mighty hunter, rider of the plains, Indian scout and hero of many a battle, knew that although he might die a poor man, few men had been richer than he in enduring friendship and loyal admiration.

From the book