For forty years, Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show dramatized the romantic days of the Old West in every part of the United States and Europe. "Children and grown-ups, plain people, lords and kings, thronged to watch whooping Indians race their ponies in pursuit of stagecoaches and covered wagons".

And now the d'Aulaire's have re-created Buffalo Bill and his beloved Western frontier in a biography which is as colorful as the career of Buffalo Bill himself.

Their story begins when Bill Cody was a little boy living in Kansas Territory, and follows him all through the years of his childhood — his friendship with the Kickapoo Indians, his first job in a wagon train heading west on the Oregon Trail. It traces his progress as a daring rider, buffalo hunter, Pony Express rider, Indian scout. It is a story of a vigorous and almost legendary figure and also a story of the vanishing plains.

Before they did this book, the d'Aulaire's drove and camped through all the country that Buffalo Bill knew and loved. Their pictures are as dramatic and as American as Buffalo Bill Cody.

From the dust jacket