When I began research for this exhibit, I really had only a basic notion of who Buffalo Bill was. I was mildly surprised to find the vast amount of literature, popular culture ephemera, and imagery associated with this extremely famous person of the late 19th and early 20th century. After all, when a guy can merely display on a poster a cameo image of himself on the side of a stampeding buffalo with the caption "I Am Coming" without any other words to convey that he and his wild west show were coming to town, that's gotta be fame.

Buffalo Bill was born William F. Cody, but he earned the sobriquet, Buffalo Bill, by killing buffalo as a meat source for the railroad. As his military exploits, acting career, dime novel persona, and wild west show popularity coalesced, Cody became a Buffalo Bill far removed from the earlier meat-producing hunter.

One observer wrote, "Buffalo Bill the character was first a fiction created to symbolize the ‘wild west.' William Cody the man became so enraptured with this persona that it began to dominate his life and his work." He continues saying that Cody had a relentless desire to become Buffalo Bill; that he was almost always ‘on stage' as Buffalo Bill to promote his show business enterprise; and that "In his day, he was a national hero, a role model, and a living legend. Slipping out of character or dashing the public's expectations of him might have led to the ruin of his empire, or so it seems Cody believed. Buffalo Bill represented the quintessential American through his embodiment of frontier values and all the raw independence, freedom, and self-sufficiency included in wild west virtues."

What would it have been like to occupy Buffalo Bill's mind and life for just 15 minutes as do characters in the movie Being John Malkovich. In that movie an unsuccessful puppeteer takes a job in an office and soon discovers a hidden doorway that serves as a portal to the mind of John Malkovich, a real-life character actor. After 15 minutes of being the actor, the puppeteer is thrown out to the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. One can only imagine the sensations and thoughts one would have upon entering the mind of Cody and being Buffalo Bill for awhile. Although I wonder where one would be expelled after the experience.

In an era before radio and television, Cody's fame was indisputable and world-wide. His prolonged farewell tours (1910-1913) are reminiscent of Cher's seemingly endless farewell tours of the early 21st century. I guess it's hard to say goodbye. In many and various ways we are all trapped by our personal histories and public personas.

Perhaps Nobel prize winner for literature, Saul Bellow (1915-2005), author of novels that investigated isolation, spiritual dissociation, and the possibilities of human awakening, summed it up best for all of us when he wrote, "I am simply a human being, more or less."

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