Life and marvelous adventures of Wild Bill, the Scout

This 1887 biography chronicles the most notorious lawman and scout the American frontier ever produced. From the blood-soaked streets of Deadwood to his legendary gunfights, J. W. Buel presents Wild Bill Hickok as both flesh-and-blood frontiersman and emerging American myth. The prose is unapologetically breathless, romanticizing a world where a man's worth was measured in the speed of his draw and the steadiness of his nerve. Buel frames Hickok as a necessary force of frontier justice - a fighter who killed only in self-defense or in the line of duty, never for the thrill of it. The book captures the mythology America was already constructing around its violent westward expansion, the legend-making machinery that would eventually give us the entire Wild West iconography. It is both a historical document and a piece ofAmericana fantasy, the moment when frontier violence began its transformation into cultural mythology.