In 1886, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show played to more than one million people in New York City. It was one of the most elaborate shows on earth. There were cowboys and Indians, sharp shooters, including the famous Annie Oakley, hundreds of horses, buffalo, elk and donkeys, with more than 200 cast members, all moving about in a sweeping western landscape of mountains and plains. Soon after the show's stunning success in New York, it would go on to dazzle crowds in London, Paris, Rome and Barcelona, cementing the legend of the Wild West in the minds of people around the globe. Behind the extravaganza was one man-a plainsman-turned-international celebrity and frontier hero, whose meteoric rise to fame was made possible only by his genius and his hucksterism. He was William Cody, better known to the world as Buffalo Bill. AMERICAN EXPERIENCE presents Buffalo Bill, a portrait of the man who made the American West into the American story. For most Americans in the mid-1800s, the Wild West existed only in dime novels and story papers. But for William Cody, it was very real. Raised in pre-Civil War Kansas, in 1868 Cody was recruited by the Army to serve as a scout in another war that was fast heating up-the war with the Plains Indians. Scouts were crucial to the effort, and Cody was good. He roamed the plains, first tracking down deserters and eventually taking part in direct combat with the natives. In addition to his military prowess, Cody was tall, handsome, brashly confident and highly charismatic. In short, he was the embodiment of how easterners pictured a frontier hero struggling to bring civilization to the West and subdue Indian savagery. And at a time when the frontier was rapidly disappearing, Cody realized that he didn't have to just live his life-he could market it as entertainment. Millions around the world would pay for just a taste of the Wild West, and never was that more evident than at the 1893 Colombian Exposition in Chicago.