"Buffalo Bill" Cody

William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody was a famous showman who dramatized the colonization of the western U.S. He was a Pony Express rider and Union soldier before working as a scout for the U.S. Army in the country’s colonial wars against Native nations. In 1872, Cody made his stage debut in one of the first Wild West shows, a Chicago-based production. Cuban American photographer José María Mora took this photograph of him in 1875. Mora was famous for the elaborate backdrops in his studio photographs of Gilded Age entertainers. In this photograph, Mora’s studio set resembles a soaring mountain peak. Cody wears a fringed leather jacket and wields a rifle, asserting his image as a rough-and-tumble denizen of the West. In 1883, Cody founded Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, the elaborate, racialized vaudeville that achieved international fame.