It was because of my great interest in the West, and my belief that its development would be assisted by the interest I could awaken in others, that I decided to bring the West to the East through the medium of the Wild West Show.

He claimed to have had many jobs including as a trapper bullwhacker "Fifty-Niner" in Colorado a Pony Express rider in 1860 wagonmaster stagecoach driver and a hotel manager but historians have had difficulty documenting them and he may have fabricated some for publicity. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was enormously successful in Europe making Buffalo Bill an international celebrity and an American icon. A 1976 feature film Buffalo Bill and the Indians or Sitting Bull's History Lesson by Robert Altman gives deeply critical depiction of Cody and his Wild West show with Cody portrayed as a lying buffoon who cannot separate fiction from reality.

One of the most colorful figures of the American Old West Buffalo Bill became famous for the shows he organized with cowboy themes which he toured in Great Britain and Europe as well as the United States. He was born in the Iowa Territory (now the U. state of Iowa) in Le Claire but lived several years in Canada before his family moved to the Kansas Territory.