I thought I was benefiting the Indians as well as the government, by taking them all over the United States, and giving them a correct idea of the customs, life, etc., of the pale faces, so that when they returned to their people they could make known all they had seen.

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.