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William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody (1846–1917) began his rise to fame at the age of twenty-three when he met a pulp novelist, Ned Buntline, who based his novels loosely on Cody’s adventures as a scout, Pony Express rider, Civil War soldier, and bison hunter in the West. Those novels, and many others like them, gave rise to a national mania for the rough, rollicking, boisterous western frontier. In 1872 Buntline produced a theatrical show, The Scouts of the Prairie, with Cody himself as the star. Then in 1883, Cody opened his own show, called Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a type of living history that formed the foundation of the world’s image of the Old West.