The Adventures of Buffalo Bill

Summary

A celluloid prairie-wind roars across 1917: the camera chases a teenage courier whose gallop beats the telegraph, dust blooming like sulphur behind him. From this mercury-burst of motion, the film pivots to slaughter—massive herds atomized under Bill’s repeater, the horizon a hemorrhage of brown hides and red dust. Next, the same sharpshooter dons blue wool, guiding generals through sagebrush labyrinths where Lakota ghosts already hover. Re-enacted battles detonate in CinemaScope before it had a name: Summit Springs becomes a churn of cerulean sky and ochre grass, Warbonnet a diptych of bayonet glints and eagle-feather silhouettes. In a gulch striped with noon shadows, Cody locks blades with Yellow Hand—steel against obsidian, sinew against myth—then splinters the chief’s sternum with a percussion that rattles the tripod. Five thousand living bodies—troopers, Brule, Arapaho, Cheyenne—swarm the frame, a kinetic fresco financed by the War Department and blessed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Finally, the legend retires to a mahogany study, walls heavy with taxidermy; yet even there, the camera stalks him like a creditor, catching the twitch in his left eye as he pores over maps of hunting grounds he once sold to railroad barons.

Synopsis

Buffalo Bill is shown in the early days of his thrilling career as a pony express rider in the pioneer west; later as hunter of buffaloes and then as the chief Indian scout for the United States army. Appearing with Buffalo Bill in the picturization of the Indian battles which follow are Lieutenant-General Nelson A. Miles, Major-General Jesse M. Lee, and Brigadier-General Frank D. Baldwin and Marion P. Maus and other heroic figures of the pioneer days. Historically accurate versions of the Battle of Summit Springs, the Battle of Warbonnet, Col. Cody's knife duel with the Sioux Chief Yellow Hand and his fight with Chief Tall Bull, in which the Indians were killed are shown. Five thousand United States troops and Indians participate in the battles. Buffalo Bill's later life, giving intimate glimpses of him at home and, of his great hunting expeditions, including that on which he guided the Prince of Monaco after big game in the Rockies, conclude this picture.