Rodeolatry
LONG before Davy Crockett got his grip on the young idea this land was threatened by a generation of young Buffalo Bills, readers of fourpenny `books' which were the chief competitors of the Nelson Lee series. The Fenimore Cooper formula was found wanting in excitement, just as the Conan Doyle method needed to be jazzed up a bit—so Buffalo Bill and Lee prevailed over the Pathfinder and Sherlock Holmes. But Colonel Cody was, incredibly enough, a real person and here we have the latest (but assuredly not the last) in a long series of books attempting to disentangle the fiction from the fact. Weybright and Sell have done well by both the legend and (so far as it is known) the truth. No doubt Cody was a monstrous slaughterer of buffalo and even, now and then, of Indians but his biographers are forced, in the end, to treat him mainly as a theatrical figure who brought a new dimension into the world of circus by producing some- thing which was a cross between the traditional circus and the Western rodeo. They also manage to define what is was about Cody that put Baden-Powell and the Boy Scout movement in debt to him in a way that no serious youth organisation will ever be indebted to Davy Crockett. GERARD FAY
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