This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories, and we tell stories about everything

here on this show.

And history and the American West, well, they're two of our favorite subjects, and they collide with this story.

Buffalo Bill Cody died in 1917, and throughout the 1950s, Americans saw heroic versions of the Cody's story on the silver screen.

So was Buffalo Bill a real-life hero?

Or was he a fake?

You're about to find out.

Here to tell the story is Roger McGrath.

McGrath is the author of gunfighters, highwaymen, and vigilantes.

A U.S. Marine and former history professor at UCLA,

McGrath has appeared on numerous History Channel documentaries,

and he is a regular contributor for us here at Our American Stories.

Here's McGrath.

Most people today have an image only of the old white-haired showman, Buffalo Bill Cody.

They know little or nothing about his early life, his life on the American frontier.

That shaped him and made him legendary, long before he created Buffalo Bill's Wild West show.

At age 11, Bill Cody went to work full-time for a freighting company after his father had died.

Young Cody was riding for the Pony Express by age 14, and at age 17, he listed in the U.S. Army,

serving in the Civil War for more than two years. He then served as a scout for the Army in the Indian Wars on the High Plains.

He took a leave of absence to Hunt Buffalo to feed the construction crews of the Kansas Pacific Railroad.

His wildly successful hunts not only supplied the crews with tons of meat,

...