When you were a kid, did you ever pretend to be a cowboy or a cowgirl?

Did you play the part of an infamous outlaw?

If you did, chances are these fantasies were inspired by a lot of fiction.

The Wild West, as we think of it today, was very different.

In the 1950s, a whole generation fell in love with the Hollywood version of Buffalo Bill Cody. But these films weren't biopics.

When it comes to movies, the more entertaining, right? And the box office responds to that. And

there's no better way to do that than to embellish a few things. The real William Cody was born in 1846.

When he was just eight, his father was brutally attacked.

And as he watched his father dying in bed, he declared that he wished to be all grown

up so that he could kill the men who attacked his father.

Most historians today believe that Cody was a good storyteller.

But what we do know is that as an adult during the Civil War, he was a Union Scout.

And then in 1866, he married Louisa Frederiki.

And in 1867, he earned the nickname Buffalo Bill while hunting Buffalo for the Kansas Pacific Railroad,

where he bragged that he killed 48 of the animals in just 30 minutes.

Cody's antics eventually caught the attention of General Philip Sheridan, who wanted a positive

public relations spin for the U.S. Army. He joined Cody on Buffalo Hunts, and the media

just couldn't get enough. Pulp fiction magazines were already in the business of romanticizing

stories about life in the West, and it didn't take long before a writer convinced Cody

to take his stories on tour. Within a year, Cody created his Scouts of the Prairie Show. It was

such a success that he ended at traveling the country with it for the better part of a decade.

By 1883, though, the show had

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