‘Your Fathers the Ghosts’
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in Scotland

Tom F. Cunningham

Category: Biography
Pub Date: October 2007
ISBN: 1 84502 117 7
Extent: 320 pp.
Price: £18.99
Format: Hardback, 234 x 156 mm
Plate/Illustrations: 16 pp



Most people are conscious, at least in outline, of Buffalo Bill Cody’s legendary exploits as an army scout and Indian fighter during the formative years of his career.

However, the no less astonishing story of how the frontiersman-turned-showman later attended a Glasgow Cup tie between Rangers and Queen's Park, provoked an uproar in Edinburgh's Court of Session, set a Dundee goods yard ablaze, nearly caused an Arbroath hotelier to lose his licence, threw the Aberdeenshire fishing industry into chaos, induced a power cut in Perth and was next presented with a medal by a house painter from Dumfries must now be told.

The time has come to inform the wider public that Annie ‘Get Your Gun’ Oakley learned to ride a bike in Glasgow.

And let us not forget that time in 1904 when the sudden appearance of a feathered band of Sioux nearly frightened the life out of the good people of Buchanhaven.

Buffalo Bill’s extraordinary capacity to generate myths was not limited to the American side of the Atlantic or even to his own lifetime. This definitive account of Buffalo Bill’s Scottish adventures bravely undertakes to sift out the history from a generous and enduring legacy of fiction.

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