The William F. Cody Archive: Documenting the life and times of Buffalo Bill

They Went Back and Lied.

Said Buffalo Bill to an American who saw him recently in London:

"Before I got into the show business, as you must have suspected, I conducted—that's the word now—a great many parties of noble young Englishmen all through the Black Hills, the Yellowstone country, the Little Missouri and Little Big Horn countries. Well, they were mostly quiet, good natured fellows, that kept me shooting to get skins, antlers and such like for them, and I pride myself on keepin' them out o' trouble with Injuns and grizzlies and such. I find these quiet chaps have come home and figured as heroes of every kind of scrimmage; every skin was the natural focus of a stack of lies, and every horn is hung with a dime novel of the most sensational kind. And I'm expected to back 'em all up and add more gory particulars. It's rough on an honest frontierman, but I do it." "What, sustain wholesale lies?" "Wal, this way," said Bill with a faint blush, "it's mostly a young gal with glowing eyes, who's been lied to, that asks me, and I ain't got it in me to take her vision away from her, and then," he added in a dreamy way, "it's all goin' to help the show." —Dakota Bell.