Better Living Through Chemistry (and a little Historical Fiction)

The Cavalcade of America was an old radio show sponsored by the DuPont Chemical Company between 1936 and 1953. I listened to the Buffalo Bill episode on the Internet Archive, and it was unashamed of its sponsorship.

The life of William Frederick Cody was presented through a collection of vignettes, featuring dramatized conversations between Cody and others at different points of his life. These included moving west with his wife (an apparently fragile and dependent woman) fighting Indians, and the early stages of planning his Wild West show. Obviously, no records of these conversations exist so the authors Cavalcade essentially wrote Historical Fiction. I like Historical Fiction as a rule, for capturing the spirit of an era and creating an interest in events of the past, but keeping this in mind Cavalcade isn't history at all; it's drama.

The most startling of the short stories was one where Cody was talking to someone about the "Battle" of Wounded Knee. (I always thought that was a massacre.) Cody said how it was so unfortunate what happened there, and if only he could have been there he could have stopped the violence. "The Indians would have listened to me!" The whole section was just so weird and seemed so ungrounded.

Much of the information given in this Cavalcade installment was true. He was a scout for the army, a Pony Express Rider, an Indian fighter and a world famous showman. Clearly the heroism of Indian killing and forcing them to be a part of a wild west show has been rejected over time. The main problem is that this is all conveyed through dramatized fiction that shouldn't be mistaken for history.