Ladies and Gentlemen

Ladies and Gentlemen shows Buffalo Bill Cody in one of his most important roles: not just as a performer, but as the showman who presented the Wild West to the world. Cody built the production around spectacle, storytelling, and his own larger-than-life persona, introducing audiences to cowboys, sharpshooters, Native performers, cavalry displays, and reenactments of frontier events. Ross catches him here in the act of addressing the crowd, megaphone raised, with the arena and audience behind him. It is a wonderfully simple image of the man who did as much as anyone to turn the American West into an international stage show.