What a story that grand storyteller Augusta Stevenson has to tell!

Bill Cody first became a boy of the plains when he went with his father on a trading trip far out on the lonely Kansas prairie. Mr. Cody drove his wagon, packed full of blankets, cloth, cooking utensils and knives, miles beyond Fort Leavenworth, the last white settlement on the frontier. Only a few white travelers passed along that trail, on their way to California to seek gold. But there were many Kickapoo Indians, with valuable skins to trade for Mr. Cody's wares. Bill cared for the big oxen so well that his father was glad when an Indian chief gave him a fast little Indian pony for his own.

Bill nearly always had some sort of job. The Codys were a big family, and Bill, the oldest boy, had to go to work early. His mother worried because he didn't have a chance to go to school. She was afraid he wouldn't learn how to read and write even his own name! But not until Bill was eleven did the first school open out there. Before that Bill had made several trips with freight wagons to the Far West. He drove stray animals and acted as messenger boy in the long train. He loved the trips across the wide prairies where great herds of buffaloes grazed.

When he grew up he was going to be a trapper, like Kit Carson—a dangerous business, but the most wonderful life Bill could imagine. The trappers traveled every winter to the high mountains and cold lakes where they caught beaver and otter, and camped like Indians.

This boy of the plains planned an exciting life for himself—but as it turned out, it was even more exciting than he had dreamed. His boyhood self was full of adventure, and in time he became so well known as a hunter that the Missouri Pacific Railroad, when it was building its tracks west, hired him to supply meat for twelve hundred workers. In one year Bill was said to have killed four thousand buffaloes for them. No wonder the railroad men were soon calling him "Buffalo Bill"! When he became a rider for the famous Pony Express, the nickname stuck to him.

He thought people everywhere would want to see for themselves what the West was really like. So he organized his famous show. Each act was more thrilling than the one before, with Indians, cowboys, exhibitions of daring riding and straight shooting. Bill Cody was a great showman. Soon "Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show" was touring the United States and England, the greatest entertainment of the times. It was almost as exciting as his own boyhood on the plains!

Augusta Stevenson's books have from the first been among the best-loved volumes in the Childhood of Famous Americans Series. She has a rare gift of presenting the heroes and heroines of our great American heritage when they were in the formative years. Young readers will share breathlessly the adventures of Bill Cody, a brave boy who helped build America's West, a boy patient in the face of hardship, quick to learn from older people, friendly and likable. Buffalo Bill: Boy of the Plains will take its place with Miss Stevenson's Daniel Boone: Boy Hunter and Kit Carson: Boy Trapper as a grand story of the boyhood of one of America's most noted frontiersmen.

From the dust jacket