Buffalo Bill Bids You Good Bye, Farewell Salute Wild West, c.1910s

This vintage poster-style cover for “Buffalo Bill Bids You Good Bye – The Farewell Salute, Magazine and Official Review” appears to date from the early 20th century, when Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show was making its final tours. Dominating the composition is a full-length portrait of Buffalo Bill in his embroidered frontier jacket, hat in hand and rifle resting at his side, set against a camp of tipis and mounted figures in feathered headdresses. Bold red and blue lettering announces the title across the top, while slanted display type at left promises “A Life Story and Book of Brave Deeds of the Wild West and Far East.” A large circular vignette at the bottom frames side-by-side bust portraits labeled “Major G. W. Lillie” and “Col. W. F. Cody,” underscoring the star power behind the show. The color palette of ochres, dusty greens, sky blues, and brick reds, along with the soft tonal modeling, suggests multi-stone chromolithographic printing, a common technique for circus and Wild West advertising of this era. Along the lower margin, small type credits “I. M. Southern & Co., Publishers N.Y. & C’n,” and notes the original price of 10¢. Visually, the design blends portraiture with staged frontier spectacle, using heroic scale, patriotic color accents, and romanticized Indigenous imagery to evoke adventure and nostalgia. The composition leads the eye from the commanding central figure to the encampment and riders in the background, then down to the inset portraits, creating a layered narrative of personality, place, and performance. As a piece of popular print culture, this image reflects how traveling Wild West entertainments promoted themselves at the twilight of their popularity, framing the show as both living history and grand farewell. It offers insight into early 20th-century mass advertising, the myth-making around the American West, and the ways touring spectacles invited audiences to experience distant cultures and eras through highly theatrical, often stereotyped, imagery. Why this piece matters is in how it captures the end of the great traveling Wild West shows and the visual language they used to say goodbye to their public. It reveals the intersection of entertainment, self-mythologizing, and print technology, illustrating how posters and magazine covers functioned as both souvenirs and powerful tools of cultural storytelling.