Robert E. Bonner

Robert E. Bonner grew up in Powell, Wyo., and graduated from the University of Wyoming. He is professor emeritus of history at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. His book, William F. Cody’s Wyoming Empire: The Buffalo Bill Nobody Knows, was published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2007.

The great Wild West showman, Buffalo Bill, failed as a capitalist leading large irrigation projects in northern Wyoming but succeeded in founding the state’s tourist industry and his namesake town, Cody—where the tourist dollar still sustains life.