Larry McMurtry’s signature style looks a lot like carelessness. Everything – “Lonesome Dove” included – seems to have been written with his left hand. In his recent memoir, the improbably titled “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen,” Mr. McMurtry explains that he is worried about the death of oral storytelling. His writing is an attempt to preserve the rhythms of oral storytelling in print. But Mr. McMurtry is no Luddite. “The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and the Beginnings of Superstardom in America” (Simon & Schuster, 234 pages, $26) is an attempt to talk about Madonna and the 19th century in the same breath.

In part, this is regionalist boosterism on Mr. McMurtry’s part. It bothers Mr. McMurtry that “it is really impossible to get people to look at the West critically – they just refuse.” When “Buffalo Bill” Cody becomes an impresario of “postmodern” dimensions, the corniness of everything that his Wild West represents becomes academically interesting and therefore hip.

Bill Cody was a Great Plains adventurer who made a trip to New York at the right time. He became a cowboy – they were called “teamsters” at the time – when he was 11, and soon became the youngest rider in the Pony Express. Mr. McMurtry points out that the Pony Express was basically a publicity stunt, an attempt by a group of successful freight haulers to win more of the government’s trust and business, and indeed every fact we have about Cody’s life has the dimensions of a publicity stunt. One advantage of Mr. McMurtry’s personable style is that he can abandon historiography to make frank assertions about whether a given story sounds true or not.

But even Larry McMurtry cannot really determine which facts about Cody’s life are true. He remembers that Ned Rorem “remarks somewhere that all life is really ‘Rashomon.'” At the end of the book, we know about as much about Buffalo Bill Cody as we know about King Arthur. And that, to Mr. McMurtry, is what superstardom is all about.

For years, Cody shuttled between East Coast stages and the Plains, where he served as a paramilitary scout. After Custer’s death, Cody went west and was able to produce a “first scalp for Custer,” which he subsequently displayed to promote his plays. Later, the relevant battle became a central skit in his Wild West show, a kind of narrative rodeo that made Cody one of the most famous men in the world.

Mr. McMurtry sees Cody not as an act, but as a visionary. “Probably Cody’s central insight as an impresario,” he writes, “was that it was always a good idea to link patriotism to performance.” And when he took his show to England, he made its theme the history of civilization. “He always wanted more narrative, even though it would be narrative in its broadest, crudest form.”

So why did Queen Victoria – “Grandmother England” to the Indians Cody employed – attend these “crude” entertainments? Mr. McMurtry notes that wealthy people were always comfortable with Cody, even in the early years, when he guided safaris on the Great Plains. Perhaps it was his dress – fringed buckskin suits, snow-white mounts – which flattered their own dude-ranch pretensions. “He was a soft touch, a partygoer and a party giver who was never reluctant to pick up the tab,” writes Mr. McMurtry.

Mr. McMurtry’s own style is cajoling in the same way. You buy into his handbill hype even as you see through it. He piles on overly persuasive adjectives: “the hustle and chatter and noise of the white people’s cities.” This isn’t kitsch; it’s showmanship. He repeats his favorite anecdotes almost verbatim, as if to show how naturally the writing flows from him.

Entire paragraphs serve no purpose but to advertise forthcoming paragraphs: “It was around this time that Cody met the man who was to help make his fortune, not once but many times: the actor and manager Nate Salsbury. It would be a few years, however, before the two men formally joined forces.” This is Mr. McMurtry’s way: narrative contour, suspense, and foreshadowing pushing and pulling, taking all the time in the world. There is a reason “Lonesome Dove” is more than 900 pages long.

What Mr. McMurtry claims not to understand about Buffalo Bill Cody’s reception is how many claimed to enjoy the show’s realism. From General Sherman to Mark Twain, celebrity experts lauded the besequined performers’ authenticity. Puzzled by Twain’s credulity, Mr. McMurtry wonders if he could have been drunk.

But the real secret, in plain sight, of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was probably not narrative. It was the performers themselves, and the props. After all, Cody had real buffalo charging around. It’s the special effects, stupid. In this regard, too, Cody was a visionary.