STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

On the eve of America's 250th birthday, Buffalo Bill Cody rode into Ketchum — on canvas.

Acclaimed painter Thom Ross opened a solo exhibition at Hemmings Gallery, bringing with him not only a bold new body of work exploring Buffalo Bill's Wild West but two living ghosts of the frontier itself:

Ralph and Barb Melfi, Colorado's nationally recognized Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley reenactors, appeared in full character, complete with authentic period medals and enough frontier swagger to make the gallery walls feel like tent flaps.

Ross, who is widely recognized as one of the American West's most distinctive painters, spent five and a half months working seven days a week to produce the exhibition. The paintings capture the spectacle of Buffalo Bill's legendary touring show, including the bucking horses, the sharpshooters and the Deadwood stagecoach, while examining deeper questions about where historical reality ends and American mythology begins.

"For me, it's the transition between historical reality and what we now know as American mythology," Ross told those who sauntered into the gallery for an Artist Chat. "And it was Cody-- that was the guy who did it."

That transition is exactly what makes the exhibition more than a collection of handsome Western paintings. Each work is accompanied by descriptions of its historic origins and sometimes even photographs, and the back room features historic photographs, a signed picture bearing Buffalo Bill's actual signature and a stereoscope card viewer from the 1800s.

One painting depicts Carter the Cowboy Cyclist, a performer who rode a bicycle down a steep wooden ramp and launched himself 50 feet into the air—a nod to the worldwide bicycle craze of the 1890s. Another shows Buffalo Bill and his performers crowded into a gondola, hung beside a historic photograph of that very scene.

Ross paints in a small studio filled with historic artifacts behind his home in Lamy, a town of 210 people 18 miles south of Santa Fe, N.M. Born in San Francisco in 1952 and raised in Sausalito, he earned his fine arts degree from California State University-Chico.

He describes himself as "a storyteller who paints."

While the works took five and a half months to paint, they really took 50 years, he said: “Because it is a product of getting there from second grade."

Ross has spent those decades in the company of frontier figures who refuse to stay buried. His 2005 installation recreated Custer's Last Stand at the Little Bighorn site with life-sized cutout figures. In 2008, he placed 108 ten-foot-tall figures on Ocean Beach in San Francisco — on the exact spot where Cody and his troupe had been photographed in 1902.

Ross played on that beach as a boy, and discovering that the famous 1902 panoramic photograph of Cody on Ocean Beach had been photoshopped in 1902 with figures like Iron Tail appearing twice only deepened his fascination with how the West was staged, performed, and retold long before any of us ever saw it.

As the audience studied the paintings, Ralph Melfi's Buffalo Bill commanded the room  with the easy authority of a man who has studied Cody for years.

Speaking in character, he walked the audience through Cody's life — from an 11-year-old boy supporting his mother and four sisters after his father was stabbed to death during the bloody Kansas-Missouri war to the showman who cleared $1 million in a single season outside the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago after fair organizers told him the Wild West was "the past."

"We found 10 acres right in front of the main gate. And we set up the Wild West there. We were there for over six months."

He told of recruiting Sitting Bull from the Standing Rock Reservation in 1885, navigating around an obstructionist Indian agent by writing directly to General Sherman. Sitting Bull, he said, was "a heck of a negotiator" who demanded $50 a week, all royalties on his photograph and autograph, and a $125 signing bonus before he would put pen to paper.

He spoke of touring Europe for 11 of the show's 30 years, performing for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, traveling with 200 horses, 15 buffalo, 25 elk and the Deadwood stagecoach. And he recalled a horrendous 1902 train wreck that turned Annie Oakley's hair completely white.

"Everybody broke bread together," he said. "Men, women, I don't care what race you were. Everybody was part of the Wild West and part of our community. Everybody had dignity and everybody had opportunity to be who they were."

Barb Melfi's Annie Oakley stepped forward next, sporting authentic reproduction medals including a Queen Victoria medal, and told the story of an impoverished girl who could outshoot anyone she met. She won a shooting contest against Frank Butler — and then won his heart. They married and traveled the world with the Wild West show.

The German Kaiser Wilhelm, impressed by her shooting, stuck a cigarette in his mouth and told her to shoot it out. "He kind of looked around, like, was this a good idea?" Melfi said as Annie. "But I said, fine, stand right there. And I shot the cigarette."

Cody, Ross noted, was a man ahead of his time in more ways than one. "If a woman can ride a horse, shoot a gun, throw a rope, she's going to get paid the same as a man, he said. And that's exactly what he did."

Ross sees Buffalo Bill as the godfather of the Western — the man who transformed 20 years of frontier warfare into a spectacle that eventually gave birth to Western movies, television shows, and an entire genre that gets its own Academy Award category. No Northern, Eastern or Southern genre exists. Only the Western. And it started with Cody.

But Ross is after something larger than nostalgia. His paintings investigate the space where fact and fiction blur, where real people become "the person of a thousand faces," as he put it.

Certain figures — Jesus, Cody, Sitting Bull, Davy Crockett — maintain themselves above the waterline of history while others come and go.

He spoke of Melville's "Moby Dick" and how the idea of metaphor blew his mind as a young man. He referenced "Saving Private Ryan" and the moment Tom Hanks calls a bridge in Northern France the Alamo, referring not to the building in Texas but to the meaning of the Alamo--the idea of a last stand.

"After more than fifty years of painting, Thom Ross has developed a visual language that is instantly recognizable and immediately engaging," said gallery owner Edward Hemmings. "But it's the depth of storytelling, the ideas he unearths beneath the surface, that stay with you."

The exhibition runs through July 31 at Hemmings Gallery, 340 Walnut Ave., Ketchum.