Time & Perspective Quote by Buffalo Bill

Buffalo Bill opens by casting himself as the one man who can narrate the West without borrowing anybody else’s binoculars. The sentence is a credential flex, but it’s also a stage direction: he’s not just telling you about “the country,” he’s telling you why you should buy his version of it. By stacking “good and bad” beside “gunmen” and “inspired prophets of the future,” he corrals moral chaos into a tidy menagerie, the way his Wild West show turned lived violence and dispossession into spectacle you could applaud from a safe seat.

The phrase “camp companions” is doing heavy image-work. It shrinks the frontier into an intimate, masculine social world where danger becomes camaraderie and where history sounds like something traded around a fire, not contested in courts, treaties, and graves. That warmth softens the sharper edges of his actual context: Cody’s fame was built in the moment the frontier was being declared “closed,” when railroads, federal policy, and industrial capital were converting myth into nostalgia. He sells proximity as truth precisely because modernity is making that proximity impossible.

Then comes the knockout: “as few men now living.” It’s not only a boast; it’s a scarcity pitch. You’re being invited to consume authenticity before it disappears, with Cody positioned as both witness and curator. The subtext is that the West is already a story, and the storyteller who got there “first” gets to decide what counts as the real thing - and which realities get edited out.