Life & Mortality Quote by Wild Bill Hickok

The supposed gunfighter-legend stripping himself of legend is the real twist here. Hickok, a man whose name was already being minted into frontier mythology, uses the plainest language to pry himself out of that story: "no great man". It reads less like humility for humility's sake and more like an attempt to take control of the only narrative that still matters to him when the usual one (fame, violence, bravado) can no longer protect him.

The line is built on a tension between performance and surrender. "My dearly beloved" opens like a sermon or a vow, but what follows refuses grandeur. The sentence runs on, breathless, as if he's writing faster than fate. That haste is its own rhetoric: not polished, not quotable, just urgent. Even the frontier's celebrity machine can't smooth out the fear behind "if I am to die today."

The subtext is an inversion of the period's masculine ideal. Instead of the stoic hero facing death with swagger, Hickok frames himself as "lucky" - a word that quietly admits how much of his life has been chance, timing, and surviving one more day. He doesn't say, "remember me"; he says, in effect, don't mistake the reputation for the person. In a culture that rewarded men for being feared, he asks to be seen as someone capable of tenderness, dependency, and gratitude. The intent is intimate triage: if the bullet comes, let the last version of him be this one.