Daily Inspiration Quote by Buffalo Bill

Cholera doesn’t enter this line as tragedy; it enters as weather. “Broken out at the post” frames the outbreak like a routine disturbance on the frontier, the kind of bad luck a man notes between supply counts and guard shifts. Then the kicker: “five or six men were dying daily.” No names, no faces, no grief language. Just a grim metric.

That cool, ledger-like delivery is the tell. Buffalo Bill’s celebrity was built on turning the violent, chaotic West into a story the public could consume. Here, you can watch that reflex in miniature: catastrophe converted into reportable fact, horror made manageable through numbers. The intent isn’t to mourn; it’s to establish stakes and authenticity. He’s saying, implicitly: I was there, it was real, it was relentless.

The subtext is also about powerlessness. Cholera was one of the few forces on the frontier that didn’t care about skill with a rifle or mastery of terrain. It made soldiers and workers equally disposable. By describing it as something that “broke out,” Cody invokes the era’s sense of sudden, almost arbitrary calamity - disease as an enemy you can’t scout or negotiate with.

Context matters, too: military posts and camps were perfect incubators - crowded, unsanitary, dependent on contaminated water. For an American audience that later bought tickets to his Wild West show, that kind of sentence functioned as a credential, proving the West wasn’t just gunfights and gallops. It was also bureaucracy, boredom, and death tallied by the day.