Daily Inspiration Quote by Buffalo Bill

Speed is the bait here, but Buffalo Bill is really selling strain. He opens with a brag that sounds like raw frontier math - ten days, two hundred miles a day - a performance of numbers meant to land like proof. Then the turn: "But we soon began stretching our riders". That single verb quietly changes the scene from plucky innovation to an early, candid admission of what powered the legend: not just horses and relay stations, but human bodies pushed past comfort as an operating principle.

As a celebrity-architect of his own myth, Cody knows exactly how to make hardship feel like progress. The Pony Express was already a publicity machine in its own time, a short-lived service that lasted barely 18 months yet became a permanent symbol of American urgency. His phrasing recasts that brief experiment as an escalating race, where "making better time" is treated like an uncomplicated good. No mention of injury, exhaustion, turnover, or the fact that the telegraph soon made the entire enterprise obsolete. Efficiency becomes morality; acceleration becomes destiny.

The subtext is the frontier ethos in miniature: if the benchmark is impressive, the next step is to exceed it by "stretching" people. It's not quite a confession, not quite a boast - it's the boast that only works because it flirts with confession. Cody's larger career did the same thing: turn labor, violence, and logistics into spectacle. In this line, the West isn't a place. It's a stopwatch.