Daily Inspiration Quote by Buffalo Bill

There is a quiet audacity in the way Buffalo Bill slides past moral drama and into the tone of a field report. “Took it for granted” is the whole trick: it compresses slavery from a contested human system into background weather, something you pack for, not something you debate. Coming from a celebrity who later sold the frontier back to the public as romance and spectacle, the line reads like an accidental tell. It’s not a proclamation of belief so much as a snapshot of what felt normal, even to “Free State men” who supposedly stood on the anti-slavery side.

The context matters: border-state Missouri sat in the anxious seam between “free” and “slave,” a place where politics were enforced as much by intimidation as by ballots. In that atmosphere, assuming Missouri was a slave state isn’t ignorance; it’s a recognition of power on the ground. The subtext is that principle yields to geography. You can carry Free State identity like a badge and still move through a landscape where slavery is treated as default infrastructure.

Bill’s small parenthetical, “myself among them,” tightens the confession. He’s placing his own younger self inside the herd, implicating celebrity memory in the larger American habit of laundering complicity through nostalgia. The intent feels less like justification than like calibration: this is how the frontier actually worked, not as later mythmakers (including him) would stage it, but as a world where the moral argument was often pre-decided by which side had the guns, the courts, and the everyday assumptions.