Buckwalter began making travelogues for railway companies documenting the scenes of the West, where he experimented and made improvements to high speed camera shutter designs. Many of these early films were featured in Hale's Tours of the World, an early amusement ride that took place inside a replica train car. In 1900, Buckwalter started a collaboration with the director and producer William Selig, a filmmaker in Chicago and became the Western agent for Selig Polyscope Company selling and distributing Selig projectors and films to theaters in the region. By 1902 Buckwalter founded a studio called "Buckwalter Films" and began directing and producing silent films shorts beginning with "The Girls in the Overalls", a story of seven sisters who run a family ranch after the death of their parents, in one of the earliest western films in America. The Royal Photographic Society awarded "Panorama of the Royal Gorge" and "Panorama of Ute Pass" top prize at an exhibit in 1903. Several of Buckwalter's documentary films were exhibited at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. In 1905, Buckwalter was invited to film and document President Theodore Roosevelt's hunting trip in western Colorado. In 1910 Buckwalter Films became part of General Film Company.