Whether John Wayne fighting the Indians or the Marlboro Man hawking tobacco, the cowboy has been a consummate symbol of American individualism and freedom worldwide. The legend was shaped by generations of penny novels, western movies and television shows (which contemporary cowboys have also watched). “Cowboy” conjures up a rugged white male on horseback, tanned by wind and work, drinking, smoking and fighting when he comes to town. Unfortunately this imagery—and the slick boots, dance music and dude ranches that commercialize it—overlook the diversity and problems of past and present. “Cowboys” in the past included African Americans and Latinos, as well as white loners, in work that was often brutal, ill-rewarded and led not to ownership, but to continual labor and loneliness in a world especially hard on women and wives. As rail and trucks have replaced cattle drives and agro-business has favored fodderfattened beef, being a cowboy remains an underpaid job and a demanding lifestyle, requiring organization, mechanical skills, endurance and knowledge of nature (horses, cows, weather). This way of life, even while changing, is celebrated in rodeos, the arts and museums. Meanwhile, students of the West allow us to understand how complicated cowboy life actually has been. The dilemmas of late twentieth-century cowboys have been poignantly chronicled in Jane Kramer’s (1977) The Last Cowboy and novelist Larry McMurtry’s In a Narrow Grave (1968).