Home > Westward Expansion > The Cowboy Life

When most people think of the American West, they think of cowboys. Historian Walter P. Webb described this heroic image in The Great Plains:

There is something romantic about him. He lives on horseback as do the Bedouins [members of nomadic desert tribes in Africa]; he fights on horseback, as did the knights of chivalry; he goes armed with a strange new weapon which he uses ambidextrously and precisely; he swears like a trooper, drinks like a fish, wears clothes like an actor, and fights like a devil. He is...