The setting sun is painting the mountains orange and purple and we can hear coyotes in the palo verde and creosote bush. I am following wrangler Terry McDonald out over the trails at a lope, looking out through the ears of a gray mare who keeps picking up the pace. McDonald pulls his horse to a walk and looks out over the range. “This is one of my favorite rides, I never get sick of this,” he says, “And first-timers are always blown away.” I ask McDonald what those first-timers say when he brings them out here. “They say, ‘You remind me of ‘Yellowstone,’” he says, laughing. We are on the White Stallion guest ranch in the Sonoran Desert, closer to Mexico than Montana, but geography appears to defy the current cultural obsession with cowboys.
It’s not just the increasing number of people who come riding with McDonald who are fixated on cowboys. That fascination is clear in “Yellowstone” and its myriad, ongoing spinoffs, but it’s also showing up in other places. It’s one of the world’s most recognizable supermodels riding cutting horses during New York Fashion Week, where Prada barn jackets that cost nearly $5,000 are on the runway. It’s Beyoncé’s collaboration with Levi’s jeans. Even Chappell Roan has a country song (arguably two, if you count “Pink Pony Club”). The specter of the cattleman permeates music, fashion and art, but it also shows up in tourism, politics — where cowboy can be a code word for anti-government action, an identity taken up by wannabe, “small guy” politicians, or a brand of foreign diplomacy — and in the economy. Land prices have spiked in rural places where ranches are getting snapped up and so have the cost of cowboy goods. “This hat used to be $100 and I went into Boot Barn recently and it was twice as much,” a wrangler named Hondo told me, touching the faded felt on his head.
The images of the good guy, the rugged individual, the outlaw, the man connected to nature and its values, have ebbed and flowed in the cultural collective.
I’m not immune to the fascination. Lately, Spotify says my most frequently played genre is coastal cowgirl and the preteen horse girl inside me has been rearing her head again. I feel it all around me. I live in a rural place, and the rodeo happens a quarter mile from my house, so every summer Wednesday I can watch a rendering of Western Americana circle the arena. I love the galloping barrel racers with their hair blown back and the coordinated muscle of the team roping, but I wince at grandstanding and the nostalgic jingoism that feels like a utopian remembrance of simpler times. It feels complicated, but it sticks around.
Like most Americans, I’m not a cowboy. According to the USDA, just over 1 percent of Americans work on farms and ranches, and the number who do the kind of work that could be classified as cowboying is even slimmer. Despite that gap, the image of a specific kind of Western life has long been woven into American identity. I wanted to know why it was flaring particularly hard now, so I chased it to a dude ranch — the original example of city dudes cosplaying as wranglers — to try and untangle America’s cowboy obsession.
History, performance and myth
Some of my best childhood memories are being on horseback. I rode competitively through high school. But when I showed up at the White Stallion, where graceful cactus gardens peek between adobe buildings and rocky peaks hang in the distance, it was clear that I wasn’t the only one who was idealizing time on horses in wide open spaces.
We act out our fantasies on vacation, and here at the ranch that feels very true. We go on trail rides, dodging saguaros on rocky trails, but we also enact an approximation of real ranch work. We cut cows and team rope, playing cowboy. At the end of the day I am wiggle-legged, muscles I haven’t used in a while screaming, keyed up from galloping down the rail of the arena, ponytail blown back, feeling like one of those rodeo queens. We eat big meals together in a mess hall. I have dinner with people from California, New York and Ireland, some who come here every year. When I ask them why, they say they love the landscape, the horses, the way they feel like themselves outside, removed from the rush of the modern world.
That feeling has a long, traceable history. The ways cowboys are perceived in broader culture have always been a complicated twist between storytelling and truth, especially as a diminishing number of people actually do the work on the ground. For instance, rodeos were conceived in the early 1800s by Mexican vaqueros as a way to blow off steam with some friendly competition and show off their skills before people like Buffalo Bill Cody made them spectacles in the 1880s. Dude ranching started around the same time, as cattle ranching in the U.S. grew and spread. Ranching has never been an easy business, and ranchers like the Eatons, who are considered the first dude ranchers, started hosting guests from the East who wanted to live the life of a cowboy, sleeping under the stars and chasing cows, as a way to supplement their income. “If they were going to be hosting they had to find a way to pay for it, so they started charging,” Bryce Albright, the executive director of the Dude Ranchers’ Association, told me. “And that business model created in the 1800s had been resilient enough to withstand time.”
Part of the cowboy fantasy is the emotional side: adventure, simplicity, tangible work.
It’s been resilient in part because, somehow, the abiding image of the cowboy can perennially morph to meet the moment. “Though the experience hasn’t changed tremendously, how we talk about it changes culturally,” Russell True, the owner of the White Stallion, who has been in the dude ranching business since he was five, says.
True, who was working in the corral saddling horses when I showed up, said that when his parents bought the ranch in 1965 they were talking about John Wayne and Westerns. Those popular stories mythologized an American West where the hardworking good guys prevailed.
Cowboys are rugged, close to the land, hardworking and independent-minded — remember, Wyoming was the first state to allow women to vote. But cowboys are often also stand-ins for rebels who don’t play by the rules, and who hold their personal freedom above a greater good. They’re often portrayed as rugged white men, an image that doesn’t actually match the reality that a substantial percentage of cowboys have always been people of color — some historians estimate that up to 25 percent are Black. Even the tooled leatherwork and turquoise we associate with Western fashion is a nod to the Hispanic and Indigenous history behind the culture.
The images of the good guy, the rugged individual, the outlaw, the man connected to nature and its values, have ebbed and flowed. Versions rose up in the late ’70s and ’80s with movies like “Urban Cowboy,” which brought country music and honky-tonking into the Hollywood mainstream, just as presidential candidate Ronald Reagan (in a cowboy hat, of course) was aligning himself with the sagebrush rebels, a group of militant anti-government Western landowners.
By the ’90s, cowboys came to stand in for the anti-yuppie real people working with their hands. It was exemplified by the movie “City Slickers,” which depicted middle-aged men lost to midlife finding meaning again with a few trying times and some sensibility unhurriedly dispersed through the wise drawls of a cowboy named Curly. True says the movie sent dude ranch bookings through the roof. “You couldn’t buy the impact of ‘City Slickers,’” he says.
Chasing open space
As Americans, we’ve always gone chasing open places west of wherever we started when the rest of our lives feel too constrained. That’s been true since colonists first came to the country and kept moving toward the Pacific looking for their own land, and it’s held true even after the Industrial Revolution had driven the majority of Americans to live in cities and work indoors. That freedom-seeking cowboy on the horizon has always been this complicated image that rises when people feel disenfranchised or hemmed in. It’s Americana at its most distilled, for better or worse.
Right now many feel cut off from abundance and personal growth. We’re inside more and less ingrained in our communities than we used to be. Those wide open spaces that symbolize freedom and American independence are threatened by climate change and development. Rejecting all of that is part of the dream of the dude ranch. When I feel stuck inside, hunched over my computer for the nth day in a row, I threaten to run away on horseback. Being a cowboy seems like the perfect antidote to a mixed-up modern world, even though I know that the image in my head is oversimplified and overlooking most of the reality of a cowboy’s life.
I get swept up by the appeal of living from pastureland, but then I remember that these cowboy ideas can be problematic and even dangerous if we don’t hold them up in the light of their complicated history.
The cowboy can show up in dark ways. You can see it in the “Yellowstone” themes of personal freedom, vigilante justice and protectionism, which are starting to show up outside of the TV screen. It’s the unrealistic idea that we can survive alone on the plains, which comes from a broken kind of nostalgia. One of the original pioneering values is helping your neighbors. Not even cowboys can go at it completely alone.
The roots of this rugged individualism come from a broken kind of nostalgia.
The collective image of ranch life threatens its reality. Desire for Western real estate has choked out working ranches and dude ranches. Land has been taken out of agricultural production and made into subdivisions with HOAs, where home values are skyrocketing so high that people who actually work the land can’t afford to live where they work. The parcel across the road from the White Stallion, which was once a ranch, is now a development with at least 2,400 home sites.
One wrangler I talked to said she just wanted a job in ranching, plain and simple. She’d worked a cow-calf operation, which she really loved, but dude ranching is more economically sustainable for someone like her who doesn’t own land. She couldn’t quite make her cowboying dream come true, so she’s working with what feels realistic.
It’s hard to sustain on the ground, but she’s still chasing it for many of the same reasons why I’m on the ranch — because it feels like there is still beauty and integrity there. And because parts of the wisdom of simpler times still ring true: You reap what you sow. Land is our most valuable resource. You can’t fool a horse. True says he thinks the connection to those values is a big part of why people come to the White Stallion, and why they keep coming. “It’s the horses, but it’s also this whole understandable movement toward nature being healthy, a little less crowded,” he says. “It strips the stress out.”
It’s the part that pulls me back to the idea, even if I don’t like the darker parts. It’s the boot stomp and the big sky, the magic of rooting for the rodeo queens. It’s a rejoinder when things get too crowded and technological. I think so many of us are problematically far from the land, far from where our food comes from, and from being in our physical bodies. Riding through the desert — which I know is a constructed, vacation experience, but which I still feel in my bones — gets me close to things I crave because I don’t experience them enough. Part of the cowboy fantasy is the emotional side: adventure, simplicity, tangible work.
A big part of the cowboy ideal is to be independent-minded and tough, to make your own future. So how do we do that well now? Can it be inclusive and reflective of both the complicated history and desire for a good future? Can our image of a cowboy expand to reflect what being a cowboy means to people who have historically been left out of the image?
It’s happening already, which is part of the tension of the current moment. This current expression of cowboy culture is an evolution, one that includes the revival of Black rodeo and the overdue wide acceptance of diverse artists in Nashville. It’s the traveling art exhibit “Cowboy,” curated at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, which challenges the more well-known idea of cowboy culture. It’s acknowledging people who have been there all along, but who might not have been found on the casting list for “True Grit” or “City Slickers.” That’s where cowboy culture could go this time, even if it feels a little uncomfortable. If we let this movement meet the moment in all its complexity.
I see it even among the wranglers on the ranch who look so cool and at ease on their horses and who include young Black women, and a Navajo guy who grew up on a ranch near the Grand Canyon who teases me for how competitive I get in team penning. Even in this fantasy land, where we literally ride off into the sunset, they are expanding the idea of what a cowboy can be.
This story appears in the June 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.