dime novels and Buffalo Bill's Wild West Exhibition, then in the enormous popularity of Owen Wister's ''The Virginian'' (1902), and subsequently in the success of popular western novels of the type by Zane Grey and Max Brand, in western films (made in Italy, Germany, Hollywood, and elsewhere), in television programs in public television documentaries, and in other formats, including the highly effective use of cowboys as advertising symbols. Serious scholars—including historians, sociologists, literary critics, and others—have studied cowboys and the symbols and myths that surround them.

In the popular view cowboys were men on horseback. In fact, most of the time they spent their days on foot working at such farm-related chores as repairing fences and cutting hay. Even in Wister’s defining cowboy novel, for example, the hero of the story—the prototypal cowboy—herded neither cows nor cattle of any kind.

Nonetheless, in both his actual and his imagined life the cowboy has become a popular hallmark for defining what it means to be a 'real' American male. Perceived as a tough, mobile, and independent outdoorsman, he has become a symbolic yardstick against which modern men might measure their own manhood.