The Vicissitudes of the Cowboy Hero in American Culture

This paper explores the iconological formation of the cowboy myth as the celebrated cultural expression of the Western frontier spirit Reconsidering the typical images of Pecos Bill, Daniel Boone, and other diverse cowboy representations, this study attempts to excavate the marginalized to mainstream images of the history of the cowboy from Cooper's Natty Bumppo stories about Daniel Boone to the mass-mediated images of such figures as John Wayne, Marlboro Man, and George Bush that highlight the American hero at the same time as representing Western masculine icon Consideration of the distinctive iconological formation of mythical cowboy representation leads to an examination of the vicissitudes of the cowboy icon in the context of American history from Frederik JTurner, Theodore Roosevelt and Lomax, and the Western history related to the cowboy The final main section of the paper deals with the media effect of Brokeback Mountain as it throws into relief how the representation of the myth-making cowboy was challenged by homophobic space as a relic of the past Critical reviews of the two queer protagonists, Del Mar and Jack Twist, reveal the brutal homophobla destructive of this maverick representation of the American cowboy image