The cowboy remains one of America's enduring legends. Representing freedom, strength and individuality, the cowboy is an icon whose reputation is constantly reinforced in popular culture by the great Western stories and Hollywood films. The backdrop to the legend is familiar too: etched red earth, a shifting, dust-smudged horizon, thorny shrubs and ghostly tumbleweed, vast and patient skies.

But the reality is undergoing an inexorable change. The Wal-Mart sprawl is stealing the countryside; the interstates are ploughing up the plains and the big skies are carved up by high-tension cables supported by ungainly pylons. And just as the cowboy's home has been eroded, so has his way of life. Environmentalists are active in their criticism of traditional ranching methods; a recent eight-year drought put many cattlemen and their cowboys into the lines outside the employment office and inflexible bureaucracy has forced some ranchers, unable to obtain cattle permits, to break up their land and sell the rubble for building materials. The great American cowboy is a dying breed, struggling to cope with the inevitable advances of a new millennium.