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 gracious to ladies, reserved toward strangers, generous to his friends and brutal to his enemies. He is a cowboy, a typical Westerner.

This stereotype of the cowboy is the West's most recognizable contribution to our national mythology. But what was the cowboy's life really like? And what about the women who also lived in...