Popular imagination has a distorted view of the American cowboy. Cowboys are normally viewed as men who freely chose to stray from organized society, who were heroic, who used violence only in the name of justice, who were charming, courageous, and decent, and who were one with nature. In fact, however, cowboys were low paid workers at the bottom of the social ladder. They have been free from Eastern American society and free to roam throughout nature, but they were still bound by their work and lower social class.

Not only does popular imagination have a distorted view of the American cowboy, it also has a distorted view of the "Wild West," altogether, sprouting from its misconceptions of the cowboy. A cowboy free to roam wherever he wants in the arid deserts of the West paints a picture of uninhabited, non-diverse land ready for exploration by Easterners. A cowboy who is respected by townspeople for putting Indians in there place paints the picture of war only between Easterners come West with Indians. A cowboy who is obsessed over across generations paints the picture of a singular Western culture, centered around the cowboy. None of these pictures, however, are real. In truth, the West was a region of diverse terrain; the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains, the Redwood Forests, and the Mojave Desert offer huge ecologic diversity. Before Easterners came to the West, the land was indeed already inhabited by Indians, Spaniards, and Mexicans, many of whom had established permanent settlements. While Indians did fight with Anglo-Americans, many tensions lay within the Indian tribes themselves, and the cowboy was not the one to go fighting when the time came either; the U.S. Army fought the wars. No Western society was cowboy-centric; rather Mexican/Spanish settlements revolved around ranching and Indian tribes revolved around either farming (as is the case with the Pueblo Indians) or buffalo hunting (as is the case with the Plains Indians).

How could popular imagination be so blatantly wrong? Some stretching of facts is acceptable, but the view shared by most is almost completely fictional. The leading factor contributing to this obscuration of facts is mainly the popular works of fiction created at the time of migration to the West, contemporary with the American cowboy. Literature by Twain and Wister, paintings by Remington and Moran, even accounts from Teddy Roosevelt portray the West in its idealized form; an empty frontier offering freedom. Because of this popularization, many other aspects of the West have been forgotten, such as the former authority of Mexican ranchers, the initial success of Chinese immigrants turned sour by discrimination, the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, and the transformation of states into territories even at times as a result of women suffrage.