The West

There are many differences between the real historical cowboy vs. the popular imagination cowboy.  The real historical cowboy was a low paid or no job worker with almost nothing to their name.  While the more popular well known cowboys like in the movies consisted of the freedom to do whatever they want, living in nature, always fighting or gun fights.  There is a huge difference between these two forms of a cowboy consisting from a low paid worker to a person that most kids wanted to be. 

In the western life the cowboys took the focus away from everything else to people that was an important part of history.  The Chinese coming into america was important because they took jobs and later in California took up ten percent of the population.  Also the Chinese Americans help create the railroads because they took up the majority of the railroad workers.  

One way that the cowboys was idealized the way it was because of movies and books had talked about the cowboys in this way because it was more interesting like in the book and movie called The Virginian.  These movies and books had created the mind set that the american cowboy had consisted of the free person who carried around a gun and fought Indians all the time.   That is the main reason of how cowboys were portrayed the way that they were.