American cowboys have not vanished in the mists of legend. Against the howling locomotion of modern and postmodern and transmodern eras, they reside right where they have been for three centuries and counting: in the cattle country of the West and Southwest, and at the core of a nation's identity. This, despite the vagueness of the vocation itself. Are there ten thousand working cowboys today? Fifty thousand? Even were everyone to agree on the definition of "working cowboy"—and good luck with that—tracking the species has eluded every organization from the Working Ranch Cowboys Association to the United States Census Bureau.

Whatever the actual number, the job itself has gotten no easier in recent times. As cattle ranching has increasingly become big business, the cowboy's essential place is more subject to an accountant's dispassionate scrutiny. For that matter, the 71-billion-dollar U.S. cattle industry itself is beset by challenges from changing weather patterns, the vagaries of the international market, urban sprawl, and health threats from abroad. Inevitably, some cattle operations have learned to diversify by leasing out their acreage to hunters or offering dude-ranch tourism. Computerization—for ear-tagging and brand recording, among other uses—has increasingly become a welcome if strange bedfellow on cattle ranches.

But if high technology is the unstoppable force, here is the immovable object: Cattle subsist largely on grass. Cows need to be led to where the grass is ample. To achieve that requires no more and no less than an individual on horseback, accompanied by a rope and maybe a decent stock dog or two—all set on a landscape detached from urban clamor, not to mention cell phone service.

Proof of the cowboy's resilience is that he has survived Hollywood's ceaseless hyping of him as the quintessence of terse, masculine individuality. In the romanticizing, a few details are overlooked: Subzero February mornings. Triple-digit August afternoons. Cracked ribs from being bucked off a spooked horse. Thumbs severed by a roped steer. Forearms gooey from pushing a cow's prolapsed uterus back up into its vagina. And day after day, week after week spent watching a thousand furry creatures chew up a pasture while your own stomach growls. All of this for a wage that works out to about four dollars an hour. What this arrangement guarantees is self-selection. Only those who seek out such misery will endure it.

"Oh, yeah, it was fun," says 18-year-old Tyrel Tucker as he reflects on the winter he spent with his 20-year-old brother, Blaine, tending 2,300 cattle in a camp north of Flagstaff. The brothers slept in a cinder-block shack with cracks in the walls and no electricity. Every day from December until April, they rode on nearly 100,000 acres of land with only the cattle, the horses, and each other for company. Blaine's cooking regimen did not vary: pancakes and sausage for breakfast, a can of sardines for lunch, potatoes and a hamburger on a biscuit or tortilla for dinner. The wind was relentless, and by nightfall the temperatures plummeted to 15 below zero.