The Arizona cowboy was a curious mix of the northern Plains, Rockies, California, Texas and northern Mexico cowboy culture. The influence of all these was strong, yet the Arizona cowboys, or vaqueros, evolved into a unique breed of their own. In a frontier that was closing rapidly at the turn of the century, Arizona offered one of the last vestiges of the freedom that was associated with being a cowboy.

Out of a frontier history that lasted more than 350 years, Americans have taken the era of the open-range cowboy, a brief 20-year span, given it immortality and called it the West. The heroic figures who emerged have come to symbolize all the manifestations of character we ascribe to the winning of the West. Most important, those qualities have come to represent our perception of our own self-image as rugged individuals.