The name "cowboy" conjures up many different images from movies, songs and TV. These imagined cowboys range from white-hat-wearing heroes to gun-shooting hooligans .But, cowboys are actually real people from US history. When the US Civil War ended, many soldiers had no place to call home. So, they began to drift to the country's rural West. Ranchers  hired these men to take care of the cattle and work around the ranch. When the ranch owner wanted to sell the cattle, the cowboys would round up the herd from the open prairie  and drive the cattle miles to the market. With the invention of barbed wire ,the cowboy era(1865-1890) began to come to an end. But people in the East had always been curious about their lifestyle. Many country/western songs during this time tried to capture the true cowboy spirit. Newspapers published cowboy tales in serial form and adventure novels followed. The bigger the fiction,  the better the sales. These novels often portrayed cowboys as cruel and violent men. Cowboys carried the bad reputation for many years afterwards. When movies began to be popular in the 1920s, the cowboy image changed again. Now, a cowboy became the great white knight  that loved his horse more than the beautiful ladies he rescued. As the cowboy of the "Old West" spent more time with his horse than the ladies, this era's image was not entirely false. Then, in the 50s,Hollywood began producing so-called "spaghetti westerns ".They earned the nickname because Italian companies financed the films and TV shows. This started the decade's "Cowboy Craze". While this didn't last long, it made modern country / western music, fashion and dance extremely popular. In recent years, with the help of musicians, radio stations and bars, cowboy nostalgia  has returned. Even though his image is still changing -- somewhere between ballad singing country boy and bar room fighter -- there's one thing for sure, _ . During "the cowboy era" mentioned in the story,   _  .
the cowboy often came to the rescue of ladies in newspaper tales the distant Wild West appealed to people in the East cowboys were shown as cruel and violent men on the silver screen country music started the cowboy craze which swept the whole country