Although later made an icon of "rugged individualism," the American cowboy was a grossly exploited and underpaid seasonal worker, who waged a series of militant strikes in the generally isolated and neglected corners of the Old West. Mark Lause examines those neglected labour conflicts, couching them in the context of the bitter and violent "range wars" that broke out periodically across the region, and locating both among the political insurgencies endemic to the American West in the so-called Gilded Age.