It does not look hospitable, which may be why it is so quintessentially American. Certainly in the early years, eking out a living in a land so arid made for an unimaginable challenge.

I think back on my own ancestors and wonder how they managed -- my father's family arriving more than 400 years ago in northern New Mexico from a similarly unforgiving landscape in Estremadura, Spain; my mother's family coming to Wyoming by wagon train from Missouri not long after the Civil War. Yet, like thousands of others, they tamed the land and recreated themselves.

Today, it is still possible to see in the land itself something of its past. Driving west along Route 40 high in the Colorado Rockies last week, I saw a herd of horses, some 40 or 50 head, that looked as if they had just descended, wild and free, from Byers Canyon above. There were overos, palominos, chestnuts and pure blacks, running against a classic Southwestern cerulean sky with cumulus clouds that dwarfed even the mountain ranges in the background.

There are few more enduring archetypes than the American cowboy. Certainly McCarthy's ability to conjure up a world in which men still ride on the backs of magnificent beasts trying to master a natural world that is both alluring and hostile has made him one of America's most popular literary figures.

But as the Southwestern landscape retreats, as suburbs encroach on the range, as fewer and fewer people know what it is to tackle nature head-on, what will happen to the cowboy tale? Perhaps this generation will be the last to come across boys like Jimmy Blevins or John Grady Cole or to see all the pretty horses running free, and all that will remain is a collective memory evoked by writers like Cormac McCarthy.