In Cowboy Presidents, David A. Smith examines the ways in which Theodore Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush reflected and deployed facets of a âfrontier mythâ between 1901 and 2009.Smith's volume, based on his doctoral dissertation in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, makes substantial use of materials at the presidential libraries of Roosevelt, Johnson, and Reagan as well as the collections of the Theodore Roosevelt Center in North Dakota to document his contention that the frontier myth has changed substantially over time since 1893 when Frederick Jackson Turner first staked a claim on its centrality to American development. In Smith's view, the myth has moved politically in right-wing directions just as has the nation, âshifting from a thesis of liberalism and inclusion to one of conservatism and exclusionâ (p. 8), âa profound change that scholars or political analysts have not previously identifiedâ (p. 13).Influenced by historian Brian W. Dippie, whose classic The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (1982) argued that the âvanishingâ myth affected political leaders who took myth for fact as they made decisions affecting Native Americans, Smith carries his story through the twentieth century with attention to popular journalism as well as presidential statements, contemporary historiography, and communications studies. Cowboy Presidents has well-chosen illustrations, including apt cartoons, and a photograph of Barack Obama in a cowboy hat.Because Turner focused on the West as the locus of the frontier, Smith pays special attention to the ways the four chief executives offered contrasting presidential visions of the significance of that region during the twentieth century and especially between the 1960s and the 2000s. Roosevelt receives one chapter, raising issues such as the role of government at home and abroad and the importance of protecting the environment; Johnson and Reagan, two apieceâdemonstrating successively how each performed more effectively early on and less so toward the end of their termsâJohnson in Vietnam and Reagan with his âreactionary, nostalgic way of understanding Americaâ (p. 137). Bush merits one chapter that stresses failuresâIraq, Katrina, and a faltering economy.An epilogue briefly mentions Barack Obamaâciting his Ossawatomie speech and its reference to Rooseveltâand Donald J. Trump âwith [his] grievance-based ideology, toxic masculinity, corporate tax cuts, environment-busting, America-first approach to trade and foreign relations . . . â (p. 217), but Smith does not take into account either the earlier challenges to the frontier myth by William Appleman Williams, Walter LaFeber, or Lloyd Gardner, or the recent work of such influential scholars as Heather Cox Richardson and, especially, Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (2019).