The cowboys are gone, and so are the critters, Owen Ulph tells us in “The Cowboy and the Critter” on the preceding pages. The West, Ulph says, will never see their like again. Perhaps-but the image left behind them, lambent with truth or riddled with error, is not something we Americans are willing to give up easily. Or so it would seem from an event that took place in Arizona in the fall of 1975.

The event was an old-fashioned cattle drive, a real-life, round-’em-up, move-’em-out,git-along-little-dogie re-enactment of the days when meat on the hoof was pried, prodded, and roped out of the brush and bogholes of the West, gathered together, then driven hundreds of miles to shipping points for eventual conversion into digestible protein. It was, as always, dirty, exhausting, sunup-tosundown work and, in this age of cattle trucks and superhighways, completely unnecessary.

So why do it? The answer, at least according to Ed Overmyer, one of the drive’s principal organizers, was to give the cowboy his just share of the Bicentennial limelight. Overmyer, owner of the Triangle T guest ranch and the E Diamond working ranch near Dragoon, Arizona, was hunkered down watching a Bicentennial television program one evening in 1975 and was struck by the fact that apparently not much was being planned to commemorate the role of the cowboy in the winning of the West. He talked over the situation with a few friends and neighbors, and together they came up with the notion of the “Last Cattle Drive.”

The Plan: Overmyer and friends would gather up some 250 head of cattle (including a number of descendants of the old Texas Longhorns) and ship them to Willcox, a little town in the southeastern corner of Arizona they had selected as their starting point for the drive. Other cattlemen who wished to participate would contribute additional cattle, until a herd of about a thousand had been accumulated. A hand-picked team of drovers, complete with the traditional working clothes and equipment of the old-time cowhand (including a horse-drawn, though rubbertired, chuck wagon), would trail the herd south down the Sulphur Spring Valley to Douglas on the Mexican border, west to the copper-mining town of Bisbee, then northwest to Tombstone, Benson, and finally the stockyards outside Tucson, where the cattle would be auctioned off to the highest bidders. The drive would cover about 350 miles and take thirty days to complete. The drovers would be paid the traditional thirty silver dollars and found. Along the way, barbecues and branding demonstrations would be held; after expenses, the proceeds from these and from the Tucson auction would be donated to the muscular dystrophy fund, one of Overmyer’s favorite charities.

The Reality: When the herd rattled across the railroad tracks outside Willcox on October 20, as scheduled, it contained only 250 head. Various government officials had blanched at the notion of 1,000 cows lumbering about in