LAPD officers, on horseback, rush through a line of protesters during a protest over Trump's deportation efforts in Los Angeles, California on June 11, 2025.
For generations, the American West has served as one of the nation's most enduring metaphors, a frontier imagined as a place of possibility and abundance.
It has been seen as a proving ground for reinvention and a stage for the myths that shape American identity. The image of the rugged pioneer on horseback, long held up as a symbol of independence and westward expansion, still lingers today even as the country fractures and struggles with the realities of a dismantled democracy over a hollowed out landscape.