And those who were giddily seeking greater isolation and flagellation upon America's savage hinterland? They tended to be utopians, cultists, cranks, or visionaries along the lines of the Shakers or utopian socialist Robert Owen or Mormon founder Joseph Smith. No advertiser would find in these niche groups the kind of brand leveraging that would move a few hundred thousand wagon wheels. But the real frontier did throw up one iconic hero, who was duly leveraged and branded to move a few million pickup trucks and a billion or so packs of smokes: the Cowboy. As every schoolboy now knows, this stoic range-rider was as much a product of mythmakers as he had ever been a historical fact. He stood, one dust-covered boot in the actual frontier and one in Frontierland, embodying square-jawed manliness, stolid existentialism, and manifest destiny, and for at least a generation he reigned as our most identifiable national hero. From the Marlboro Man (b. 1955) to Gunsmoke (also b. 1955), the Eisenhower era of Pax Americana required his presence as a no-nonsense marketing tool.

But by the late sixties and early seventies, our appetite for simplistic two-dimensional heroes began to seem naive in the face of Vietnam, LSD, and Watergate. Even in Hollywood, ambiguous heroes like Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry pushed aside the cowboy, who went out in a blaze of bloody Technicolor glory in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid—though the Marlboro Man lingered on, in an amazingly effective advertising afterlife, long after two of the models who portrayed him died in the early 1990s of lung cancer (the same era that the brand sponsored the Marlboro Adventure Team, a promotion in which "Marlboro Miles" coupons could be redeemed for backpacks and even kayaks).

Once the cowboy passed from the scene, the archetypal outdoorsman of 20 years ago was the type who slogged through the ads in early issues of Outside and its progenitor, Mariah. A shaggy, masculine, post-hippie guy in waffle-soled boots, cut-off jeans, and a Pendleton wool shirt, resolute in his quiet iconoclasm, not giving a damn about how he looked as he turned his back on a soft society. He was venerably counterculture, and while American advertising is one of the most efficient machines in the world at co-opting counterculture trends, the marketers and admen wanted no part of this particular, tree-hugging fringe. Not yet. This outdoors guy was atavistic, a nineteenth-century relic—think the Ted Kaczynski look with gorp instead of gunpowder and a map of Alaska instead of an antitechnology manifesto. For a while, the two companies that worked hardest to associate themselves with the great outdoors were Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds, and what they were seeking to hook into was great quantities of breathable oxygen—this being the subconscious fantasy of every potential lung cancer victim.

Between those fringe-jacketed longhairs pounding Rocky Mountain spring water in ads for Coors beer and the emergence of Frontierland, there was a lull. In their cursory glances outdoors, our national myth-spinners—Madison Avenue, Hollywood, Seventh Avenue—saw only the hook-and-bullet crowd. Nothing sexy here. Cat Diesel caps, bulky sweaters—or even worse, Deliverance and squealing Ned Beatty. Wool was for losers in the disco years, when sleekness in the form of Halston and Darth Vader was the aesthetic cue. Advertisers wanted to look forward, and those shaggy beards were screaming the sixties—the 1860s.