To the spectator, the rodeo cowboy's eight-second ride has become the embodiment of freedom and the frontier spirit. But to the young men who chase glory on the backs of wild horses and angry bulls, those same eight seconds are a small chance at fame and fortune, a surer promise of broken bones and lonely roads, a moment in a much deeper struggle for survival. Dirk Johnson spent a year on the rodeo circuit with these brawny and battered cowboys, watching them try to hang on to broncs and bulls - and to wives and ranches and lives that seemed only one fall away from disappearing. He drove with them from the circuit's beginning in Denver, the capital of the New West, through Old West towns like Dodge City and Cheyenne - and even smaller ones that have never appeared on road maps, hemorrhaging from the dire economic struggle of rural America - and back, to the stage-set streets of Santa Fe, and the neon of Las Vegas, the season's finale. Johnson has crafted an unforgettable story from the adventures and struggles of such men as Joe Wimberly, a bull rider in desperate financial straits with a wife and three small kids, hoping for a chance to ride a ferocious 1,700-pound Brahma that had never been conquered - for a jackpot that could save his little house in rural west Texas; Craig Latham, an orphaned son of a lost Wyoming ranch, now living in a trailer in the No Man's Land of Oklahoma and competing as a saddle-bronc rider, trying to measure up to the memory of an older brother, a rodeo legend who died in a car accident; Bud Longbrake, an Indian cowboy straddling two worlds, who battles bad luck on the rodeo trail and the imminent loss of his children's Sioux identity back on the South Dakota reservation; and Larry Sandvick, a handsome young bareback rider with the nerve of a gunslinger and the soul of an artist, tough enough to break almost any horse and rebellious enough to break almost any rule, daring the world to tame his Wild West style. Biting the Dust is both a narrative of heart-stopping power - of young men tangled in the ropes of the American dream - and a landscape of astonishing clarity and nuance. Dirk Johnson has broken through our romantic visions and opened an unexamined territory - the real American West