In North Central Montana, a land‐based conflict centered on the environmental organization American Prairie sparked the formation of the “Save the Cowboy, Stop the American Prairie Reserve” Facebook page, attracting posts and comments from ranchers and members of the area's agriculture‐dependent communities. Despite Montana's rapid amenity migration and rural gentrification, this region has largely maintained its Old West culture. Consequently, Save the Cowboy members often express frustration about how American Prairie's large‐scale rewilding initiative and land acquisitions affect the region's rural communities. In this qualitative content analysis, concerns about preserving the Old West culture and avoiding the New West transformation dominated Save the Cowboy's Facebook posts and comments (N = 1,002), even compared to the ostensibly more concerning economic and ecological issues. By describing a social space marked by cultural antagonisms between Old West insiders and New West outsiders, this study points to the dangers of essentializing Old West‐New West conflicts. Illustrating how Old West insiders deploy their cultural capital to contest rural change, it also expands the Old West‐New West typology by proposing the term “Nouveau West” to capture how Old West insiders assert dominance by disparaging newcomers who lack the requisite knowledge of how things are done locally.

中文翻译：

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拯救荒野还是拯救牛仔？旧西方与新西方之间的文化冲突*


在蒙大拿州中北部，一场以环保组织 American Prairie 为中心的陆上冲突引发了“拯救牛仔，停止美国草原保护区”Facebook 页面的形成，吸引了来自牧场主和该地区依赖农业的社区成员的帖子和评论。尽管蒙大拿州的便利设施迅速迁移和农村高档化，但该地区在很大程度上保持了其旧西部文化。因此，Save the Cowboy 成员经常对 American Prairie 的大规模再野化计划和土地征用如何影响该地区的农村社区表示失望。在这个定性内容分析中，对保留旧西部文化和避免新西部转变的担忧主导了 Save the Cowboy 的 Facebook 帖子和评论（N = 1,002），即使与表面上更令人担忧的经济和生态问题相比也是如此。通过描述以旧西部内部人士和新西部外部者之间文化对立为标志的社会空间，本研究指出了将旧西部与新西部冲突本质化的危险。它说明了旧西部内部人士如何利用他们的文化资本来对抗农村变革，还通过提出“新西部”一词来扩展旧西部-新西部类型学，以捕捉旧西部内部人士如何通过贬低缺乏当地运作方式必要知识的新来者来维护主导地位。