Frederic Remington's bronze sculpture of a so-called "bronco buster" (a cowboy that "breaks" a horse so it can be ridden) highlights the inherent conflict at the heart of the idea of an American West. The weathered cowboy astride the tense and anguished body of the rearing horse serves as a metaphor for the struggle between those Americans who felt the West represented the United States' "manifest destiny," and the people who actually lived there, and already had suffered at the hands of a foreign government willing to take possession of their land and redistribute it to official citizens. For some Americans, the West represented wild, untamed opportunity and freedom, but for others it meant an infringement on their liberty, encroachment on their land, and unparalleled suffering.