In Middle Cisnes, Reding watches a singular -- and ultimately murderous -- conflict take hold between those who want to trade life in the nineteenth century for life in the twenty-first, and those who want to keep living as gauchos have for hundreds of years. What all of them understand is the near-impossiblility of a journey through a world where everything from the fierce landscape to a ravaging disease conspires against them, a journey whose terminus -- the Outside, the only town in central Patagonia's 42,000 square miles -- is a place where the gauchos are not only ill-equipped to live, but are clearly unwelcome.

The Last Cowboys at the End of the World is a story of regeneration through violence and tragedy. When the people of Middle Cisnes finally try to take their place in the modern world, the results are as horrifying and surprising as they are heroic. In the collision of the gaucho past, our present and an unknown future, Nick Reding captures a moment in time that we have never before seen and will never see again.