The pickup truck has become an important part of Western livestock culture. Even though trucks are needed and valued for their usefulness in farm and ranch work, decorative additions are often made to trucks, and these additions don't always follow solely utilitarian functions. rather, they help negotiate and present group membership, notions of masculinity, and patriarchal images of women. They also continue to reaffirm the control of man over nature. However, these trucks do not always present seamless images, nor are the images always interpreted monolithically by those who own and decorate pickup trucks, as I discovered when I began to examine the decorative traditions and accompanying folk expressions surrounding pickup trucks.