I suppose the amount of it is that both the American and the Australian rough riders are, for their own work, just as good as men possibly can be.
One spring I had to leave the East in the midst of the hunting season, to join a roundup in the cattle country of western Dakota, and it was curious to compare the totally different styles of riding of the cowboys and the cross-country men.

A stock-saddle weighs thirty or forty pounds instead of ten or fifteen and needs an utterly different seat from that adopted in the East.

A cowboy rides with very long stirrups, sitting forked well down between his high pommel and cantle, and depends upon balance as well as on the grip of his thighs.

In cutting out a steer from a herd, in breaking a vicious wild horse, in sitting a bucking bronco, in stopping a night stampede of many hundred maddened animals, or in the performance of a hundred other feats of reckless and daring horsemanship, the cowboy is absolutely unequalled; and when he has his own horse gear he sits his animal with the ease of a centaur.

Yet he is quite helpless the first time he gets astride one of the small eastern saddles.