Wister's cowboy was a creation or construction of his own mind. For every Virginian in a white hat there was at least one villain in a black hat. For every good cowboy, there was a heel, as Falludi herself notes. Wister's hero was a good man who tried to do right, but I'm not sure how representative he was of the "cowboy code," or how much Falludi is really talking about actual cowpunchers and how much she's talking about the myths postwar America used to domesticate baby boomers. It's Hollywood that told us that to be a cowboy meant to be decent, upright and foursquare.
I'm not sure how much the opposition between Boone and Crockett that Falludi presents really holds. History or legend has it that Boone brought his people west but left as soon as he could see the smoke from neighbor's cabin from his own and he could no longer live by hunting -- A peaceful, decent fellow, but one who wasn't crazy about society. Crockett was elected to Congress and might have played a role in an independent Texas had he survived the Alamo, so he doesn't quite qualify as an anarchic spirit.
Walter Mead has compared Bush's approach, and Reagan's, to that of Andrew Jackson, a frontiersman Falludi doesn't mention. That looks to be a more sensible place to begin than a specious contrast of Boone and Crockett.