I learned this today. The Stetson hat was designed by John B. Stetson in 1865.
We have an image of cowboys wearing Stetson hats, but they didn’t really start wearing them until the later part of the 19th century.
Cowboys have existed in America for several hundred years and the tradition itself came from Spain. In Spain, cattle ranching spread throughout the Iberian Peninsula and these cattle were kept on estates called haciendas. Ranch hands on horses would manage the cattle and they were called vaqueros. When the Spanish colonized Southern and Central America in the 16th century, they took the tradition of vaqueros with them.
As more English speaking settlers started to settle in north America, the tradition of the vaquero started to move north from Mexico. Enormous cattle ranches appeared and the vaquero gradually became the cowboy.
Early cowboys would wear any type of hat that they took a fancy to. Bowler hats were very popular and they have been called “the hat that won the west”. The bowler hat, also known as a Derby hat was very popular with working class people because it was durable and wouldn’t blow off.
Most working cowboys used a wide-brimmed and high-crowned hat. This was the kind of hat that the vaqueros in Mexico wore and it made sense for the American cowboys to keep wearing it. This hat does have some similarities to the Stetson hat, but it is much closer to the Mexican sombrero. It has a wide brim to protect the wearer from the sun and it has a high crown to allow air to circulate and to keep the head cool.
John B. Stetson, the inventor of the Stetson hat, started his working life as a hatter. His father was a hatter and he worked in the family business. However, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and told that he didn’t have long to live. (He would actually live until he was 75.) He decided to go out and explore the American West before he died.
While he was exploring, he met a whole variety of people and saw a whole variety of hats. While he was prospecting for gold in Colorado, he decided to make himself a hat. He had the skills, and he had a lot of beaver felt. He made the hat out of the beaver felt without tanning it. The hat was light, maintained its shape, and waterproof. He made it with a large brim and very quickly grew to like it. It kept the rain off, it sheltered him from the sun, it had space to insulate his head, and he could carry water in it. Legend has it that a cowboy saw it and paid John Stetson $5 for it, but I don’t know if that is true as $5 was a lot of money back then.
Stetson’s health improved and he headed for Philadelphia. In 1865, he started to make a hat based on the style he had made for himself in Colorado. He called it “Boss of the Plains”.
The original hat has a circular brim that is almost flat. It looked more like the hat worn by the vaqueros. Cowboys that bought the hat would steam it and shape it into the cowboy hat shape that we know. Beaver felt keeps its shape when steamed and left to dry.
Stetson started to send out samples of his hats and they became very popular very quickly. He had to build a larger factory in 1866 and by 1886, his hat company was the largest hat company in the world. He had to mechanize his factory and his company was producing 2 million hats a year by the time he died in 1906. Because he had his name stamped on the band of the hats, people started to call them Stetsons, and after a while that was the most common name for them.
When Hollywood started to make western movies, the international market for the Stetson started to grow as well. However, sales dropped in the 1950s and 60s. The family of John B. Stetson ended up selling the company, but the new owners couldn’t improve sales. The factory shut down in the early 1970s and burned down in 1980. The company declared bankruptcy in 1986.
Incidentally, the term “ten gallon” hat doesn’t refer to the amount of water the hat can hold, which is something I thought until I just found out the truth. Thinking logically, a hat that could hold ten gallons would be enormous. The term either comes from the Spanish tan galan, which means really handsome. Or, from gallon, which is a type of braid around the crown of the hat. Apparently, a ten gallon hat will hold about 3L of water.
So, the Stetson hat was invented by John B. Stetson in the 1850s and mass produced from 1865. And this is what I learned today.
Photo by Brett Sayles: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photography-of-a-person-riding-horse-1069710/
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stetson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Stetson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy_hat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacienda
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican%E2%80%93American_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_of_the_Plains
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowler_hat