A cowboy hat is an indispensable attribute of any famous cowboy, straight from some iconic Hollywood Western or the distant history of the Wild West.
For fans of this era, it may seem that the hat and cowboys (apart from the revolver and the horse) are inseparable friends, but you probably didn't know that this was not always the case. For a very long time, cowboys wore straw or captain's sea hats, and some of them even wore something like raccoon hats on their heads, until the classic cowboy hat replaced them.
Today we will talk about how one man's common illness influenced the creation of one of the most iconic men's hats in history.
A little excursion into history
John Betterson Stetson was born in 1830 in the American city of Orange, New Jersey. John was the eighth child in a large family of twelve children, the eldest of whom later inherited the management of his father's hat business. One way or another, but in his youth John still managed to learn the basics of the hat business, working part-time in the family business.
After several years of hard work in a hat factory, John began to get sick, he was absolutely sure that something was wrong with his lungs, so when he visited the doctor, he heard his diagnosis for the first time:
Tuberculosis, the doctor said. And in the 1850s, that was a death sentence.
It must have been hard for a young 20-year-old to hear such a diagnosis. John's mind quickly became filled with the realization that his short life was now coming to an end, and he had done nothing about it.
Since John was sure that his days were numbered and he didn't know exactly how many he had left, he didn't want to spend the rest of his life working in his father and older brother's hat shop, but decided to try something else.
Despite his weakness, John Stetson got a job at a brick factory. And to his great surprise, his prospects looked bright in managing the enterprise, thanks to a flexible mind, not physical strength, but then the Missouri River flooded, washing away the brick factory and all of John's prospects. Then the Civil War began, so it is logical that Stetson tried to enlist in the Northern Union Army. But when it turned out that he had tuberculosis, he was refused permission to serve.
The story of the idea for creating a cowboy hat
So, left without a single idea for what to do now, John Stetson decided to do one of the craziest things in his life, go to the unexplored West.
He decided that since the air was drier there, he would be much more comfortable with his illness. That's what the doctors advised him to do, “move to a place where it's drier and warmer,” but no one gave a 100% guarantee that this would be the cure for tuberculosis.
Surprisingly, the Missouri air did a good job on young John's lungs, and although his health was still weak, he felt some relief after a few months in his new place. Stetson's trip West did his lungs a lot of good, but it also completely emptied his wallet. When he returned East, he had about $60 left in his wallet, but he had the perfect business idea!
Old hat instincts kicked in when John saw how poorly equipped the Americans working in the West were. Most of these people wore straw hats and British top hats. Many settlers also wore wide-brimmed hats, which were made of wool and sagged when wet, making them difficult to repair and clean. Stetson knew that fur felt hats would serve their purpose better, and he even made a couple of prototypes while traveling West. The widest-brimmed hat, a prototype he made while out West, started out as a casual idea, but was quickly purchased that same day by a passing cowboy.
The irony is that the first prototype of the cowboy hat was actually sold to a real cowboy.
In 1865, now in Philadelphia, Stetson founded the John B. Stetson Company, which specialized in high-end felt hats, and the first prototypes were the very hats he had created during his trip to the West.
John B. Stetson Company
John Stetson sent samples of the Boss of the Plains hat to all the major clothing retailers in the West, enclosing a blank order form with each sample. The then-unknown Stetson brand thundered across America, thanks to overwhelming feedback and orders from all over the country.
The Boss of the Plains hat was originally offered in only two colors: black and pearly white. Cowboys in Texas preferred the black with a wider brim, while riders in Montana chose the white, albeit with a narrower brim.
By 1886, the Stetson name had become not only a household name, but his hat brand had become the largest in the world. The fully mechanized factory covered nine acres of Philadelphia and by 1906 was producing 2 million hats a year. Even after the West was completely conquered, people continued to buy Stetsons left and right.
John Stetson himself lived to a ripe old age and died in 1906, but in the years before his death he had mastered many new modern production methods and virtually created ideal conditions for workers. Before industrialization, most hatters were itinerant workers who traveled the country in search of work. Therefore, to keep these skilled workers in his factories, John began to introduce pensions, shares and large Christmas bonuses to encourage their loyalty. His factory had a library, a dental office and even a hospital that provided free assistance to the workers.
Sales of Stetson hats were incredible, right up until the start of the Great Depression and until men stopped wearing hats.
