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Cowboy Boots
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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 RE: Cowboy Boots (in reply to RobF)
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Well, Rob, if you are going to wear cowboy boots and a leather jacket with fringe, you might as well try your hand at being a "singing cowboy," a la Gene Autry. You might even buy a major league baseball team as Autry did.
Speaking of cowboy boots, growing up in Arizona I always had a pair, as I used to go riding a lot, not equestrian style with an English saddle, but just riding in the desert with a western saddle. Boots in stirrups sure beat a pair of sneakers.
One of my assignments in the US Foreign Service was at our Embassy in Santiago, Chile. My wife and I often would spend weekends at an Embassy-leased cottage in Zapallar, north of Vina del Mar on the coast. We would enjoy the quiet and the fireplace at the cottage in Zapallar, and we would rent horses from a local huaso (A huaso is a Chilean cowboy, what the Argentines call a gaucho) and spend the day riding, using those marvelous Monturas Chilenas (Chilean saddles) covered in sheepskin. They were the most comfortable saddles I have ever used.
In any case, I don't think they will commit you for wearing cowboy boots, but they just might obtain a court order committing you for wearing that jacket.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Feb. 9 2020 20:10:47
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Cowboy Boots (in reply to RobF)
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Good on you RobF, for going with the pointed ones. I would be surprised if Lucchese even makes them with square toes.
Some time in the 1970s I was visiting my college room mate Tom F., an expat Texan, in Munich. He took me to see the interior of a church. We walked out onto the sidewalk in mid afternoon, heading toward Tom's Corvette with Texas license plates parked at the curb. Both of us were wearing Levis and cowboy boots. "Cowboy style" was fashionable among German hipsters at the time--not that Tom saw himself as a hipster, though for a Vice President of Cyanamid International, he did dress distinctively.
A man approached us and tried to buy our clothes off our backs. Tom bent over, hiked up my pants leg and pointed to my boot, made to measure by Abram Rios and Sons, Raymondville, Texas. (The Rios sons have since passed away. The brand was sold or licensed to a factory, I believe in Laredo.) In his fluent Texas accented German Tom asked, "Do you know what that design is?"
"Nein, Ich weiß nicht."
"It's a cattle brand. If you or some other German were to wear it, the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association would come after you." That was a bit of an exaggeration, though cattle brands are to a large extent private property.
The man persisted for a while trying to buy our clothes, but he soon gave up.
I had a nodding acquaintance with Charlie Dunn, the well known Austin bootmaker. He worked at Buck Steiner's Capitol Saddlery. My daughter bought her show jumping tack there, and you would run into Charlie once in a while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Dunn
I never went for the movie star style boots. Rios made them too and had an exhibit in his shop, but I never saw anybody wear a pair like them in south Texas. Charlie Dunn's were expensive after he became famous.
I haven't owned a pair of cowboy boots since I moved to California in the 1980s.
RNJ
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Date Feb. 10 2020 3:23:51
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Cowboy Boots (in reply to BarkellWH)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: BarkellWH "He's all hat and no cattle."
That could be used to describe anyone putting on a false front.
Bill
Lucchese went into business in San Antonio. It was the quintessential cow town, before the military moved in at Fort Sam Houston, and later at the Air Force bases. I suppose Lucchese were a part of the bunch of saddlers and boot makers along the river banks south of the Commerce Street bridge, before the river banks were beautified as a tourist attraction. When I was a boy their shop was downtown, still near the river.
I think I was an adult before Lucchese moved to Houston. Houston is an oil town, not a cow town. Either Houston or Dallas was where the custom originated of wearing cowboy boots and a big hat with a three-piece suit. It got to where even a few people in Austin were doing it--probably without the hat.
In the late '60s to early '70s in Austin I wore Levis, cowboy boots and a leather jacket to work, because I rode a motorcycle every day. I was seen as non-conformist, but among people my age at the University and the surrounding counter-culture my clothes were unremarkable. When I went on business to Washington, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles etc. I dressed respectably.
While I still lived in the Central Pacific I came back to Texas at Christmas time. My brother lives about 16 miles west of the small town of Boerne. Boerne was settled by Germans, part of the wave of emigration brought on by the unification of the country under Prussian domination. For quite a while there was a town ordinance against building a church or holding a service inside the city limits. In recent years Boerne has become a retirement site for people from San Antonio. There are plenty of churches.
My brother and sister-in-law sang in the choir at the Christmas celebration in the Boerne town square. We got there a little ahead of time. My brother was wearing a suit and tie, my sister-in-law was appropriately dressed for the choir too. I had on a leather "bomber" jacket inherited from my father, with the insignia taken off, tailored slacks and penny loafers.
Looking around at the assembling crowd of retirees, I noted the prevalence of western cut shirts with mother of pearl snaps instead of buttons, jackets with a lot of fringes on them, big hats, Levis and cowboy boots. None of the retirees I saw looked like they ever spent any more than a few hours on a weekend out of doors.
Growing up, my brother, my five cousins and I spent summers together on the ranch, doing actual ranch work when we were big enough. I said to my brother, "When we were boys, didn't people only put on cowboy clothes when they were getting ready to go out and punch some cows?"
"That's how I remember it," he agreed.
RNJ
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Date Feb. 10 2020 23:31:50
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Cowboy Boots (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
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quote:
Looking around at the assembling crowd of retirees, I noted the prevalence of western cut shirts with mother of pearl snaps instead of buttons, jackets with a lot of fringes on them, big hats, Levis and cowboy boots. None of the retirees I saw looked like they ever spent any more than a few hours on a weekend out of doors.
Lots of "snowbirds" visit Arizona in the winter, and many like to dress pretty much as you describe the retirees in your quote cited above. But the most ridiculous piece of apparel I can think of that they like to wear is the "bolo tie." Now, the bolo tie is a wholly manufactured modern ornament that was totally unknown in the actual West of the cowboy and the gunfighter (as well as just ordinary people). It has a couple of cord-like strings that are threaded through a piece of mineral such as turquoise or clear plastic, sometimes with a scorpion embedded in it.
Some of these yahoos can be seen wearing a suit with a bolo tie instead of a regular necktie. I don't know what impression they make on their fellow snowbirds, but I have always thought they were candidates for a court order committing them to be held for further observation.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Feb. 11 2020 0:10:33
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Cowboy Boots (in reply to BarkellWH)
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A bit of bolo tie lore:
The atomic bomb was developed by the Manhattan project at a super secret site near Los Alamos, New Mexico. Not everybody wore suits and ties. Some adopted a form of western wear. I don't know how many, if any, wore cowboy boots, but the bolo tie gained some currency.
During the 1950s-1960s if you met a PhD physicist in the USA wearing a bolo tie, it was pretty sure to be a silent signal that he had worked on the atomic bomb.
In the 1980s I traveled to France regularly on business, accompanying two friends. John I., a Louis Alvarez PhD, wore an ultrasuede blue blazer, a pair of slacks, what I was pretty sure was a washable shirt, a bolo tie and Hush Puppy shoes. No matter the length of the trip, the only luggage he carried was a very small suitcase, often used by women for cosmetics etc. The case had a sticker on it that read "Port Said 1958."
John is twelve years older than I, still going strong at 94. He had done well in Central California Coast real estate. When I met him he was President of the Santa Barbara Wine and Food Society, had about 350 cases in his cellar, and owned shares in the up and coming fashionable wineries. Despite his sizable intake of food and wine, John was slender and fit. He was a dedicated bicyclist.
In Paris and Bordeaux we walked a lot. John wore his bolo tie to three-star restaurants and the most prestigious wine merchants.
RNJ
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Date Feb. 11 2020 1:13:06
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Cowboy Boots (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
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I have no idea why anyone would wear such a piece of faux "Western" wear. but as they say, to each his own.
On the subject of Western wear and the "old West," as it is presented in books and film, the era of the true "cowboy" on cattle drives and the like only lasted about 20 years, from the end of the Civil War (1865) to about 1885. After 1885, the railroad network had pretty much done away with the long cattle drives of Western lore. Of course, the "cowboy" continued his existence in one form or another, even up to today, but nowhere near what the cowboy's working life was like during that 20-year period of his heyday (the term "cowpuncher" comes to mind).
The mythology of the cowboy is one of the lasting American myths. The world has bought into it, as well as many Americans who actually know little about what a cowboy's life was really like. Germans have loved it. In the early 20th century a German author named Karl May wrote a series of books about the American West, although he had never set foot in it. In Germany they have "Wild West" parks where families spend entire weekends playing "cowboys." Other countries do as well.
In the end, I reflect upon a television special I watched in 1971 about the great film director John Ford, who made many westerns, primarily set in Monument Valley in Arizona. The special was narrated by John Wayne who starred in many of John Ford's westerns. John Wayne ended the special with the following observation, which I think I am quoting verbatim.
"Well, the West may not have really been the way John Ford portrayed it, but it should have been."
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Feb. 11 2020 2:52:49
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RobF
Posts: 1611
Joined: Aug. 24 2017
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RE: Cowboy Boots (in reply to BarkellWH)
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quote:
"Well, the West may not have really been the way John Ford portrayed it, but it should have been."
Let’s not forget who was featured in the first post in this thread - the great Canadian, Lorne Greene, of Bonanza fame. That album was the first LP I ever had when I was a kid. I wore the grooves out of it. Old tin cup, Ringo, Ghost Riders in the Sky, Blue Guitar....I loved those songs. It’s probably why I started playing the guitar. Well, that and the Beatles. We made cigar box guitars and went crazy imitating them.
When I was a kid I wasn’t allowed to watch much TV, my parents said if I sat too close it would give me “Blazes” and rearrange my brain cells (in hindsight, I think they might have been right about that, lol). Regardless of the danger, every Sunday at 8:00 I was allowed to stay up and watch Bonanza. I loved watching old westerns as a kid.
As an aside, Tomatito was sporting some pretty fancy western wear in the pictures OrsonW posted and I noticed my friend was wearing a Western shirt in the Gitanos del Sacromonte documentary, which was filmed in the same period. But maybe not so surprising, seeing as how all the Sergio Leone “spaghetti” westerns were filmed not that far from Almería in the ‘60’s. That had to have had an impact on the young Tomatito.
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Date Feb. 11 2020 4:30:28
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Cowboy Boots (in reply to BarkellWH)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: BarkellWH
The mythology of the cowboy is one of the lasting American myths. The world has bought into it, as well as many Americans who actually know little about what a cowboy's life was really like.
I don't remember any movies that depict the beginning of the cattle boom. It didn't start on big ranches where they raised a sizable herd and drove it to Dodge City. It started with people rounding up the wild longhorn cattle in the south Texas brush country. The Austin author "O. Henry" wrote his Cisco Kid stories about that time and place. The longhorns were the descendants of those brought by the colonizers from New Spain (now Mexico). During the early cattle boom entrepreneurs would form a big herd collected from various freelancers, mostly of Mexican descent, hire some cowboys, a chuck wagon and a cook, and head north to the railhead. If they made it with most of their cattle, and the market was right, they would come back with saddlebags full of $20 gold pieces and try their luck again.
Many of the first generation of trail drovers were of Mexican descent. It's well known that American cowboy equipment and practices are recent descendants of Mexican cattle culture. The wild cattle were easily spooked and stampeded, making the trail drover's job a dangerous one.
Once people saw how much money could be made taking a herd to the railhead, they started putting together ranches and domesticating the longhorns. Lyndon Johnson's grandfather and great uncle were of the last generation of big ranchers in the central Texas Hill Country.
When the white people showed up, the Hill Country was grassland. Overgrazing cattle on it stripped the grass cover from the thin layer of topsoil, which promptly washed away down the hillsides with the winter rains. The big ranches in hilly country became worthless, and were soon covered in "mountain cedar" (juniper) and scrub oak.
A little further west, around Fredericksburg, the land is level. There are prosperous farms and a burgeoning wine business.
In south Texas Captain King put together the King Ranch, domesticated herds of longhorns, and began a breeding program to produce superior beef cattle adapted to the subtropical environment. South of the King ranch much of the grassland was overgrazed as well.
My father used to say that when he was a boy you could sit on a horse in Raymondville and see the Gulf of Mexico. It was a slight exaggeration. It's at least 20 miles from Raymondville to the Gulf. But in the early 20th century the country in between was grassland, with a few patches of "brush"--small thorny mesquite and huisache trees. Cattle eventually spread the seeds of mesquite and huisache in their excrement. By the time I was a boy any land that hadn't been cleared for farming or kept clear for convenient cattle handling, was thick thorny brush.
In the 1920s, land developers from elsewhere showed up, bought many of the derelict ranches, cleared the land and sold it to farmers from Oklahoma and the midwest. The land is immensely fertile. At places in the Rio Grande delta the topsoil is 200 feet (60 meters) deep. Rainfall is adequate and fairly reliable at the seacoast, but it rains less and more sporadically as you move inland.
The Great Depression hit agriculture years before it hit finance and industry. Many of the farmers went broke with the bottom falling out of crop prices, and occasional droughts.
An irrigation system using water from the Rio Grande was built, starting as a public works program under Roosevelt's New Deal. It was extended through the 1950s. My mother's brother-in-law left south Texas in the late 1920s or early 1930s. He and his brother inherited their father's farm in Mississippi.
In 1947 he returned to Texas. He rented 200 acres of irrigated land and planted a winter cabbage crop. We visited them that winter. They lived in a little "box house" with no electricity, no running water, and an outhouse down the path out the back door. They had a much nicer house back in Mississippi, but they sold it to move back to Texas. That little shack helped to save money while they gambled on the cabbage crop. The gamble paid off. Their harvest came in at the top of the market.
The profit from the cabbage crop let him buy that 200 acres of land. Ten years later he owned 950 acres. He and his son farmed it, plus another 1000 acres which they leased. They raised cotton in the summer, vegetables in the winter--both high stakes gambles. They had built nice big houses with all the conveniences, from yellow pine timber logged off the Mississippi farm, milled and seasoned, shipped to Texas. They were multi-millionaires. In 1957 a million dollars was a lot of money.
Some of the middle sized ranches, 15 to 30 square miles, made it through the early part of the Great Depression pretty much as subsistence operations, living off the land. Irrigation and moderate oil production made them profitable by the beginnng of WW II.
A few of the ranches still run cattle. Since the big 19th century cattle boom ended the business has been pretty much a game of chance, but you can afford to keep cows if you can subsidize them with farming and a little oil production. You might even make a little money on cattle once in a while, and keep a few descendants of many generations of vaqueros employed, if you like that kind of life.
My father didn't. He left home at age 16, worked in the east Texas oil fields, went to sea, bossed a construction crew of Mexicans building the big refineries in Port Arthur, and so on.
Looking for more stable employment, he went to work for his mother's first cousin, who owned the Ford dealership at Ballinger, a small town near Abilene. On his first day the owner said, "We're going to go repossess a car," and handed my father-to-be a shotgun.
"Why do we need to go armed to repossess a car?"
"Times are hard. Even the bootleggers* are broke."
At age 22 Dad accepted his father's offer to get him a place at West Point via the local congressman. He had always wanted to fly, and went into the Army Air Corps.
Except for summers on the ranch, I have always been a city person. My brother retired pretty far out in the Hill Country, a good ways from the nearest town. Our grandfather made sure that we and our cousins were like brothers and sisters, so the lawyers haven't been able to start any fights to make money breaking up the ranch.
That happened to the last big Spanish land grant along the River Road in south Texas as recently as the 1980s. It happened to the last Spanish land grant on the California coast just a few years ago. It happened to the Schreiners' YO Ranch near Kerrville since I retired and moved back to Austin ten years ago.
Faustino Yturria (Fausto Yturria, Jr. if you please) has held on to his father's ranch, which descends from a Spanish land grant bordering the King Ranch on the south. Besides cattle and horses, part of it is now stocked with exotic game, which people pay to shoot.
The YO may have been the first to import African game and charge people to "hunt" them. Bob Snow was the YO foreman at the time. The Schreiners had hired him away from the Fish and Game Department. Before working for the state as boss of the game wardens he made his living as a hunting guide in south Texas and the Sierra Madre Occidental in Mexico. As far as I know black bear, cougar, wolves and mule deer are still plentiful in the Sierra, but I doubt that many Americans go hunting there these days. Bob's older brother Luke was Sheriff of Willacy County for 42 years, and one of my father's best friends.
The exotic game business must have become saturated. When my brother retired, he and his son-in-law bought a parcel in the Hill Country that had been part of an exotic game ranch within 40 miles of San Antonio. Since then they have acquired another couple hundred adjacent acres from the same source. It all has seven-foot wire mesh fences, so they have their own herd of white tail deer, and no coyotes. Hawks keep the rabbits in check. His daughter's horses add to the scenery.
Someone told me that the Cavazos had gotten most of the old Cavazos Ranch away from the King Ranch in a lawsuit. They said Captain King and his partner Mifflen Kenedy had defrauded their ancestors.
All the little "ranches" I know of between here and Houston are weekend getaways for rich people.
When we went to the charreada (Mexican rodeo) last April during Fiesta San Antonio, Larisa asked me about the museum next to the hotel. I had never been inside, so I said "Let's go." Turns out it is filled with artifacts from the 19th century and early 20th century Texas ranches. I spent at least 45 minutes talking to a couple of the volunteer guides there--old people from old ranch families.
RNJ
*Prohibition was still in effect. It was illegal to sell or manufacture alcoholic drinks. Of course, people did it anyhow. A bootlegger was a person who sold whiskey or other alcoholic products.
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Date Feb. 11 2020 6:40:01
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