By Rachel Kovaciny
When you imagine the classic American cowboy, what do you imagine him wearing?
I bet it’s a hat. Not a top hat or a fedora or a pith helmet or a bowler hat: a cowboy hat. Particularly, a Stetson. But… why did cowboys wear Stetsons? Who invented them? And how did they get so famous?
John B. Stetson invented the Stetson cowboy hat. He was born in New Jersey in 1830. He became a hatter like his father, but had to leave the family business when diagnosed with tuberculosis. The doctors prescribed a “dry air cure,” which meant Stetson needed to travel west to more arid places, particularly mountainous regions. He ended up in Colorado for his health just when the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush got rolling in the early 1860s, and he became a prospector.
Stetson had decent luck panning for gold, but found even more success hunting animals for meat and trapping beaver for their pelts. He knew how to process beaver fur to make felt, and how to make hats from the fur. Legend has it he disliked the woolen hats and coonskin caps miners wore. Wool was warm, but not waterproof, and both lost its shape and became sodden and heavy when it rained. Coonskin caps were better at shedding water, but they had an unfortunate tendency to harbor fleas and smell terrible if the pelts weren’t prepared properly.
So, Stetson decided to show his fellow miners what a real hat could be. He knew beaver felt hats were basically waterproof, lightweight, not smelly, and would return to their shape even after getting rolled up or stuffed into a saddlebag. He had pelts handy, so why not put his hat-making skills to good use and make the hat he and his fellow miners needed?
Whether he created the hat on a dare, to win a bet, or just because he had beaver fur available and needed a hat, we will never know. But Stetson created a high-crowned, wide-brimmed hat for himself. The tall crown created a pocket of air that helped insulate the wearer’s head. It provided extra space if you went foraging for berries or nuts or other food and needed to carry your findings back to camp. Because the hat was waterproof, it kept your head dry when it rained, and you could also use it to carry water. The wide brim meant precipitation stayed away from your face and didn’t run under your collar and down the back of your shirt.
Another legend says Stetson sold his first wide-brimmed outdoorsy hat to a passing cowboy who took one look at that hat, understood how perfectly suited it was to his lifestyle, and bought it for a five-dollar gold piece on the spot. Whether that’s true, we know Stetson understood how well his hat design worked for the outdoor activities that pioneers, miners, and cowmen engaged in.
By 1865, Stetson’s health improved enough to go back East. Instead of returning to the family hattery in New Jersey, he settled in Philadelphia and started his own business with the money he had earned out West. He experimented with current Eastern hat styles for a while and hit upon a way of making excellent lightweight hats out of fine beaver fur. He combined that lighter weight with the wide brim and tall crown of the hat he’d made for himself back in Colorado to create what he called the “Boss of the Plains” hat. This hat was perfect for frontier life. But how was a Philadelphia hat maker to get this hat into the hands of the people who needed it? Stetson had another good idea: let his hats advertise themselves. Instead of sending drawings, photographs, or descriptions of his hats to vendors and merchants, he sent them each an actual hat to touch, see, and try out. He said a minimum order of twelve hats was required to sell Stetson hats in a store or catalog. His tactic worked; within a year, he had set up his own hat factory on the outskirts of Philadelphia.
Other hat designs and styles followed, building on the foundation of that first hat. Within a few years, the name “Stetson” was synonymous with “hat” across the American West. By 1886, Stetson owned the largest hat company in the world, one that led the industry in mechanized innovations. By the time John B. Stetson died in 1906, the company was selling close to two million hats a year. The Stetson company stayed in business until the early 1970s. Now, the license to create hats with the Stetson name belongs to a company in Texas.
President Teddy Roosevelt favored Stetson hats, which helped make them popular in the East at the beginning of the twentieth century. The image of a cowboy wearing a Stetson on the cover of the 1902 western novel The Virginian by Owen Wister fed the notion that rugged and adventurous men wore Stetsons. They surged in popularity again a couple of decades later when cowboy movies ruled the box office from the 1930s through the 1950s. Cowboy stars like Tom Mix, John Wayne, and Roy Rogers made Stetsons popular, and our association of the brand with the Old West became a fixed part of our national culture.
Today, the name “Stetson” feels as interchangeable with the word “hat” as the name “Kleenex” does with the term “facial tissue.” John B. Stetson may have traveled west to improve his health, but he ended up creating a hat that improved the lives of millions of people for more than a hundred and fifty years across the entire nation.
