The History of the Cowboy Hat

Every Texan Needs One

Cowboy hats and Texas goes together like peanut butter and jelly. It’s an emblem of American culture, particularly in the west and southwest, but in Texas, the cowboy hat is woven deeply into the fabric of our identity and culture. More Texans need to wear one! Have you ever wondered where the cowboy hat originated and came from? The earliest of what we today think of as a cowboy hat showed up in the 1860’s, but we can trace the origin of the hat all the way back to the 13th century. Mongolian horsemen were recorded wearing hats with a tall crown and wide brims to keep their head insulated and face sheltered from the sun.

There’s evidence that quite a few cultures located in hot, sunny climates adopted similar wide brimmed headwear. In Mexico, the vaqueros wore the sombrero and it’s thought that the early Texas cowboys adopted the style of the Mexican vaqueros sombrero creating the first versions of the American cowboy hat.

When European settlers first started moving into the American west in the 1800’s, there was no standard hat. They wore a range of headwear including top hats, bonnets, sailor caps, coonskin hats and bowler hats, also known as the derby. A lot of your early cowboys wore the derby. Famous gunslinger and gambler Bat Masterson favored the derby and Billy the Kid was known to wear a top hat. But by the mid 1800’s as the west was being settled it soon became apparent that these hats did little to protect these men from the blaring rays of the sun.

Enter John B. Stetson. Stetson worked for his father who was a hatmaker up in New Jersey. He contracted tuberculosis and was told he didn’t have long to live so he set out for the American west in pursuit of adventure. On his trip he’d seen the hats worn by the cowboys and others working out west and saw how they offered little protection from the sun. He’d seen the sombreros worn by the vaqueros and the Texas cowboys so he set out in 1865 to design a new hat he called the Boss of the Plains. He designed it to be durable, waterproof, lightweight and fashionable. The original hats were made of beaver felt and complete with a sweatband to distinguish the front from the back. The were colored in grey, brown or white.

The Boss of the Plains hat quickly gained popularity and soon became recognized as a status symbol out in the west. Eventually these caps came to be known as Stetsons - also known as the cowboy hat.

The Stetsons of the 1860’s isn’t what the average person thinks of when they think of a modern cowboy hat. It’s brim and cap were both round and flat. But over time as the hat gained in popularity, variations and customizations morphed into the modern hat we think of today.

By the turn of the century, Texans began calling their hats ten gallon hats. How did that moniker originate? Some think it refers to how much liquid could be carried inside the hat. Stetson ran a famous ad depicting a cowboy giving his weary horse the last drop of water from the crown of his hat. But it’s unlikely this where the moniker came from.

The most likely explanation for the origination of the term came from the Mexican vaqueros. Texas cowboys often crossed path with their Mexican brethren who sported braided hat bands - called galons in Spanish - on their sombreros. A ten galon sombrero was a hat with a crown tall enough that it could hold ten hatbands so Texans anglicized the word and started calling their hats ten gallon hats.

So there you have it - a brief history of the cowboy hat. If you don’t have one, go get one and make sure you wear it! We are in Texas after all.