Before the Stetson:
What Frontier Men Really Wore

Contrary to the image Hollywood has handed down, the cowboys, outlaws, and pioneers of the Old West did not all wear big wide-brimmed hats. Before the Stetson appeared in 1865, the headwear of the Frontier was remarkably varied, mismatched, and often improvised. A man wore what he could find, what he could afford, or what he had packed away when he left the East — and it was almost never a cowboy hat.

The Derby: "The Hat That Won the West"

The journalist, society columnist, and railroad historian Lucius Morris Beebe (1902–1966), a flamboyant figure of American journalism, a former columnist for the New York Herald Tribune (New York, New York) and owner of the legendary Territorial Enterprise of Virginia City, Nevada, the paper where Mark Twain had gotten his start, was the first to tear down the myth. On October 26, 1957, in an editorial titled The Hat That Won the West published in the Deseret News of Salt Lake City, Utah, Beebe (still running the Territorial Enterprise at the time) examined thousands of period photographs and reached a conclusion that landed like a bombshell: the most common headwear in the American West was not the Stetson but the derby: the English bowler. He wrote that "the authentic hat of the Old West was the cast-iron derby, the bowler of Old Bond Street and the chapeau melon of French usage." Beebe added that the image of the ever-present cowboy hat was largely an invention of the painter Frederic Remington, and named among the notorious derby wearers the gambler and lawman Bat Masterson, the stagecoach robber Charles E. "Black Bart" Boles, and the chief detective of the Wells Fargo transport and express company, James B. Hume.

The irony is delicious: this round, stiff, low-crowned hat, associated in the European imagination with the bankers of the City of London and gentlemen in three-piece suits, was in fact the favorite of the cowboys, professional gamblers, lawmen, and outlaws of the American Frontier. How do we explain the paradox? To understand it, we have to go back to the very origins of the derby.

The London Origins of the Derby

The derby (or bowler hat) was created in 1849 by the London hatters Thomas and William Bowler, on commission from the firm Lock & Co. of St James's Street (London, United Kingdom), the oldest hat shop in the world still in business. The client was Edward Coke, younger brother of the 2nd Earl of Leicester, who wanted headwear that could protect the gamekeepers of the family estate of Holkham Hall, in Norfolk (England, United Kingdom). Until then the gamekeepers had worn top hats, which were forever being knocked off by low branches as they rode. Coke wanted a hat that was low, close-fitting, and reinforced with hardened felt: a hat that could take a knock. When he came to collect the prototype from Lock & Co. on December 17, 1849, he set it on the floor and stamped on it hard to test its strength. Satisfied, he paid 12 shillings (about £99 in 2026).

This hat, which Lock & Co. called the "Coke" (pronounced cook), soon took the name of its makers, the Bowler brothers. It was a runaway success in England, then crossed the Atlantic with the waves of European immigrants pouring into the American West. In the United States it was renamed the "derby," after the horse races founded by the Earl of Derby.

Why the Derby Ruled the Frontier

The derby's success in the American West was no accident. It came down to reasons that were at once practical, economic, and cultural:

Its low, close-fitting shape made it remarkably stable on the head, even in high wind or at a gallop: a considerable advantage on the gust-swept plains. Its rigid structure of hardened felt stood up to knocks, falls, and rough handling. It was mass-produced in European and American felt factories, which made it far cheaper than a Stetson: a derby cost roughly four to five times less than a Boss of the Plains, whose retail price started at $5 (about $105 in 2026) for the basic model in ordinary felt, climbed to $10 (about $205 in 2026) for fine felt, and reached $30 (about $615 in 2026) for the beaver- or nutria-fur model, considerable sums at the time. The derby, by contrast, was within just about anyone's reach.

Finally, the derby enjoyed a logistical advantage: it was immediately available in the general stores of every western town, whereas the Stetson, made in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, took several years to build out its distribution network into the remote territories.

What the Period Photographs Show

The photographic evidence is eloquent, and it bears out Beebe's observations. Bat Masterson (1853–1921), the famous professional gambler and lawman of Dodge City, Kansas, sported an impeccable derby, and he was so attached to the style that he wore it all his life, including after he became a sportswriter in New York. The best-known photograph of Billy the Kid (circa 1880) shows him in a tall, narrow hat that looks more like a small top hat than a cowboy hat. Wild Bill Hickok (1837–1876) was photographed in a flat, low-crowned hat, sometimes described as a "pancake" hat. A well-known photograph of Jesse James shows him in a low hat with an upturned brim, typical of the civilian hats of the day.

The most striking case remains that of the Wild Bunch: the gang of Butch Cassidy (Robert LeRoy Parker), the Sundance Kid (Harry Alonzo Longabaugh), Ben Kilpatrick ("the Tall Texan"), Harvey Logan ("Kid Curry"), and Will Carver. The famous group portrait taken on November 21, 1900, in the studio of photographer John Swartz in Fort Worth, Texas (the celebrated "Fort Worth Five Photo") shows these five outlaws, among the most wanted in the West, posing in three-piece suits and wearing derbies and town hats, with an elegance that would make a Fifth Avenue dandy turn pale. Swartz, proud of his shot, displayed it in his shop window, where a detective from the Pinkerton agency (the private detective agency hired by the railroad companies to hunt down train robbers) recognized one of the men, setting off the manhunt that would bring about the gang's end.

The Other Headwear of the Frontier

The derby was not the only contender. The American Frontier, in its social and cultural diversity, offered a range of headwear as varied as its inhabitants:

The military forage caps inherited from the Civil War (1861–1865) were everywhere in the postwar West. Thousands of demobilized soldiers (Union and Confederate alike) headed West still wearing their uniforms, unable to afford civilian clothes. The forage cap, with its short visor and flat crown, was the most common headwear among veterans turned cowboys, miners, or farmers. The regular army stationed in the western forts also wore the regulation forage cap, and later the wide-brimmed campaign hat adopted in the 1870s.

The coonskin caps, drawn directly from the tradition of the fur trappers and mountain men like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, were still worn by some gold prospectors and pioneers in the 1850s and 1860s. Warm in winter, they nonetheless had one major flaw: they were often infested with fleas and ticks, and they soaked the head when it rained: two drawbacks that John B. Stetson himself observed with disgust during his expedition to Pike's Peak, Colorado.

Rudimentary straw hats, hand-braided or bought cheap, were common in hot regions, notably Texas and the Southwest, but their fragility made them unsuited to ranch work over the long haul.

Top hats, surprising as it may seem, turned up regularly in photographs of the West — worn by the bankers, lawyers, merchants, and notables of booming towns like San Francisco, California, Denver, Colorado, or Tombstone, Arizona.

Finally, the soft felt slouch hats, with no fixed shape, made up a kind of catch-all category for everyone who lacked the means (or the desire) to buy a derby or a Stetson.

A fact too often left out: historians estimate that one cowboy in four on the Frontier was African American. Former slaves freed after the Civil War, free men from the South, demobilized Buffalo Soldiers, all wore the same headwear as their white counterparts: derbies, forage caps, straw hats, slouch hats, and later the Stetson. Their contribution to the history of the West (and of the cowboy hat) has been largely erased by Hollywood, which forged the image of an all-white West. Figures like Nat Love (1854–1921), nicknamed "Deadwood Dick," or Bass Reeves (1838–1910), the first African American deputy U.S. Marshal (the officer who assists the federal marshal and is charged with serving arrest warrants across a given territory) west of the Mississippi, deserve to be recalled here, if only because the hat they wore tells exactly the same story as that of their contemporaries.

The Decisive Influence from the South

But the deepest and most lasting influence came from the South: the sombrero of the Mexican vaqueros. It was this Hispanic tradition that would give John B. Stetson the direct inspiration for his Boss of the Plains, and transform the silhouette of the American rider forever.