Buffalo Bill, Tom Mix, and Hollywood:
The Mythmaking of the Cowboy Hat

If the Stetson conquered the West through its functionality, it was spectacle and cinema that turned it into a universal symbol. In less than half a century, the cowboy hat went from a working tool worn by ranchers to the most recognizable cultural icon of American identity, and that shift owes everything to a handful of extraordinary personalities and to the power of the image.

Buffalo Bill and the Wild West Shows: The Hat Becomes Spectacle

The Stetson got a considerable boost in the 1880s thanks to William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody (1846–1917). Cody was already a devotee of custom Stetsons, which he wore onstage as early as the beginning of the 1870s in traveling stage productions organized by the popular novelist Ned Buntline. The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum (Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) describes his entrance this way: Cody would come in at a gallop, dressed in a fringed jacket, tall black boots, and beaded gloves, topped with an oversized Stetson that he waved in a broad greeting to the crowd, drawing a standing ovation every time.

When he launched his own Buffalo Bill's Wild West on May 19, 1883, in Omaha, Nebraska, his Stetson-topped image was plastered on posters from San Francisco to Saxony (Germany). For Stetson, it was priceless advertising, and entirely free. As HistoryNet, the American history portal that publishes Wild West Magazine among others, put it, Stetson "couldn't have bought better advertising." The Wild West Shows toured for nearly thirty years, with performances before the crowned heads of Europe, and played a decisive part in transforming the cowboy hat from a working tool into a global cultural symbol.

From a surviving Buffalo Bill Stetson, sold at auction with documented provenance, we know it was made of nutria fur (coypu), with a brim 15.5 inches (about 39 cm) in diameter: spectacular proportions, designed to be seen from the farthest bleachers.

Annie Oakley: The Stetson in a Feminine Key

Annie Oakley (1860–1926), nicknamed "Little Sure Shot" by the Sioux chief Sitting Bull, joined Buffalo Bill's show in 1884 and stayed for seventeen years. In the show's promotional photographs and posters, she is invariably crowned with her upturned-brim Stetson, adorned with a metal star — probably one of her many shooting awards. Oakley was one of the first women to make the Stetson a feminine accessory as much as a masculine one, opening the way for generations of cowgirls.

The Cowgirls of the 101 Ranch: The Hat Goes Plural

Buffalo Bill's show was not the only one to put women in Stetsons. The Miller Brothers' 101 Ranch Real Wild West, based near Ponca City, Oklahoma, employed a whole troupe of cowgirls whom the programs described as "the sauciest, jolliest, and most charming gathering of femininity that ever galloped." Among them, "Buckskin Bessie" Herberg (1896–?), born Betty Herberg in Pipestone County, Minnesota, joined the show at 16 in 1911 and became one of its stars, performing acrobatics with her horse Happy, always in her Stetson and dressed in buckskin, hence her nickname. An autographed promotional photo from 1916, held at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West (Cody, Wyoming), shows her in her signature Stetson.

Another notable figure was Jackie Laird (Mary Ellen Laird), who had run away from home at eleven to join a circus as a trick rider. She joined the 101 Ranch at twenty-three and became the leader of the cowgirl troupe for twelve years. She wore her wide-brimmed Stetson at all times, along with a buckskin skirt, a silk blouse, and handmade boots. Her most famous act was leaping from one horse to another among four mounts at full gallop around the arena.

Bill Pickett: The Black Cowboy Hollywood Forgot

The 101 Ranch also counted among its stars Bill Pickett (1870–1932), an African American cowboy born in Williamson County, Texas, the inventor of bulldogging (steer wrestling): a technique of seizing a steer by the horns and wrestling it to the ground with a bite to the lip, inspired by herding dogs. Pickett joined the 101 Ranch around 1905 and became one of its main attractions, always in his Stetson. In 1921, he appeared in the film The Bull-Dogger: one of the very first films to feature a Black cowboy. Inducted into the National Rodeo Hall of Fame in 1972 (the first African American to receive the honor), Pickett embodies an entire chapter of cowboy-hat history that Hollywood cinema systematically erased.

Tom Mix: The Hat That Invented Hollywood

The advent of silent film amplified the legend of the cowboy hat on an unprecedented scale. Tom Mix (1880–1940), born in Mix Run, Pennsylvania (as Thomas Edwin Mix according to civil records, though he presented himself all his life as Thomas Hezikiah Mix) was the first great star of Hollywood westerns and, according to the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.), the man who had "the greatest influence on western dress before 1930."

Across nearly 300 films (sources vary between 270 in detailed filmographies and more than 300 according to the Smithsonian Institution and Stetson, the difference coming from whether the roughly fifteen-minute one-reelers are counted) Mix imposed a flamboyant style that broke radically with the authentic cowboy: elaborate double-breasted outfits, spectacular stunts he performed himself, and above all an oversized white Stetson with a very tall crown that became his absolute trademark.

Mix was so inseparable from his hat that the John B. Stetson Company took an unprecedented step: it named a hat model after him, the "Tom Mix," a high-peaked, extra-wide-brimmed style that remains in the Stetson catalog today. Tom Mix's original hat is held at the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.), where it is described as a "ten-gallon" Stetson made between 1910 and 1930.

The Origin of the "Ten-Gallon Hat"

It was Tom Mix's hat that popularized the expression "ten-gallon hat" in the 1920s. The origin of the phrase is still debated among historians. The most common explanation (a hat that could hold ten gallons of water) is in fact a myth: even the largest hat holds only a few quarts. Most specialists believe the term derives from the Spanish "galón" (braid, trim), referring to the decorative braids (galones) that vaqueros fixed to the band of their sombrero: a hat trimmed with ten galones being a particularly elegant sombrero. Another hypothesis proposes a corruption of the Spanish phrase "tan galán" ("so elegant") used to describe the majestic bearing of a rider in his hat.

William S. Hart: Realism Against Spectacle

It would be unfair not to mention William S. Hart (1864–1946), the other great figure of the silent western, who offered a realistic counterpoint to the flamboyant Tom Mix. Born a year before the Stetson Company was founded, Hart counted real figures of the West among his friends, including Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp. Unlike Mix, Hart wore plain, authentic Stetsons, closer to what real cowboys wore. As HistoryNet noted, Hart was "known for his accurate portrayals of Western characters": a realism that extended right down to the choice of his hat.

The Golden Age of the Western: The Hat Conquers the Planet

Other silent stars, like Tim McCoy, helped popularize the oversized cowboy hat that, though impractical for a real cowboy, became Hollywood's symbol of the Wild West.

The arrival of talking pictures in the 1930s opened a new era. Gene Autry (1907–1998), the "Singing Cowboy," was the first to merge the western and country music on screen, always in his spotless white Stetson. Roy Rogers (1911–1998), the "King of the Cowboys," and his wife Dale Evans (1912–2001) both wore Stetsons, helping, as Annie Oakley had before them, to make the cowboy hat a unisex accessory.

Then came John Wayne (1907–1979), whose massive frame topped by a Stetson became one of the most reproduced images of the 20th century. Wayne wore the cowboy hat in more than 80 westerns over a fifty-year career, from the silent era (The Big Trail, 1930) to the late classics (True Grit, 1969). His influence was such that the cowboy hat became, in the minds of millions of viewers around the world, no longer a functional object but a heroic attribute — the visible sign of a brave, independent, and righteous man.

The golden age of the western (from the 1940s to the 1960s) made the cowboy hat an object of worldwide fascination. Millions of viewers, from Tokyo to Paris, forever linked the wide brim and tall crown with adventure, freedom, and the pioneer spirit. Cinema had accomplished what neither the Stetson catalogs nor the rodeos could do on their own: turn a utilitarian piece of headwear into a founding myth.

The Color Code: White Hats and Black Hats

Hollywood also invented a visual language of the hat that had no historical basis but that deeply marked the collective imagination. In the B-westerns of the 1930s to 1950s, an unwritten code took hold: the hero wore a white hat (Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger), while the villain wore a black hat. This color code, childishly simple, let viewers instantly tell the "good guys" from the "bad guys", even in the dimly lit movie houses of rural America.

This purely Hollywood convention so saturated popular culture that the phrase "white hat / black hat" entered everyday language to denote, far beyond cinema, the forces of good and evil, including, today, in the field of cybersecurity, where white hat hackers and black hat hackers unknowingly carry on a tradition born in the studios of Hollywood.