Legacies, Borders, and Revival:
Beyond Texas and Beyond the 20th Century

Boulet: When Québec Steps In

In 1933, Georges-Alidor Boulet founded the "St-Tite Shoe Co." in Saint-Tite, Québec: a small town nicknamed "the leather town" for the skill of its workforce. The company first made men's dress shoes. During the Second World War, its reputation for quality earned it a Canadian government contract to make all of the army's shoes and boots: as many as 300 pairs a day, three-quarters of them destined for soldiers.

In 1964, Georges-Alidor's three sons (Robert, Roger, and Reynald) joined the company and turned it toward the western boot, making it the first Canadian house to specialize in the field. The same three brothers organized, that same decade, the first rodeos in Saint-Tite: the direct ancestors of the Festival Western de Saint-Tite, now one of the largest western gatherings in the world. Boulet remains family-run (a fourth generation joined in 2013) and is today the largest maker of western boots in Canada, specializing 100% in Goodyear welt construction.

Fenoglio: The Legacy Continues, on the Same Ground

The Fenoglio story, in a way, brings full circle the one told in the previous chapter. The Fenoglio family had been in Nocona since 1886, long before turning to bootmaking. In 1999, the Nocona Boot Company factory closed its doors, the brand being absorbed at the time by Justin Brands, which moved its production to El Paso. A group of craftspeople who had worked there refused, however, to let the local know-how die out: in 2001, they founded the Montague Boot Company, set up in the very same brick building on Main Street where Enid Justin had opened her own workshop in 1925.

It is in that continuity that James Fenoglio took over the operation, first under the name "James Montague," before proudly placing his own family's name on the boot box. The house today employs craftspeople with, in some cases, more than forty years of experience, faithful to its motto: "There's Nothing Finer than Fenoglio."

Corral: The Southern Border, the Mexican Turn

In 1999, Othell Welch founded Corral Boots in Edinburg, Texas, after a trip to León, in Guanajuato (Mexico's leather capital) that opened his eyes to the skill of the local bootmakers. In 2006, Corral partnered with the Cuadra family, itself at the head of an exotic-leather house founded in León in 1991, to reach a new level. Corral set itself apart with a decidedly fashion-forward approach: it was the first to offer a western boot with lizard inlays and laser cutouts, and its signature motif (heart and wings) became one of the most recognizable in the industry, worn primarily by women.

Tecovas: The Western Boot in the Direct-to-Consumer Age

In 2015, Paul Hedrick (a Texan by birth, a Harvard graduate, then a consultant and private-equity investor in Greenwich, Connecticut) struggled to find good western boots far from his native Texas. His research revealed an American market worth more than $3 billion a year. Rather than open a store, he sold his first pairs out of the trunk of his car, at farmers' markets and even at the holiday party of his old Dallas elementary school.

The brand's name comes from the Tecovas Formation, a little-known geological curiosity of Palo Duro Canyon, in the Texas Panhandle: a deliberately obscure and distinctly Texan name. Made in León, like Corral's, Tecovas boots quickly established themselves as the reference for direct-to-consumer sales in the western sector, before the opening, a few years later, of the brand's first physical stores in Austin, Texas.

Hedrick openly credits the influence of Warby Parker, Bonobos, and Tuft & Needle: the direct-to-consumer pioneers in eyewear, ready-to-wear, and bedding. Where the great handcraft houses often top $1,000 a pair, Tecovas democratized the entry point: from $195 at its 2015 launch, around $375 for its classic boot in 2026, a gap with high-end craftsmanship that remains considerable, without ever sacrificing manufacture in León.

Why León?

Corral and Tecovas were not alone in choosing León: one of Mexico's largest cities and the industrial hub of Guanajuato state, it accounts on its own for roughly 70% of the country's footwear production and turns out most of the nation's worked leather. Founded in 1576 to defend the Spanish frontier against the Chichimeca (the subject of the article The Origins of the Western Boot) the city developed intensive cattle ranching early on, then a leather industry fed by the arrival of Spanish, Argentine, and Italian craftspeople. That same pattern of migration had already shaped Lucchese and Tony Lama in Texas a century earlier: in León, it repeats itself on the scale of an entire city.

Four Paths, One Shared Craft

A century-old Canadian family, a Texas workshop resurrected on its own foundations, an alliance with Mexico, a start-up born out of a car trunk: these four stories share neither their date nor their geography, and even take flatly opposed stances on the question of manufacture. Boulet defends a Made in Canada forged in Saint-Tite, Québec since 1933; Fenoglio claims a Made in Texas out of Nocona as an act of resistance; Corral and Tecovas, by contrast, embrace their Mexican roots in León as self-evident marks of quality. The camps differ, but the bedrock is the same: leather worked by hand, traditional construction, and the conviction that a well-made boot crosses borders as readily as it crosses generations.