Stetson

John Batterson Stetson was born in 1830 in Orange, New Jersey, into a hatmaking family. In 1860, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and given little hope of recovery. Following the common medical advice of the era, he went west—to the dry air of Colorado and Missouri—where he spent time prospecting and living outdoors. During this period, Stetson experimented with felt-making from raw fur using a technique requiring no weaving: by agitating, pressing, and steaming animal fur, he could produce a stiff, waterproof felt without a loom. He fashioned a large, high-crowned, wide-brimmed hat from this material and wore it on the trail, where it attracted attention for its practicality.

In 1865, Stetson returned to Philadelphia—his tuberculosis in remission, possibly cured by the outdoor life—and founded the John B. Stetson Company. He began producing his 'Boss of the Plains' hat: a simple, symmetrical design with a high round crown and a flat, wide brim, made from beaver felt. He sent samples to hat dealers in the West. The response was overwhelming. Cowboys, ranchers, lawmen, and gamblers across the frontier adopted the design, customizing the crown by pinching and creasing it in styles that varied by region. The Stetson factory grew to be the largest hat factory in the world, employing four thousand workers by 1906.

The Stetson absorbed into itself the entire mythology of the American West that emerged in the late 19th century through dime novels, Wild West shows, and eventually cinema. Buffalo Bill Cody wore a Stetson; so did Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, and the actors who portrayed them. The hat became the visual shorthand for 'cowboy' with such completeness that it replaced all prior associations—the 'ten-gallon hat,' the 'cowboy hat,' the 'western hat' all refer to variations on Stetson's design, often using his name generically. In many languages, 'stetson' became the common noun for any wide-brimmed western hat.

Today, the Stetson Company still manufactures hats in Garland, Texas. The Boss of the Plains design is still in production. The hat appears in country music videos, on Texas politicians, in Hollywood westerns, and on the heads of actual working ranchers for whom it remains functional equipment—the wide brim provides shade and rain protection in exactly the way Stetson found useful on the Colorado trail in 1860. Few objects have so thoroughly merged the mythological and the practical as the hat that a sick hatmaker invented for himself.