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Few items in the history of the American culture carry the same iconic weight as the cowboy hat. It is the one item of apparel that can be worn in all four corners of the world and receive immediate recognition. The cowboy hat is symbolic of the free spirit and rugged individualism that defined the West and its wearer today is still recognized to be part of the idealized West, or at least someone who desires to be identified with that mystique.
Symbolism aside, the hat keeps the sun off and the head cool - or in the case of a felt hat, warm. Hats have been around since man first had the need to protect himself from the elements. The cowboy hat still serves this basic function for millions of people who make their living under the sun and out in the elements.
The particular design that came to be known as the "cowboy hat," the "western hat," the "ten gallon hat" or the Stetson is not that old. Most assuredly there were other hats being worn by people moving westward from the east before and after the Civil War. Cowpunchers and men of the West made do with a variety of headgear - castoffs from the war, the slouch hat, the bowler derby, top-hats, even sailor tarns. The bowler at one time was the most popular hat in the West, and was called "the hat that won the West" by early 20th century newspaperman and historian Lucius Beebe.
It was the need for extra shade in the sun beaten Southwest that inspired the earliest extra broad brimmed hats in North America, the wide sombreros of the Spanish and Mexican horsemen and cattle herders, the vaqueros, which translates as cowmen or cowboys. Anglo herdsmen and entrepreneurs who took up the same trade adopted their Mexican counterparts' headgear.
It wasn't until John B. Stetson invented the cowboy hat we know today that there was a uniform hat widely marketed specifically for the men of the west and for those men who wanted to adopt the West's mystique.
As a young man in the mid- 1 800s, Stetson, the son of a hatter in the northeast, was diagnosed with tuberculosis and went West to drier...