When I opened the doors to Big Bend Saddlery in Alpine, Texas, I was hit with the smell of leather.
It's deep, warm, and permeates the entire store, which seems to carry every type of western wear and then some: saddles and chaps, slickers and vests, hats stacked to the ceiling and belts dangling from their racks like spaghetti.
When I mentioned the scent to Gary Dunshee, the owner of the Saddlery, he shrugged. “I don’t notice it,” he said.
Makes sense, he’s likely immune - I found him in the work room surrounded by leather. Beside him, custom saddles gleamed under the overhead lights, so smooth they looked nearly reflective.
Gary was oiling a cartridge slide - a small leather case for bullets. It’s a thin piece of material, only about six inches long, and it was getting just as much attention as something larger and flashier might. This is a place where, down to the smallest element, craft comes first.
Gary’s been working at the shop since 1971, and he and the rest of his team hand-make saddles, tack and other gear for working cowboys all over the country. His shop also sizes and shapes hats, which is the reason for my visit.
Over the last few years, cowboy hats have made their way into the mainstream, showing up on the heads of celebrities, athletes, and some Westward-bound billionaires. However, if you live in West Texas, cowboy hats are nothing new - you see them all the time on locals and tourists alike.
It's clear some people have been wearing them forever, but, on the heads of visitors, hats might be brand new, a little big, or sitting entirely backwards. So I went to ask Gary a question to clear things up: what’s the right way to wear a cowboy hat?
He gave me a diplomatic answer:
“I think the right way is whatever's comfortable on whoever's wearing it, probably. Whatever they like,” said Gary. “I'm not going to go up and tell somebody, ‘Hey, pardon me, you're not wearing your hat like you need to be.’”
What he can tell me about, he said, is what the real working cowboys like to wear.
When a cowboy picks out a hat, there are two important things: “They want [a hat] to keep the sun off their face, and they don't want it blowing off of their heads,” said Gary. “What they do is buy one that fits what a cowboy would call ‘properly.’ They put it on, and it's snug, but they can still screw it down tighter. If a cow runs off and they have to go get her, they don't want it blowing off. You can spend more time hunting hats than you can punching cows sometimes” (punching cows means herding cattle into chutes or box cars).
When it comes to crowns (the dome part of the hat), there are choices: West Texas, Cattleman, Stockman, Gus, Rough Stock, Puncher, Vaquero, Two Dot, Tom Mix, Fedora, and Cutter. Cowboys usually go for a Cattleman top, which is good to grip. It’s got two dips in the sides and a crease down the middle - what you probably think of when you think of a cowboy hat.
In terms of style, Gary told me cowboys don’t usually go for super wide six-inch brims but that’s subject to change. Brim size, in particular, seems to be cyclical - expanding, contracting, and then expanding all over again. “Right now,” said Gary, “everybody wants a four-and-a-half-inch brim. It'll swing back to a three-and-a-half or four-inch brim, but it might take thirty years to do that.”
In the western wear world, trends start the way they do for everyone else - celebrities. For cowboys, that means rodeo stars.
“The best place to see how trends get started is at the WRCA World Championships in Amarillo,” said Gary. “All the big boys are there, so you can imagine all the sixteen-year-olds and seventeen-year-olds running around, saying ‘I want to be like him.’”
Gary mentioned one of the big boys (“the guy,” he said), a cutter named Buster Welch, who used to set the trends.
“No matter where Buster went, there was a little entourage of people behind him," said Gary. "If Buster got hot and threw his jacket down over his shoulders, everybody behind him just instantly—” (Gary made a whooshing sound) “—the jacket came down the same. I told somebody when we came back, ‘if Buster would have worn his hat backwards, everybody in there would have turned their hats around.’”
As for why non-cowboys are into the look, Gary points to Yellowstone (“good, bad, whatever - a lot of people watch it,” he said) and The Cowboy Channel. For the record, I didn’t know there was a Cowboy Channel.
“When COVID hit,” said Gary, “that’s the only thing that a lot of people would watch on TV.” He’s onto something - over the last couple of years, Cowboy Channel programming has boomed in viewership. Gary thinks that in a time of uncertainty, people tuned in for the ritual of it.
“They played the national anthem and had a prayer at the opening of it,” he said. “People liked that.”
“I imagine Beyoncé also has something to do with it,” I said.
Gary laughed. “Probably so.”
It’s not just the customers that have changed, it’s the whole business. While hats are in high demand, not that many people are in the market for a saddle anymore. “We've hung on and survived,” said Gary. “But saddle shops around the United States have just gone out of business like gangbusters.”
Gary says that there’s enough business for the few that are left, including Big Bend Saddlery. This shift reflects the changes in ranch culture, and the land itself. “The ranches were way, way bigger than they are now,” said Gary. “If you wanted to see your cows, you saddled a horse and went and saw your cows.”
Ranch transportation might look different now.
“If you're around San Antonio and want to see your cows,” said Gary. “They're in a two hundred-acre pasture and you get in the Polaris and drive around and see them. I don't sell Polaris parts.”
And he’s not going to start any time soon. "All we know how to do is make stuff for cowboys,” said Gary. “We're really not interested in doing anything else.”
Caló
Le Salió Cola - this means the situation became more complicated or difficult than expected— a surprise sudden turn for the worse. You thought you could handle it, but then things got out of hand? Te salió cola, ese.
Caló is a borderland dialect. You can find more episodeshere.
Other recent programming:
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to take up a yearslong dispute over a plan to ship highly radioactive nuclear waste to rural West Texas, a case that could have sweeping implications for how the nation deals with a growing stockpile of waste generated by nuclear power plants. Travis Bubenik has that story here. And, he spoke with Texas Standard about his reporting last week. You can find that conversation here.
Mitch Borden and the MPR newsroom continue to follow the fallout from a recent fire near Odessa a couple of months ago that allegedly led to oilfield-related chemicals and liquids spilling into a local neighborhood. Here’s Mitch’s most recent piece on the investigation. If you’d like to listen back to the entirety of his coverage, here’s his first piece of reporting on it.
High Five
Last Friday the station honored the memory of Kevin Williamson with a special broadcast and a plaque dedication.
We celebrated Marfa-style with a special show featuring country and pop from Willie Nelson to Lady Gaga.
Here are five songs from that show:
- Finally - CeCe Penisten
- Rhinestone Cowboy - Glen Campbell
- Fantasy - Mariah Carey
- Gimme a Ride to Heaven Boy - Terry Allen
- Bidi Bidi Bom Bom - Selena
Listen to the entire show here, and check out all of our archived music shows on our Mixcloud.
PSAs
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Make a donation today by heading to marfapubliradio.org/donate.
