“he always told me that a cowboy boot should look like a...

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Leslie Clark

“He always told me that a cowboy boot should look like a Coke bottle or a beautiful woman; then he’d describe the shape of an hourglass with his hands.”

oy Story 3 hit movie screens this summer, and once again

its old-fashioned hero, Woody, rushed forth to save the

good guys and vanquish the bad. As everybody knows, the

movie is animated, the characters are toys, and Woody is that

enduring symbol of American legend, lore and romance—

a cowboy. We recognize him by his hat, his six-gun and his

boots: Especially his boots.

It is impossible to overestimate the allure, the mystique,

the lasting popularity of cowboy boots. Even though most

people who wear them have rarely or never seen the backside

of a horse, cowboy boots grab the imagination and persist in

holding on to a star-studded, fabled status. In Texas, which

might reasonably be called the motherlode for handcrafted

boots, they are considered an artform and a gloriously proud

tradition. Bootmaking is passed down through generations in

the same families, and faithful customers are known to buy

their boots for decades from the same maker. It has been

remarked that Texas men are more loyal to their bootmakers

than to their first wives.

In the golden era of the 1950s, boots went on a joyride in

conspicuous consumption. Exotic hides were introduced,

like whale, anteater and elephant skin (prohibited now). One

storied pair of black boots had gold Krugerrands imbedded in

them. In his now-classic The Cowboy Boot Book, first published

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in 1992, the late boot collector and western props dealer Tyler

Beard quoted a story from a 1955 issue of The Cattleman

magazine illustrating how boots got gussied up.

“Last summer a customer wearing handmade boots walked

into the John Furback jewelry store in Amarillo, Texas, and

asked to see their silver belt buckles. The jeweler could not

concentrate on the sale for staring at the customer’s boots.

His practiced eye skipped over the richly engraved sterling-

silver plates covering his boot heels and toes. Right in the

middle of the toe caps were mounted two-carat diamonds…

In his cordovan boot top was the emblem of the state of

Texas embroidered in pure gold thread, complete with the

blazing lone star.”

Everyone agrees that cowboy boots are descendants of the

European riding boot. Dating from the seventeenth century,

cavalry boots were “straights”—i.e., no left or right foot—with

high tops and rounded toes. In 1815, after his defeat of

Napoleon at Waterloo, the idolized Duke of Wellington’s

boots inspired the next craze. Calf-high of plain black leather

with a low heel which prevented the foot from dropping

through the stirrup, they formed the basis for American

military boots and were adapted for cattle ranching through

the 1880s. The tall, level tops were known as “stovepipes,”

which is what they looked, and probably felt, like.

But nobody quite agrees on where the cowboy boot as we

know it appeared on the scene. According to Beard, “Big

Daddy Joe” Justin is credited with making the first cowboy

boot after the Civil War in his shop in Spanish Fort, Texas, a

frontier settlement on what became the Chisholm Trail. But

records also show that as soon as cowboys ended the great

cattle drives at railheads in Dodge City, Wichita, Ellsworth,

and Abilene, Kansas, they asked cobblers to make boots with

what they needed: narrow, pointed toes, an underslung,

higher heel, and thick leather for protection. In the 1860s, the

“Coffeyville” from Coffeyville, Kansas, became a prominent

style. It had a pieced-on front, the precursor to the now-

standard four basic sections that go into building a boot: the

vamp, covering the front of the foot; the counter, over the heel,

and the uppers.

Thanks to the entertainment industry and its enthusiastic

mythologizing of the West, the idea of the cowboy boot as

fashion accessory took hold and has never left. As 1920s

cowboy movie stars rode into the sunset and cowboy crooners

sang to radio listeners, boots enjoyed no end of colored-leather

inlays and overlays of playing cards, twining roses and vines,

cactus, longhorns, eagles, and bucking broncos. Television

took over and millions of American kids went out to play in

cowboy outfits after World War II, with mail-order catalogues

promoting matching children’s boots.

Elizabeth Taylor made custom boot history ordering

diamond-studded white ones costing forty thousand dollars

from famed Houston bootmaker Rocky Carroll. Carroll’s

story is representative, except for his high-flying customers.

A second-generation bootmaker whose father started the

business in 1938, Carroll began learning his craft at the age of

six and has made boots for the last six presidents, though not

for Obama yet. Carroll attributes the reputation of his prized

PLAYING CARD BOOTS, Abraham Rios of Mercedes, Texas, circa 1940s. Mixed media. Photographs by Blair Clark; courtesy of the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe.

BUTTERFLIES AND BLUEBIRDS, Lisa Sorrell, 2008. Kangaroo top and crocodile foot.

Opposite page: UNTITLED, Montana Boots. Mixed media.


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boots to their “split personality.” The bottom or top front part

of the foot looks fairly decorous and conservative. But let the

wearer sit down and his pant legs hike up, and ornate inlay

and lavish embroidery burst with rowdy abandon into view.

Carroll says he likes to stitch “character” into his boots.

Boots still keep getting reinvented. They migrated into

advertising (think of the Marlboro man) and serve as subjects

of contemporary art and photography. They take the stage on

the feet of rock ‘n’ roll and country music stars, affirming their

role as rebels and outsiders. Cowboy boots walk the streets of

London and Bangkok. They convey a legacy that is still vividly

alive, redefining the West with attributes of go-your-own-way

independence, freedom and unpredictable behavior.

For the exhibit Sole Mates: Cowboy Boots and Art at the

New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, curator Joseph

Traugott trolled through literally thousands of boots, mostly in

El Paso, regarded as the boot capital of the world. According

to Traugott, the city boasts more boot manufacturers than

anywhere else in America. Most people are familiar with

the big-name brands, which all started out as small family

businesses: Lucchese, Justin, Tony Lama, Nocona, and a

newcomer, Rocketbuster. Rocketbuster, founded in 1989 by

Marty Snortum, was inspired by glitzy vintage peewee boots

(i.e. low-top boots, made because of a leather shortage during

World War II, that have remained in vogue ever since).

Snortum calls Rocketbuster boots “west Texas retro-moderne.”

Colorful, flamboyant, even bordering on kitsch, their

showboat style is tempered by a nostalgic love of cowboy

boot tradition.

Traugott’s search also turned up examples by two award-

winning contemporary women bootmakers, Deana McGuffin

in New Mexico, and Lisa Sorrell in Oklahoma. Women have

been involved in custom boots for a long time, mostly in the

background stitching designs on tops. They never got much

credit. A third-generation bootmaker, Deana McGuffin had to

convince her father to teach her how to build boots. “He

didn’t think I was physically strong enough, and he didn’t

think it was really appropriate for a woman,” McGuffin

remembers. But she prevailed. Though he was retired, her

father ran a small home shop, mostly for boot repairs, and

McGuffin learned the craft alongside him. She opened her own

shop in 1985 in rural Clovis, New Mexico, with ranchers for

customers. Inspired by her father’s work and by the beautiful

styles of San Antonio bootmaker Dave Little, McGuffin knew

she wanted to make dress boots, “real fancy and colorful,” and

she became known for her rich metallic colors and narrative

designs. Ten years ago McGuffin moved to Albuquerque, and

has noticed increasing numbers of women buying handmade

boots. Her orders come from all over the country, and some

customers sign up for a two-week “learning vacation,” a sort

of tutorial where they travel to her shop and collaborate with

McGuffin on building their own boots. She also teaches

extensively through New Mexico state-funded training

programs and holds private courses for people wanting to

become professional bootmakers.

A bootmaker’s talk is studded with thought-provoking

terms like “toe bug,” “wrinkles,” “mule ears,” and “beading,”

which does not call for beads. They represent some of the

DEANA McGUFFIN after a long day, 2009.

MY DAY OF THE DEAD, Deana McGuffin.


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design features on a boot, along with the choices a customer

has in selecting leathers, color palette, toe shape, heel and top

height, stitching, and decorations. McGuffin works mostly in

kangaroo and ostrich leathers. “People don’t understand that

one reason custom boots cost as much as they do is because

the materials are expensive to start with,” she says, mentioning

that the price of fine quality leathers alone is often more than

a pair of off-the-shelf boots. Contrary to popular assumption,

boots are built from the top down, not bottom up. McGuffin

makes a top or shaft pattern for each client, to get the right

height and fit at the boot throat. Then comes the outside

decoration. For the intricate inlay in her unique Day of the

Dead boots at the Sole Mates show, McGuffin used pearlized

turquoise and hot pink lambskin, a lightweight leather flexible

enough to create fine detail and the rippling, three-dimensional

layers in the dancer’s skirt.

Once the shaft designs are finished, the front and back

parts are sewn together inside out. Then comes the painstaking

job of turning the tops, with the foot sections already attached,

to the right side. “You start at the top of the shaft, dampen the

lining side with water, and then start rolling them to the

inside,” McGuffin explains. The rolling “takes a particular

hand motion,” and the kind of strength that her father had in

mind. A bootmaker relies on several pieces of machinery, for

splitting, sewing and shaping leather, but they are only part

of the complex hands-on steps required in building handmade

boots. Factory boots are assembled on automated equipment,

and computerized machines do the designing and stitching.

A little over twenty years ago, Missouri native Lisa Sorrell

answered a want ad in a Guthrie, Oklahoma, newspaper

seeking someone to stitch boot tops. At the time, she says, “I’d

never heard of a cowboy bootmaker and had never worn

cowboy boots.” Sorrell learned to sew growing up and had

designed clothes for a living before she went to work for

bootmaker Jay Griffith. She learned everything she could from

him. “He always told me that a cowboy boot should look like

a Coke bottle or a beautiful woman; then he’d describe the

shape of an hourglass with his hands.” Following the time-

honored system, Sorrell spent three years apprenticing herself,

first to Griffith and then to one of his students. She strongly

advocated an apprenticeship: “The more time you can spend

in a working boot shop, the better you’ll be.” Sorrell maintains

that she worked “five years building boots before it started

making sense, and ten years before my hands began to know

what they were doing.”

With her waiting list, it takes a year to get a pair of Sorrell’s

boots. At the moment she is building boots for clients from

Wyoming, Sweden, Washington, D.C., and for a seventy-eight-

year-old woman from Boston, who told Sorrell that nobody

wears cowboy boots in Boston, but “I’m old enough to do what

I want.” Sorrell squeezed her into the schedule. “My typical

customer is a businessman—my boots go to the office,” she

states. “Cowboy boots are a way for men to wear high heels

and bright colors.” Sorrell only uses kangaroo, alligator, ostrich, MASTER WINNER, Lisa Sorrell, 2007. Crocodile and other leathers.

PURE LUXURY, Lisa Sorrell, 2009. Crocodile and other leathers.


Sole Mates: Cowboy Boots and Art, at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe through October 17, 2010, celebrates the mythmaking, imagery, popular culture and changing attitudes towards the West embodied by the cowboy and his boots. The show opens with a kinetic excitement: the entrance frames Donald Woodman’s enormous black-and-white inkjet print of a cowboy bull rider, aloft in the air in a blur of tumult and energy. Someone sings a plaintive cowboy song in the background. After the rousing introduction, twentieth-century art curator Joseph Traugott’s exhibit delves into a chronological survey of more than a century of boots and related cowboy art. Roughly eighty pieces of artwork, including paintings, prints, drawings, lithographs, sculpture, advertisements, postcards, video and photographs accompany fifty pairs of boots from twenty-four lenders around the country.

Titles and lyrics from classic Westerns introduce each of the exhibit’s sections, beginning with I See by Your Outfit That You Are a Cowboy. Alongside turn-of-the-last-century boots worn by real working ranch hands are paintings and drawings by Frederic Remington and Charles Russell, the American artists Traugott identifies as first elevating the image of the cowboy in the late 1880s into the personification of the West. Later sections of the exhibit scan the evolution of that legacy in movies, fashion, folk humor, commerce, and contemporary art, while a major theme within Sole Mates probes questions about the roles of gender, freedom and individuality in defining what the West means.

Running like a bright refrain throughout are the cowboy boots, presented as works of art and as subjects of works of art. From a sensational pair of elaborate multicolored inlaid boots commemorating the life of actor James Dean, to artist Carol Sarkisian’s “sculpture” of boots thickly encrusted in glass beads, to the handsome boots covered with New Mexico images belonging to Governor Bill Richardson, every pair illustrates the wide open range of possibilities and assumptions associated with such an iconic symbol. Short or tall, plain-stitched or fancy, beat up or gilded in gold, the boots in Sole Mates affirm that the culture of the cowboy West lives on, an ever-evolving, beloved ideal in American life.

DEANA MCGUFFIN’S FINISHED BOOTS IN THE SHOP, 2009.

and crocodile leathers, but has to hunt for the colors she

needs. “It’s very frustrating if you want a certain shade of

green, for instance. The problem is you can never find it.

With leather, you learn to design with the colors you can

get.” She usually works on three pairs of boots at a time,

leapfrogging among them “because there’s a lot of wet and

dry time. What I like to do is start my boots at the beginning

of the month and end at the end of the month. I can stay

organized and know exactly where I am and what process

needs doing next.” She likes to listen to classic country

music at work, and has made a custom of naming her

boots after old songs where the mood of the music matches

the mood of the boots.

Sorrell says she has never faced discrimination as a

woman bootmaker, though she has come across some

curious assumptions. “Jay had an amazing flair for color

and design. People often say to me, ‘You make beautiful

boots because you’re a woman.’ I tell them that everything

I know about color and design I learned from a grouchy old

alcoholic.” For her inlay and overlay, two types of intricate

sewn-on decoration which she described as “very similar to

quilting,” Sorrell relies on kangaroo leather exclusively, for

its durability and because it responds the best to “skiving,” a

method of thinning the edges so the leather lies smoothly

without any ridges or bumps. “Every edge is cut twice,”

Sorrell explains. “First it’s cut out and then it’s skived in.”

She admits that “I love to play with those two techniques so

seamlessly that you have to get up close to see which one

I’ve done.” Reflecting on what she just said, Sorrell wryly

notes, “I may have a shoe fetish.”44

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According to curator Joe Traugott, the best way to

distinguish handmade cowboy boots is to put them on. As

much time and skill can go into the interior construction, for

comfort and fit, as does into the styling on the outside, unless

it is elaborate. Custom-made boots last a long time because

of a demanding procedure called “crimping,” or shaping, the

piece of leather covering the vamp. The vamp leather is slowly

tightened over a curved board, while alternately wetting and

drying it, which helps form the shape of the instep as the

leather loses most of its “memory.” Otherwise, as with

manufactured boots, leather tends to keep on stretching the

longer it is worn, until boots inevitably become loose and

floppy. But a handmade boot’s superior fit depends most

crucially on the last, a piece made from multiple measurements

of a customer’s foot. Sorrell is forever searching for wooden

lasts from the 1940s, which she favors for “their more graceful

lines and sexy curves.” She customizes lasts for each client,

and like every bootmaker has shelves full of them.

This year for the first time Sorrell exhibited at the

Smithsonian Craft Show and at the American Craft Council

Baltimore show. “I loved it,” she says. “I want to introduce

cowboy boots to other people and teach them how to appreciate

them because they are so wonderful.” She often teaches

students in her shop. “I say to people who want to become a

bootmaker, have you got a good eye? If I tell you to put

something in the middle, can you find the middle?” The old

independent bootmakers were tough taskmasters. Sorrell

recalled an anecdote about a beginner learning to make boots.

After he finished the first one, the bootmaker who was training

him took the boot away and hid it. “Now make the other one,”

he told his young apprentice. “You have to make two boots that

look wonderful and that look like each other,” Sorrell states.

Her thirteen-year-old daughter, Paige, is about to build her

first pair of boots. Sorrell, you can tell, is thrilled.

Cowboy boots have been worn for well over a century,

and more people than ever seem drawn to them. It is estimated

that there are currently around two hundred custom

bootmakers in the country. “A lot of younger people are

coming into the business,” McGuffin says, commenting on

the expanding number of books, publications and websites

devoted to the art of the cowboy boot. Their appeal seems

limitless, especially as a canvas for self-expression. As the Sole

Mates exhibit demonstrates, boots are a valuable cultural

artifact, a means of looking back at who we were and at how

we thought about ourselves. Boots also sustain a personal

history. “I’ve noticed about cowboy boots that there’s always a

story that comes with them,” Sorrell observes. “People say,

‘My grandfather had boots like that,’ and they’ll tell me about

their grandfather. I ask my customers, write and tell me what

happened when you wore your boots. There’s an emotional

connection, a heritage, to cowboy boots—they’re not just

a product. I feel they’re a distinctly American icon.” In

McGuffin’s view, boots have got everything going, for them

and for their owner. As she put it, “They’re the sexiest shoes

on the planet.”

SUGGESTED READINGBeard, Tyler and Jim Arndt . The Cowboy Boot Book. Salt Lake City, Utah: Peregine

Smith Books, 1992.June, Jennifer. Cowboy Boots: The Art & Sole . New York, New York: Universe

Publishing, 2007.Traugott, Joseph. Sole Mates: Cowboy Boots and Art . Santa Fe, New Mexico:

Museum of New Mexico Press, 2010.UNTITLED, Larry Mahan. Mixed media.

UNTITLED, L.W. McGuffin.


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