A Picture Thru The Generations

Thunk

Diamond Member
Sep 30, 2019
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Minnesota
When I was a kid, my brothers, sisters and myself went to a photo place that dressed us up in old cowboy outfits and took a black & white photo of us...it looks like a really old pic...we gave it to my folks for Christmas.

20 years later we swiped the photo off their wall & went and did another photo just like it...except we were 20 years older.

Now another 20 years have passed and we're talking about doing it again :D

Only problem is one sister has died...so we're discussing either leaving her spot empty or putting a pedestal with a vase and a single white rose in her place.

We bring in the oldest photo so they dress us and position us as close to the original as possible.
 
I remember at the 20 year mark...the girl positioning us kept looking at the photo & then us...she finally asked...is this a photo of YOU???

We laughed & said "YUP".
 
Movies have destroyed any historical idea of what our frontier ancestors might have worn..

No cowboys ever wore a "10-Gallon Hat". The most commonly worn hat in the Old West was the Derby or Bowler...

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The Stetson company didn't start making the center creased, slouch hat we now associate with Old West Cowboys until the 20th Century. Stetson's best 19th Century hat was the "Boss of the Plains"

1800s_Boss_of_the_plains_5.jpg


Also, cowboy boots ... the decorative, pointy-toe long boot that we see today was popular with Spanish vaqueros and landed gentry in Mexico, but never really caught on in The Old West.

The most common boot in the old west was a plain, leather Wellington cavalry boot. Or the low-rise Chukka.

Cowboys never used belts on their pants. Belt loops didn't become a standard item on ready-made-pants until the 1920's. Victorian era pants were held up with leather or cotton suspenders and worn much higher up around the waist.

Very few cowboys wore guns, particularly revolvers. For one, they were very expensive, more than a months pay for most people in The Old West. For another thing, wearing a gun built interfered with the manual labor most people did for a living and didn't fit around the long frock coats that most people wore.

The idea that cowboys looked like this ...

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... was a image created by Hollywood decades after The Old West was gone.
 

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