When Prabal Gurung, an American fashion designer of Nepalese origin, wanted his show at New York Fashion Week in 2018 to say something about American identity and how everyone belongs within it, he teamed up with Dallas footwear manufacturer Miron Crosby. Together, they created a collection of cowboy boots made from materials such as mirror-shiny rose-gold leather and sent them down the runway on models of diverse backgrounds. This happened roughly three weeks after musician Lil Nas X’s song Old Town Road—he himself wears cowboy boots—ended a record-breaking nineteen-week run at the top of the U.S. charts. It also became the unofficial anthem of the so-called yeehaw agenda, a movement in popular culture that highlights the history and style of Black cowboys.
In other words, cowboy boots remain in the spotlight even as the world around them changes. Today, there are new venture-capital-backed footwear companies, such as the Austin brand Tecovas, whose founder grew up in Dallas and returned to Texas from the Northeast to bring online sales to a conservative craft. Meanwhile, the cowboy footwear market entered the 2020s with expectations that it would grow by half within five years.
Texans, of course, need no reminder of the power of the cowboy boot. It is as much a part of the state’s heritage as cattle and oil. But the appearance of boots in new and fashionable places is a reminder that they do not belong only to the tough guys on cigarette ads. And although the cowboy boot in its present form would most likely never have emerged without the influence of Texans, it has no single creator or birthplace that can rightfully claim its invention. It has always been a blend of multiple cultures.
For purely practical reasons, horseback riders have favored sturdy footwear with tall shafts since time immemorial. Genghis Khan and his marauding Mongol army wore leather boots, as did medieval Moors, Hungarian hussars, and vaqueros—the herders of Spain and its overseas possessions. In the eighteenth century, German soldiers wore elegant calfskin Hessian boots with tassels and a V-shaped notch at the upper front of the shaft. Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington, rejected these showy embellishments and popularized the boots that still bear his name. Wellington boots live on, both in cattle pens and on shopping trips.
What we now call the cowboy boot is a distinctive offshoot of all these styles and cultures. It was born at the height of the great cattle drives between 1866 and 1890, when cowboys began asking bootmakers for footwear with a slimmer shape, a higher heel, a rounder toe, and a sturdier instep than was then available. The higher heel, often angled slightly forward, held more securely in the stirrup. The rounded toe gave the foot more room. And the sturdier instep made the entire boot more durable. A bootmaker in Coffeyville, Kansas, near the end of the Chisholm Trail, began supplying such boots to Texas cowboys as early as the 1870s. Interestingly, as many as a quarter of the working cowboys at the time were Black, most of them formerly enslaved. And Richard King employed the so-called kineños, or “King’s people,” entire families of herders whom he brought from Mexico to tend the cattle on his vast South Texas estate.
During the same period, Texas cowboys were also outfitted by H. J. Justin, known as Big Daddy Joe, who opened a workshop in Spanish Fort in Montague County directly on the Chisholm Trail in 1879, and Sam Lucchese, who founded the Lucchese company in San Antonio in 1883. In the decades that followed, other renowned bootmaking businesses emerged across the state: Tony Lama Boots in El Paso in 1911, Little's Boot Company in San Antonio in 1915, M. L. Leddy's in Brady in 1922, and the Nocona Boot Company, founded in Nocona in 1925 by Justin’s daughter, Enid Justin.
Since the days of the great cattle drives, Texas has been transformed from the ground up in almost every conceivable way. Its population has grown more than fortyfold, and nearly ninety percent of Texans live in vast, diverse cities rather than the open countryside. But one thing has changed very little throughout that time: the essential nature of the cowboy boot itself. And that remains true even as successive generations of bootmakers continue to refine its shape and turn it into a canvas for their own artistry. The footwear that played an integral role in shaping Texas, both the real one and the mythical one, remains part of the state’s colorful mosaic after all these years. If cowboy boots are the official footwear of Texas, as the Texas Legislature itself officially designated them in 2007, then they belong to all Texans. Despite their name, they are not tied to any gender, trade, social class, or background. Cowboy boots are ours.
