In With the Old, Out With the New

Until this year my research focused on the innovators in gunleather in the 20th century, because that's when it all happened. But the holstory that led up to that -- the late 19th century saddlers who made civilian/citizen gunleather -- attracted my attention while I was working out the 5Ws of both the olive style holster and the scout type belt; both of them 1870s. So in terms of my book Holstory about 20th century makers, this is 'everybody else':

Above, "IT'S THE REAL THING". And below, "IT'S NOT" the real thing, it's modern.

Which leads me to state again, for collectors of antique gunleather (defined generally as being more than a century old), that just because you've found a holster or belt with a maker's mark from the 19th century does NOT mean it was made in that century. Many of them lasted into the early 20th century and a few of them, quite late into it.

Below is a table listing the 19th century saddleries that made gunleather. Not much gunleather because the 'fire in the hole' for mass producing civilian gunleather was the Model T introduced 1908. The automobile ruined the market for saddlery and these chaps needed to do SOMETHING, and that turned out to be gunleather for the increasingly gentrified cities of America. Austin TX kicked that off with the appearance of the holster style that we would later dub 'The Brill' but started out as the Kluge Scabbard of 1905. Meanwhile, Wyeth OWNED the mail order gunleather market beginning in 1872.

I've sorted the listing below by founding date and those in dark green were founded in the 19th century AND closed that century, too. Encountering these marks you should KNOW you've got an antique although be warned that some makers did have late 20th century folks who legitimately used the old marks with slight changes, so "be alert not alarmed":

THIS IS AN UPDATED CHART. I HAD CARELESSLY LEFT OUT GALLATIN, THE MOST SIGNIFICANT MAKER OF THE LATE 19TH CENTURY WHO FORMED THE BRIDGE FROM THE 'CALIFORNIA' STYLE (LIKELY SO-CALLED BECAUSE OF MAIN & WINCHESTER IN CA) AND THE 'OLIVE' STYLE POPULARISED BY SUCCESSOR MEANEA.

P.S. don't take all my dates as gospel, especially the end dates because I have usually used the death of the founder; but a few continued anyway. The founding dates are from the comprehensive book called Old Cowboy Saddles and Spurs (6,000 saddlers are listed) of which there are several editions that began to be published in the 1970s and gathered likely from city directories. Overall I have chosen to show the dates that comport best with all the other data I have gathered including contemporaneous newspaper ads and articles for these saddleries such as this one that is 1895:

Most of the maker's marks that I have preserved of these old saddlers are shown below. They are grouped by state or territory, not by name or date of origin, and so they begin with AZ and end with WY. I do not believe they are properly called 'cartouches' as 20th century literature claims; they were actually postal addresses so that a random cowboy could write and ask about one he'd seen, because it was the role of these old post offices to correlate the company name with its address that was listed in all city directories.

An example of these city directories below (for example, I have every city directory for Hermann Heiser's ventures). It lists the saddlery on Blake Street Denver that he bought in 1873, Gallup & Gallatin, to create his own saddlery that appeared next in 1874's issue:

Okay, okay, I did leave out some mighty important maker's marks above, because I store these separately from the 'other' categories:

To read more about it all in my book that is titled "Holstory -- Gunleather of the Twentieth Century-- the Second Edition", click on the link at top of page to review then purchase it.