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He always told me that a cowboy boot should look like a Coke bottle or a beautiful woman;
then hed describe the shape of an hourglass with his hands.
Leslie Clark
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

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

crocodile foot.
Opposite page: UNTITLED, Montana Boots. Mixed media.

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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.

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 nowstandard 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 childrens boots.
Elizabeth Taylor made custom boot history ordering
diamond-studded white ones costing forty thousand dollars
from famed Houston bootmaker Rocky Carroll. Carrolls
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

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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 customers boots.
His practiced eye skipped over the richly engraved sterlingsilver 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 straightsi.e., no left or right footwith
high tops and rounded toes. In 1815, after his defeat of
Napoleon at Waterloo, the idolized Duke of Wellingtons
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

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DEANA McGUFFIN after a long day, 2009.

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MY DAY OF THE DEAD, Deana McGuffin.

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.

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Traugotts search also turned up examples by two awardwinning 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
didnt think I was physically strong enough, and he didnt
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 fathers 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 bootmakers 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

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MASTER WINNER, Lisa Sorrell, 2007. Crocodile and other leathers.

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

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, Id
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 hed describe the
shape of an hourglass with his hands. Following the timehonored 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 youll 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 Sorrells
boots. At the moment she is building boots for clients from
Wyoming, Sweden, Washington, D.C., and for a seventy-eightyear-old woman from Boston, who told Sorrell that nobody
wears cowboy boots in Boston, but Im old enough to do what
I want. Sorrell squeezed her into the schedule. My typical
customer is a businessmanmy 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,

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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 dont 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 dancers 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

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DEANA MCGUFFINS FINISHED BOOTS IN THE SHOP, 2009.

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
Woodmans 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 Traugotts 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.

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Titles and lyrics from classic Westerns introduce each of the

exhibits 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
Sarkisians 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.

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and crocodile leathers, but has to hunt for the colors she
needs. Its 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 theres 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 youre 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 its cut out and then its 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
Ive done. Reflecting on what she just said, Sorrell wryly
notes, I may have a shoe fetish.

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UNTITLED, Larry Mahan. Mixed media.

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UNTITLED, L.W. McGuffin.

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. Ive noticed about cowboy boots that theres always a
story that comes with them, Sorrell observes. People say,
My grandfather had boots like that, and theyll tell me about
their grandfather. I ask my customers, write and tell me what
happened when you wore your boots. Theres an emotional
connection, a heritage, to cowboy bootstheyre not just
a product. I feel theyre a distinctly American icon. In
McGuffins view, boots have got everything going, for them
and for their owner. As she put it, Theyre the sexiest shoes
on the planet.

SUGGESTED READING
Beard, 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.

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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 boots superior fit depends most
crucially on the last, a piece made from multiple measurements
of a customers 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.

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