A
few friends and I were sitting around drinking coffee a few days ago, and the
subject of blue jeans came up, and we starting comparing notes on how old our
jeans were.
“I’m not sure how old my jeans are, but they’re older than
my kids,” said Roy.
Then
the origin of blue jeans came up. And, being the historian, I was assigned the
duty of finding out who invented them.
I found the answer in a neat little
book, “The Best of the West,” by a fellow historian and friend, Bill O’Neal of
Carthage.
The inventor
was Levi Strauss who was only eighteen in 1847 when he came to America from his
native Bavaria to work as a merchant in New York City. In 1853, he joined his
brother-in-law David Stern in the dry goods business in San Francisco.
Leaving
New York with a supply of cloth, Strauss sold almost all of it on the way to California,
arriving in San Francisco with a single bolt of canvas tent cloth.
Meeting
a mine worker in the city, he designed for the man a pair of heavy canvas pants.
Recognizing his opportunity, he bought large quantities of canvas sail cloth from
ships standing in the harbor.
Within a year Strauss and Stern had become
the largest pant makers after switching from canvas to heavyweight blue denim.
The
pants with copper rivets quickly became known as “blue jeans” or “Levis.” The
pants quickly became popular with western workers because of their durability.
Levi. Strauss & Company was incorporated in 1890 and the San Francisco
plant employed 500 workers to meet the demand. Strauss, who now had the most famous
name in the west, grossed one million dollars in 1902. He died in 1902, but his
four nephews continued to produce Levi’s.
At first, cowhands resisted
the strong denim trousers, looking upon them as the uniform of miners and other
workers the cowhands disdained.
In time, however, Levi’s became regulation
wear for cowboys.
Turned up cuffs on the trouser legs were used to hold
horseshoe nails while shoeing horses and by the early 1900s Levis were often worn
with shirts sporting snap buttons.
Rodeo cowboys, who sometimes were caught
on saddle horns by unyielding shirt fronts, requested the snap buttons so they
could quickly free themselves from a wild bronc.
Bob
Bowman's East Texas
January 10, 2011 Column.
A weekly column syndicated in 109 East Texas newspapers |
