American Slouch Hat Origins

[Archaic]

Hey Neil, I didn't know you were a US Civil War re-enactor too! That's really cool. I've been a Civil War buff since I was a little girl, and I dragged my poor parents over many a battlefield. I was always interested in "Living History" and re-enacting, and I enjoy talking about it with my friend Hunter. (Please excuse my little "aside", Mike. )

The posters who mentioned "blocked" hats are right on. Most men's hats other than soft caps required steaming and blocking to give them shape. Stiffer materials were used to help them retain that shape, and they were periodically re-blocked. Bowler hats were quite stiff.

Slouch hats were, as the name implies, casual and "slouched", not stiff and upright like most hats. A real slouch hat would have been considered quite a sloppy look in the city of London.

I used to sell all kinds of vintage hats. Old Stetsons were carefully blocked and often came in perfect condition in their original carefully-designed hat-box made to protect their high crowns and straight brims.
"Homborgs" originated among rich people at the fashionable spa town of Homborg in Germany. They were popularized by Edward, Prince of Wales, later King Edward.

When I have time I'll see if I can get some pictures of the various men's hat types together and post that.

Best regards,
Archaic

[The Good Michael]

I used to do Apache vs US Cavalry reenactments. I was always an apache because I liked having a feather near the muzzle of the gun. I had to quit when I ran out of wall space for my scalps.

Interesting thing about the Apaches and a related tribe, the Navajos. They are kind of proof that Native Americans came across the Bering Strait and migrated down south and quite probably into Mexico and Central America. The reason is, in an area where so many tribes speak Tewa and Tiwa and many languages related to Mexican tribes, Apaches and Navajos speack Athabascan which is found primarily in Canada in Saskatchewan and Alberta. It shows that they migrated and were separated by vast chunks of land sometime after the southwest tribes. This then shows at least two southward movements in ancient times with Nez Pierce and Siouxan people probably blocking the migratoy paths sometime before recorded history.

Mike

[Archaic]

Native Americans

Hi Mike. As a kid I was always playing either Civil War or Indians- and I was always an Indian, never a Cowboy, Pioneer, or US Cavalry. I loved to hang feathers from my toy Winchester rifle, and to make bows & arrows and tomahawks. (I still have some of them.) I built an entire Indian village in the woods behind our house. When I was 10 I even tried to organize a full-scale battle on horseback, but I was the only kid that had a pony and our parents didn't want us flinging tomahawks or shooting arrows at each other! I was very disappointed. As you can see, I was a real tomboy.

The Apache, Sioux, Cheyenne and Nez Perce are the tribes I found most interesting then, and still do today. I particularly admire Cochise of the Apache and Crazy Horse of the Sioux- in fact I listed them on that recent "People You Admire" Thread in Pub Talk. I own an Appaloosa horse, a very colorful spotted breed that originated among the Plains Indians and was carefully bred by the Nez Perce tribe.

My knowledge of Native Americans came in handy a couple of years ago during an Appraisal. While sorting approximately 7,000 antique photographs with another appraiser, I found a hither-to-unknown photograph of the most famous Cheyenne chiefs, taken at Fort Keogh within a few years of Custer's Last Stand. In very faint, tiny pencil on the back I made out the names Two Moon, Brave Wolf, American Horse, etc- all known to have been present at the Battle of the Little Big Horn! Some of the individual named in the photo are even contenders for being the warrior that killed Custer!

I was very excited, and at first the owner and the other appraiser couldn't understand why- they wanted me to just toss the photo in the"garage sale" box and keep going. But I knew how important that photo was, and I was quite sure it was unpublished and unknown to historians. The most interesting thing is that the warriors weren't inside a portrait studio all fully dressed and perfectly posed; instead they were wearing only loincloths, moccasins & feather headresses and were all mounted on horseback with rifles in their hands. None of them were wearing any article of 'White Man's" clothing. They weren't carefully lined up for the photo in the usual manner, and the photograph wasn't squared up at all but shot at a very weird angle from low on the front left side. I realized it was a almost certainly a photo taken surreptitiously, without the consent of the warriors- a rather dangerous thing to do! (Many native Americans refused to permit their photos to be taken; they called cameras "Soul-Catchers.") The photo is unlike any other I have ever seen. It might even depict the historic 1877 surrender of Two Moon and his followers at Fort Keogh!

Anyway, it was pretty exciting to discover a previously unknown early photograph of some of the most famous Native Americans in history. (In fact, in 1912 the designer of the famous 'Buffalo Nickel' used the Cheyenne Chief Two Moon as one of the models for the Native American depicted on the coin.) The owner of the photo was very grateful that I had recognized the Cheyenne leaders; she said she had no idea the photo was important to American History and would have sold it for 50 cents at a garage sale! I suggested to her that she donate the photograph either to the Smithsonian Institute or to the Cheyenne Nation so it will be preserved and published, and that she take a tax credit for its market value.

Nice to know that so many of us here on Casebook have other interests in common in addition to Jack the Ripper and the LVP!

Best regards,
Archaic

PS to Mike H: My apologies for going off-topic, but at least we're all getting along! I'll try to find you some "slouch hat" illustrations & some more Tumblety articles to make up for it. Deal? -B.

[Tom_Wescott]

Hi all,

The double whammy of the Dear Boss letter and Packer's story gave birth to the American Ripper myth. Here's an interesting caution. It made me think of Tumblety, but I'm not sure even he could be described as a 'comic singer'.

OCT. 29th, 1888 (from The Echo)

The various districts are being patrolled by extra constables, and their zeal has lead them into several excesses, notably, an arrest of three young men made on Thursday night in Berner-street. The police, according to a morning contemporary, have so much in mind the vague stories of an American perpetrator of the dastardly crimes that any person in a wide-a-wake or soft felt becomes an object of suspicion. A comic singer was unfortunate enough during a professional visit on Thursday to Whitechapel to wear one of these hats; and when during the interval he and two friends strolled round the neighbourhood, to view the scene of the Berner-street tragedy, they were promptly denounced by some too quick-sighted citizen and marched off by the police. It is only due to the latter to say they were detained but a very short time, sufficient to test the truth of their statement.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[mklhawley]

Very interesting find Tom and I share your doubts of it being Tumblety, especially since the article states the singer was with two friends. I also like the idea of the double whammy.

Hey, no problem Archaic. I love people with passions.

Mike

[YankeeSergeant]

Hats

Very interesting find Tom and I share your doubts of it being Tumblety, especially since the article states the singer was with two friends. I also like the idea of the double whammy.

Hey, no problem Archaic. I love people with passions.

Mike

Archaic, MAybe we'll cross paths at a re-enactment. I rather doubt Tumblety was Jack because he was just too flamboyant.

[mklhawley]

Hi YankeeSergeant,

I understand your thoughts on this and I am not trying to change your mind. For me, though, the flamboyancy does not come into play. After extensive research on the man, it is clear to me his flamboyancy was a business decision and an excellent one at that. He wanted to be in the limelight in order to get people into his herb shop. It made him wealthy. Note whenever he had gotten into trouble hanging out in the slums hooking up with young men, he was quite anti-flamboyant. He dressed as the locals did. Tumblety even admitted in his interview in Jan 1889, he dressed in the Whitechapel district as to not bring attention to himself. Of course he had his American Slouch hat on.

Sincerely,

Mike

[ChrisGeorge]

Hi Archaic et al.

Archaic, I loved your story about the ca 1877 photograph you found of the Indian warriors. Congratulations on that. Very interesting information and a great find.

Here are a couple of photographs that I took on the Marc Train between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore a few nights ago of a gentleman wearing an Indiana Jones-type slouch hat.

Also on the question whether Tumblety dressed flamboyantly in the East End in 1888, I should say that wearing a slouch hat would have been flamboyant for the East End of the day because the residents would not have been used to seeing such an American style hat. I might agree that on a general basis by 1888, Tumblety appears to have dressed less flamboyantly than he did in earlier years when he paraded around American cities in faux military dress. Yet nonetheless a slouch hat in the East End at the time of the murders would clearly have created attention because it was unusual. British men and East European immigrants did not wear such hats.

Chris

[mklhawley]

This guy even put one on the front cover of his book.



There's a little Tumblety in all of us!

[ChrisGeorge]

That certainly shows that you're no slouch, Mike.

[YankeeSergeant]

Tumblety redux

Hi YankeeSergeant,

I understand your thoughts on this and I am not trying to change your mind. For me, though, the flamboyancy does not come into play. After extensive research on the man, it is clear to me his flamboyancy was a business decision and an excellent one at that. He wanted to be in the limelight in order to get people into his herb shop. It made him wealthy. Note whenever he had gotten into trouble hanging out in the slums hooking up with young men, he was quite anti-flamboyant. He dressed as the locals did. Tumblety even admitted in his interview in Jan 1889, he dressed in the Whitechapel district as to not bring attention to himself. Of course he had his American Slouch hat on.

Sincerely,

Mike

Mike, I see your point as well. I was thinking more the way he conducted himself rather than his dress. I rather thought( and still do) that he would want to avoid damaging any chance at drumming up business. (In my humble and ameteur opinion)

[ChrisGeorge]

Mike, I see your point as well. I was thinking more the way he conducted himself rather than his dress. I rather thought( and still do) that he would want to avoid damaging any chance at drumming up business. (In my humble and ameteur opinion)

But might not engaging in homosexual activities have damaged his business? Dr T engaged in such activities throughout his life. And to be blunt, it looks as if the notoriety he received in 1888 in London might have made him hop town. Of course, I am assuming him leaving London abruptly might not necessarily have been connected to the suspicion that fell upon him in regard to the murders as some have conjectured.

C

[Archaic]

Archaic, MAybe we'll cross paths at a re-enactment.

If we do, Neil, can I shoot the crown of your slouch hat full of arrows? In a friendly way, I mean.

Hmmm, I'm a bit out of practice these days... better wear a Tom Mix-style Stetson!

Hi Chris, glad you liked the story. My non-historian friends still don't quite grasp why I was so excited. All those years as a kid lugging home eyeball-high stacks of library books about Native Americans and poring over the photographs really paid off.

Hey Mike, can you post a link to your book? Looks interesting. Thanks- and congratulations!

Best regards,
Archaic

[mklhawley]

Here you go Archaic. Thanks.

http://forum.casebook.org/showthread.php?t=5104

[YankeeSergeant]

"You'll never work in the bidness again"

Archaic, If you're shooting arrows I'll wear the forage cap Chris, I see your point. My understanding was that although he was known as a "Gentleman Dandy" ( to use a Civil War term) and had been arrested several time over the years he was never convicted. the "Toffs" weren't going to give him business but in Whitechapel where people had a bit less leisure time they might not pay attention to newspapers except what the news hawkers were shouting as they sold papers. Perhaps in the interval between 1865 and 1888 he toned it down. Like the sage Monty says in another post where all still learning when it comes to JtR. He may have left simply to avoid prosecution for the alleged homsexual offences.