Regional stockman patterns and were they really carried by the cowboys/vaqueros?

silenthunterstudios

silenthunterstudios

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Everyone is familiar with the stockman, and have discussed it up, down, side to side and back again. It's called the stockman because it was created as a do it all knife for the stockyards, in Chicago and St Louis I presume. The pattern first appeared beginning in the 1870's (please correct me if I am wrong :thumbup:). Over the years, we've had the cattleman, which is more of a cigar jack shape, but a stockman, and the basic stockman itself. My favorite version, the premium stockman, is now being produced by Great Eastern cutlery as the #81 Abilene.

Cowboys used to carry whatever they could afford to get the job done, or so I have read, with jacks and basic sheath knives being popular. As long as it could stand a good number of days on the range working fences (I guess there for the ride in this instance), cutting rope and tending to cattle, it was up for the job. Over the years, the stockman turned into a smaller farming knife.

Just as we have variations of trappers, jacks etc, we have two distinct types of stock knives. Cigar jack and curved/serpentine jack type. Cow punching and cattle ranches ran from Montana to Texas and California to Oklahoma. The west was open range country, with all the tales that come with it. Were cattle knives more heavily used in one part of the country as opposed to serpentine stockman knives? Is the stockman knife a romanticized "work" knife that really didn't see widespread use until the latter part of the 19th century? Just as the myth is perpetuated that from the time Jim Bowies famous Sandbar fight was spinned into the extravagant news item of the day, through the refinement of the Colt Navy Walker, the bowie was carried by everyone including the mountain men, is the stock knife wrongly associated as being carried by most of the cowboys and others that actually worked with cattle every day?

I would say with no reservations that the stockman pattern has to be my favorite, single blades may be what I carry every day, but I can't shake a good stock knife. As the vaqueros on the Argentinian pampas are known for their facons/punals, the Mexican vaqueros carried their long knives too. The cowboy carried a sheath knife and a folder. Which area of the west carried what, and did they carry a stockman as their folder?
 
Excellent topic and I'd like to know more.

I do know that gear was often provided by the cattle company as cowboys didn't make much.
All kinds of different gear made it west. It was what ever could be procured. We think of the Colt Single Action Army of 1873 as the only Western sixgun, but in reality, there was all kinds of stuff headed out west.
I'd also imagine that a fixed blade would be more important to have than a folder.

Oh, talking to folks who work ranches today, they often prefer a trapper pattern...... or so it seems from my limited discussions.
 
Robt Klaas, made for West German cowboys.:D

Best regards

Robin
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Good post Dan, looking forward to this 'un :)

Jack
 
Very good post and good questions, Dan!

I suspect that history and Hollywood both have warped the view a little bit. Cowboys being mostly young and poor working class, carried what ever was cheap at the General Store in town, or was a hand-me-down from an older brother or father. I remember reading someplace that well after the advent of metallic cartridge revolver, a lot of cowboys still carried the old Colt .36 Navy percussion because they were so common, and cheap. By 20 years after the Civil War, the cattle trade was going down, and a lot of cowboys found themselves out of work and riding the grub line. I imagine that you'd see anything from a cheap single blade clasp knife to a old well used skinner or butcher pattern in a home made sheath being used.

Carl.
 
Not trying to derail my own thread, but I've also thought about what the average joe cowboy carried as far as a gun. Rustling was a big problem, sometimes done by the cowboys themselves to their bosses. Not everyone riding the range carried a new SAA and Henry lever action. However, they needed them. I'm sure a lot of worn down guns, knives, boots etc. They probably looked more like Terence Hill in My Name is Nobody, than the flashy cowboy movies of the same era ;).
 
This should prove to be a great topic (it has been an interest to me). I grew up helping and working on the family farm out in Wa. state. in the late 70's through to 91 when I moved off to college and down east.
My dad would always have a stockman pattern Schrade with him as would the help that lived there. I always wanted one like my dad and when I finally got one it was a Craftsman stockman. It had the yellow handles so I never considered it as good as his with the brown.
The 3 blade style was very useful for cutting the bull calves, until we found the elastic bander, much easier and no blood!
Still always had a use for the knife and have several to this day! No cattle anymore, its become a tree farm, they don't run away. :D
 
silenthunterstudios said:
Not trying to derail my own thread, but I've also thought about what the average joe cowboy carried as far as a gun. Rustling was a big problem, sometimes done by the cowboys themselves to their bosses. Not everyone riding the range carried a new SAA and Henry lever action. However, they needed them. I'm sure a lot of worn down guns, knives, boots etc. They probably looked more like Terence Hill in My Name is Nobody, than the flashy cowboy movies of the same era ;).
Click to expand...

I think that just like today, you had a few knife/gun nuts, and then you had most of the guys who were just trying to survive economically, from paycheck to paycheck. Just like the army, I don't know where all the Randall's and other customs were when I was in, but 99% of the young soldiers just carried what ever the PX had on sale. In ten years, I saw one high end sheath knife, a Randall by chance, in the possession of one senior NCO, who was a supply sergeant of all things. Most guys carried the issue Camillus scout knife or a Buck from the PX. And a few of those clones of the Buck 110 made somewhere over seas. The guys who were not knife nuts, really didn't seem to care about a quality knife, as long as they had something that would "do".

Cowboys probably carried everything from Colt dragoons and old Navy's to Smith and Wesson Russians, depending if it was important to them. And a lot of it was most likely not maintained well.
 
My father had the cowboys/chiefs/mountain men set of books from Time Life. He found them at a junk shop, I've found a couple since then to complete the whole set for him. Harry Longbaugh and Virgil Earp weren't missing any meals when they sat for their famous portraits. Hollwyood has taken their liberties over the years. One thing that stood out for me was that, amongst the gunfighters, pistols were rarely used at anything other than super close range, due to their accuracy, or lack thereof. The weapon of the old west was actually the shotgun. It was used quite commonly.

Why wouldn't the early stockknife makers jump on the Wild West dimestore novel bandwagon? "This three blade cattle knife is just like the one Wyatt Earp used when he was, ahem, in the cattle business."

Wyatt did a little bit o' rustling to make ends meet before his famous duel in a little town...

That doesn't mean manufacturers weren't on the up and up, just an idea.
 
Here is an interesting link to a bit of history on what cowboys carried in the Missouri Range and Dakota areas published by the national park service:

http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/thro1/rickey.pdf

It seems cowboys in these areas preferred large folders and clasp knives to fixed blades. There is also a lot of info on the guns and clothes, etc. that they carried with them. No direct mention of stockmen or cattle knives, but a fascinating read nonetheless.
 
I have no special knowledge, but the Barlow knife that Mark Twain writes about in the Tom Sawyer novel must have been around. Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) was a reporter and a contemporary writer.:rolleyes:
 
jackknife said:
Very good post and good questions, Dan!

I suspect that history and Hollywood both have warped the view a little bit. Cowboys being mostly young and poor working class, carried what ever was cheap at the General Store in town, or was a hand-me-down from an older brother or father. I remember reading someplace that well after the advent of metallic cartridge revolver, a lot of cowboys still carried the old Colt .36 Navy percussion because they were so common, and cheap. By 20 years after the Civil War, the cattle trade was going down, and a lot of cowboys found themselves out of work and riding the grub line. I imagine that you'd see anything from a cheap single blade clasp knife to a old well used skinner or butcher pattern in a home made sheath being used.

Carl.
Click to expand...

I belive that when Hickok was killed (1876), he had his two .36 Navys on him. The SAA was available for a few years as well as the Remington. You'd figure a gunfighter/gambler/lawman would take to the advancement of metallic cartridges.

Edit: Apparently I was wrong. He had a Smith & Wesson Model 2 Army Revolver on him. It does have metallic cartridges.
 
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I believe BRL has written that the EE cattle knife came first, then the serpentine stock knife later as an "upgrade" level knife. I'll try to find the article.



--Ten minutes later--

This is per BRL, not my words.
Cattle Knives

"The Cattle Knife is a heavy duty three bladed pocket knife, ordinarily 3 5/8 or 3 3/4 inches long. Some are Junior sized, as small as 3 1/4 inckes. Others are as large as 4 1/2 inches (such as the Case 94s). A very few Cattle Knives have four blades.

As the Name suggests, the Cattle Knife was designed for work on and around livestock. The type seems to have been introduced around 1870.

The standard Cattle Knife has the same round-ended equal-end shape as the equal-end Jack, and was probably derived from the common Jack Knife shape. At least 90% of Cattle Knives are standard equal-ends, but a few have been made in other shapes.

The master blade of a Cattle Knife is most often a spear blade, though many, including most Case Cattle Knives, have clip master blades. A few have sheepfoot master blades. The second blade is usually a spey, while the third can be a sheepfoot, pen, or punch."
 
silenthunterstudios said:
Everyone is familiar with the stockman, and have discussed it up, down, side to side and back again. It's called the stockman because it was created as a do it all knife for the stockyards, in Chicago and St Louis I presume. The pattern first appeared beginning in the 1870's (please correct me if I am wrong :thumbup:). Over the years, we've had the cattleman, which is more of a cigar jack shape, but a stockman, and the basic stockman itself. My favorite version, the premium stockman, is now being produced by Great Eastern cutlery as the #81 Abilene.

Cowboys used to carry whatever they could afford to get the job done, or so I have read, with jacks and basic sheath knives being popular. As long as it could stand a good number of days on the range working fences (I guess there for the ride in this instance), cutting rope and tending to cattle, it was up for the job. Over the years, the stockman turned into a smaller farming knife.

Just as we have variations of trappers, jacks etc, we have two distinct types of stock knives. Cigar jack and curved/serpentine jack type. Cow punching and cattle ranches ran from Montana to Texas and California to Oklahoma. The west was open range country, with all the tales that come with it. Were cattle knives more heavily used in one part of the country as opposed to serpentine stockman knives? Is the stockman knife a romanticized "work" knife that really didn't see widespread use until the latter part of the 19th century? Just as the myth is perpetuated that from the time Jim Bowies famous Sandbar fight was spinned into the extravagant news item of the day, through the refinement of the Colt Navy Walker, the bowie was carried by everyone including the mountain men, is the stock knife wrongly associated as being carried by most of the cowboys and others that actually worked with cattle every day?

I would say with no reservations that the stockman pattern has to be my favorite, single blades may be what I carry every day, but I can't shake a good stock knife. As the vaqueros on the Argentinian pampas are known for their facons/punals, the Mexican vaqueros carried their long knives too. The cowboy carried a sheath knife and a folder. Which area of the west carried what, and did they carry a stockman as their folder?
Click to expand...

I see you've been reading your newly acquired LVG4 Dan. Keep reading it and all your questions will be answered.

We have many large ranches in my area and the cowhands seem to carry whatever strikes their fancy. Some carry a stockman but many of them prefer a trapper. It seems they all have a kit with the tools they'll need when it comes time for the roundup (buckarooing some call it) where they vaccinate, notch ears, and castrate the calves. A lot of those kits have a knife that they only use for the roundup and don't carry throughout the year.

Edited to add: This is a great thread that ran a couple/three years ago. I think you might remember it Dan. Lots of discussion on ranching knives. I think it's a good read.

http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php/745697-So-you-re-outfitting-the-hands-on-a-ranch?
 
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jackknife said:
I remember reading someplace that well after the advent of metallic cartridge revolver, a lot of cowboys still carried the old Colt .36 Navy percussion because they were so common, and cheap. By 20 years after the Civil War, the cattle trade was going down, and a lot of cowboys found themselves out of work and riding the grub line. I imagine that you'd see anything from a cheap single blade clasp knife to a old well used skinner or butcher pattern in a home made sheath being used.
Click to expand...
This wasn't just limited to the 1880s; they were not uncommon in court cases of shootings up into the 1920s. One of my great-uncles used a .36 Navy in a shooting in 1932 or so, and his father-in-law had an 1860 Army as his ranch gun and then into retirement. They were there, they worked, and they weren't a primary tool for day-to-day use. More attention was paid to rifles and shotguns, especially after the sale of .44 rimfire cartridges was discontinued.

Their pocket knives were mostly stockmen with a punch, later they seem to have gone to trappers. There was usually a camp knife in the saddlebags or pickup (post-1945 up til the '70s, it was often a WWII-surplus engineers' knife). Grandpa A. (the 1860 Army owner) carried a cattle knife (spear, spey, and punch) most of his working years, and a stockman in retirement.
 
Toddwalla said:
Here is an interesting link to a bit of history on what cowboys carried in the Missouri Range and Dakota areas published by the national park service:

http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/thro1/rickey.pdf

It seems cowboys in these areas preferred large folders and clasp knives to fixed blades. There is also a lot of info on the guns and clothes, etc. that they carried with them. No direct mention of stockmen or cattle knives, but a fascinating read nonetheless.
Click to expand...

Good reading! Thank you for the link. :thumbup:
 
silenthunterstudios said:
Not trying to derail my own thread, but I've also thought about what the average joe cowboy carried as far as a gun. Rustling was a big problem, sometimes done by the cowboys themselves to their bosses. Not everyone riding the range carried a new SAA and Henry lever action. However, they needed them. I'm sure a lot of worn down guns, knives, boots etc. They probably looked more like Terence Hill in My Name is Nobody, than the flashy cowboy movies of the same era ;).
Click to expand...

This being a knife forum, the expectation is that this thread will remain on track talking about knives.
 
Can do Frank.

Ed, you are right, I will bring BRL4 along with me as some light reading on my vacation tomorrow ;).
 
coffeecup said:
This wasn't just limited to the 1880s; they were not uncommon in court cases of shootings up into the 1920s. One of my great-uncles used a .36 Navy in a shooting in 1932 or so, and his father-in-law had an 1860 Army as his ranch gun and then into retirement. They were there, they worked, and they weren't a primary tool for day-to-day use. More attention was paid to rifles and shotguns, especially after the sale of .44 rimfire cartridges was discontinued.

Their pocket knives were mostly stockmen with a punch, later they seem to have gone to trappers. There was usually a camp knife in the saddlebags or pickup (post-1945 up til the '70s, it was often a WWII-surplus engineers' knife). Grandpa A. (the 1860 Army owner) carried a cattle knife (spear, spey, and punch) most of his working years, and a stockman in retirement.
Click to expand...

Honestly, I'd think a good punch might be near mandatory, but I don't think it was.
 
Punches are real handy when you're out for days or weeks at a time. When a strap or rein breaks, just punch a couple holes, thread a piece of wire through, and twist it up tight--leaving better repairs for later.

When you're back at the tack shed every day, carrying a punch becomes less important.
 
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