Ranger Belts Question

[Ian]

I'm writing a little blurb for a website I'm building. My question is: what is the origin of the ranger belt. I had assumed it originated with the Texas Rangers. Correct? Anyone have a little history they could share? Were they originaly used as gun belts? What is the benefit of the overlapping ranger style vs the regular buckle style?

Thanks

Ian

[rdb]

jeffzilla, in one of my topics, left this comment about ranger belts:

The history of the Ranger belt began as a cinching technique in horse tack. It allowed for tightening a strap without pinching a horse's hair in the buckle.

Mexican Vaqueros were the skilled ranch workers of the early cattle days. They also attained great skills in leatherwork and silversmithing from the Spanish tradition in order to make the trappings of their trade.

Sometime in the 1840's, the new Colt Walker 6 shooter was tried out by the legendary group of frontier lawmen, the Texas Rangers. These new guns needed holsters which required wide belts. By adapting the technique from horse tack, a smaller belt buckle sufficed.

[Ian]

Thanks Dave

[rdb]

I looked all over the Google, and elsewhere, cause, it interests me too. But the few real historical references only repeat and cut and copy what others have said. To get any real history on this is going to require some deep historical research. Phone calls and emails to western historians may be required. The general story out there is that the Mexican silversmiths made a small dressy buckle, the rangers had to dress sharp to impress their authority on people, the rangers needed wide gun belts, so they combined the tack approach to the gunbelt, and the smaller silver buckle...good luck on finding any other story. Common history is always a good story, but fact is often illusive.

[Hidemechanic]

Though I have nothing to back this up, but an opinion that I may have derived from other historical searches, it could well be that though they used this type of buckel method early on, thay may not have called it Ranger Style. A coyboy needing a belt probably just picked up whatever caught his eye, which may or may not have been ranger style. ( Not to diminish the reference to Texas Rangers).

I think there are a lot of items from our past that we have put modern names to and later the assumption is made that the modern name might be where the way to start a search that leads nowhere. Sometimes searchers have to get more creative in their search peramiters in order to find what they are looking for(photos, drawings, journals,etc..).

Sometimes too, the difficlty comes from finding that what we may call by one name may have a different name in another country or culture. Happy hunting.GH