?? for Will Ghormley

[Rascal Ralph]

I was wondering if pre-1900, there was any type of "embossing" used on leather holsters and belts. Most of the time it's obvious which stamps were used, (per-Packing iron) But were there elongated stamps,or rolled embossers used? Ralph

[will ghormley]

Hey Ralph, ya' ol' rascal,

Yeah, there was plenty of embossin' goin' on.  Plenty of rollin' embossers, both hand-held and mechanical, even on the frontier.  Back east they had machines what would presure emboss the whole holster with a pattern.  In fact, up till the late 1820s, most holster decorations were embossed examples from back east.

It wasn't till the Santa Fe Trail got ta' runnin' pretty good, that the Spanish tradition of carving leather for decoration really took off outside of the southwest.  For U.S. citizens, it started in Missouri among the anglo saddle makers influance by the Spanish trade, and spread out from there.

The Spanish learned geometric leather carving from the Moores when the Moores over-ran Spain.  The conquistidores took this tradition to the Americas.  In what would become Mexico, the native Mexicas, (read Aztecs), incorporated thier history of carving floral designes in stone, with the Spanish tradition of carving geometric designes in leather.  This new floral leather carving, or incising, was the begining of what we now view as western floral carving.  The rest, as they say, is history.

I don't know if that gives you the answer you were lookin' for, but if you want to ask another, more specific question, I can make-up an answer to that one too.

Will