A Boot Collector Feature
Founded in 1915 in Cheyenne, Wyoming — and still making genuine early-1900s-style cowboy boots on original equipment, more than a century later.
Gustav C. “Gus” Blucher was an Austrian-born bootmaker who learned the business at H.J. Justin in Nocona, Texas, where he worked for several years and may have run his own shop before heading north. In the fall of 1915 he opened his shop in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in the northern cow country, one of six bootmakers in town making boots for the hard-riding cowboys of the Northern Plains. What set him apart was the mail-order trade he’d learned at Justin: he advertised alongside Justin and Hyer in the Wyoming Stockman Farmer and other trade papers.
Wyoming was a hard place to build boots. Skilled bootmakers were scarce and materials were hard to get and expensive, and with his health failing, Gus moved the company to Olathe, Kansas, in 1919, Hyer’s hometown. It reopened there making “real Boots for real Cowboys,” with two young partners, William L. Flournoy and Ray Powers, who came from Nocona and were thought to have worked for Justin too. At a time when most small mail-order shops were closing, Blucher thrived, and collectors credit it with the best custom work of its day.
Its mail-order kit shows how it was done. A 1948 inquiry from a customer in Detroit brought back Catalog No. 30 along with an instruction sheet, an order form, a tape measure, a reply envelope, and a letter from W.L. Flournoy. Over the following decades the business changed hands and moved again, landing in Beggs, in Okmulgee County, Oklahoma, where owner James Edward “Smitty” Smith, who earned his reputation at Dixon’s in Wichita Falls, has crafted the boots for roughly 35 years. Smith works with original Blucher drive punches and wooden lasts, making the same styles the same way Gus Blucher made them in 1915. The old catalog promised boots “Tested and Proven by Stirrup, Weather and Time” and “Shop Made Expressly For You,” and the shop still makes the styles in it. Smitty has never had much use for computers (“Show me a computer that can make a pair of boots. Maybe then.”), and his boots have long been favored by Great Basin cowboys.
Authentic, old-time cowboy boots built the way they were built in the 1900s — right down to the tools. Each pair takes about a month to finish, current orders run on roughly a two-year waitlist, and starting prices run around $900. The shop has shared space with Cross Country Leathers, a custom leather-goods maker for motorcyclists, reflecting the kind of small-town, multi-craft leather shop that's grown rare.
A century-old name, still built on its original tools.
Pairs from smaller, custom, or long-closed makers rarely come up for sale, so this search may not find anything. It’s worth checking back now and then.