Texas Jack, Dressed to the Nines

Here’s a photo of Texas Jack you haven’t seen before. As far as I know, it’s never been online until today.

When most of us picture Texas Jack and Buffalo Bill, we picture buckskin. Fringe, worn leather, a rifle across the knee. That’s how they looked on stage and on dime novel covers, and it’s the image that stuck.

But look at him here. Tailored coat, white collar, fancy tie. And running down the front of his vest, a gold chain.

I know that chain. In the spring of 1873, The Scouts of the Prairie played Niblo’s Garden in New York, and Jack and Bill were making around a thousand dollars a week. Jack took some of that money to Tiffany’s. One reporter wrote that he bought “a huge gold chain, almost the size of a ship’s cable, and long enough to go around his neck,” and paid $1,000 for it. Then, the reporter said, he went looking for the biggest watch money could buy and came back with one “as large as a spittoon.”

That chain shows up in several photos of Jack, and here it is again.

The card itself comes from Warren’s studio on Tremont Street in Boston, but I don’t think the picture was taken there. Compare it to the second image, a stereoview from Gurney & Son in New York. Same coat, same chain, same turn of the head. I’m almost certain it’s the same sitting, hat on and hat off. Photos of these men sold like crazy, so my best guess is that a New York picture got copied and sold in Boston too.

The third image is Buffalo Bill, also at Gurney’s. Good coat, silk tie, long chain of his own.

So here’s what I love about this. These two sold the East on the rough life of the frontier, and the minute the money came in, they dressed like dandies.

But there's an old saying that in Latin is vestis virum facit. The clothes don't make the man. You can put a guy like Texas Jack in gold chains, diamond cufflinks, fine broadcloth, and silk shirts, and he will still be what he is. A cowboy.