Talk:Coonskin cap

Worn by Crocket?

I'm a noob still, but for citing the source that Crocket didn't wear the coonskin hat, I'd have to point first at the Crocket article itself, and then at whatever sources they used. On a less credible note, that new Alamo movie. Highlandlord 05:55, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

I think you would be correct. I remember hearing of an account by one of the women who survived the Alamo being able to recognise Davy Crockett's corpse by the odd-looking hat he was wearing.74.36.192.6 08:26, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Daniel Boone never did because we have the direct testimony of his descendants. For Crockett, it’s less clear than that. The Alamo testimony, although about historical events that the witnesses directly observed, wasn’t actually written down until long after the fact. That doesn’t mean it’s false, but does subject it to greater scrutiny. What is clear is that Crockett knew how to use political image to his advantage. That was true of how he ran his campaigns, and even extended to care in how a portrait artist would portray him in authorized art. It was concern for that image that led him to publish his autobiography, but that book wasn’t a journalistic account, it was carefully slanted to portray himself a particular way. Father V (talk) 03:52, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Krush Groove?

can someone notate that in the movie "Krush Groove" the fat boys are seen sporting coonskin hats — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.117.204.1 (talk) 01:13, 6 March 2007

• That's Krush Groove, 1985, and The Fat Boys, disbanded 1991. No mention in either of those articles; our strongest hint of it is that the director apparently went out of his way to name the club-owner "Crocket" just to justify the headgear.
  --Jerzy•t 00:55, 14 July 2009 (UTC)
  

Animal rights?

• I'm not a radical PETA person, but I think the declining popularity of coonskin caps in the '70s was because animal rights and welfare issues came to the forefront around that time (therefore it would be considered cruel to kill an animal for fashion). Anyone agree? WizardDuck 01:06, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

It sounds like something that would need a citation to be included. -- Karen | Talk | contribs 02:45, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

• "Came to the forefront" about a decade or so before PETA went beyond "5 people in a basement"? Third 'graph of fur farming says

  Demand fell in the late 1980s and 1990s because of a number of factors, including the failure of designers to come up with exciting new lines, and also the efforts of animal rights campaigners. Since the turn of the millennium, however, sales worldwide have soared to record highs...

Extraordinary claims require extraordinarily reliable refs, not professions being a moderate radical.
--Jerzy•t 00:55, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Removal

I was about to reword

and the price of a pound (about 0.45 kg) of raccoon fur rose from 25 cents to $8

as

and the price of raccoon fur increased, from 25 cents a pound (55 cents/kg), by a factor of 32

but removed it (despite the provision of a source), bcz

1. a pop news article is not a reliable source when it is written over 45 years after the event and offers no sources
2. in any case, there is no reason to believe that the raw fact is relevant:

"Raccoon fur" (as opposed to pelts) is probably not useful except for making exotic yarn or maybe spirit gummed theatrical facial-hair effects, which is a reason for the earlier assertion of "fake fur" to be treated as the credible one. You're not likely to sew or glue shorn fur onto whatever Disney used as a foundation for the caps. You'd use synthetic furry strands that will fuse onto the body of flexible plastic, or synthetic woven fabric, that gives the cap its shape.
If there is any relevance of the craze to the prices in a real-raccoon-product market, it was probably due to specialty leather-goods makers making them up, from authentic pelts (like the frontier originals), on a custom basis for rich brats whose parents wanted to satisfy the kids w/o letting mass-market kitsch crap into the house, lest they get the idea that what the masses buy is adequate for them; such purchases are a piss-poor tangential hint about the magnitude of a craze.
In any case, such a change in price is in itself pretty irrelevant to the magnitude of the craze. A 32-fold change in price could follow Disney's middleman quietly and cheaply buying options on a Friday afternoon, spread among the largest wholesalers who together account for 20% or 50% of the market; that market may normally sell, dirt cheap, the scraps of pelts (big enuf for kid-sized hats) left from making raccoon coats (not a dead market, despite decline from the 1920s collegiate craze), to feed mink and sable (or even raccoons), for fertilizer, or for whatever else scrap leather is used for. It could even result in those with scrap still on hand holding it as a speculation, in case Disney eventually ran out before the craze did: you could think the odds were 30 to 1 against being able to ever sell it to Disney, and holding it would still be your best move.
--Jerzy•t 01:51, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

5000/day: Oh, yeah? & So what?

Tho i left the 5k/day figure in place, it is implausible that it reflects what it insinuates: the peak of nationwide retail sales, which were in those days infeasible to measure. These are presumably daily wholesale sales rates, or even more likely, weekly or monthly ones, daily-ized by divided by the number of shopping days in the period. And those wholesale figures more likely reflect retailers' guesses about future retail sales, than actual retail sales. Different caps bought from wholesalers on the peak wholesale-volume day would be to be sold later -- and likely on different days, so that the wholesale peak could be broader and lower than the retail one (or conceivably narrower and higher). Further, total retail sales don't directly measure much about the craze: they count as equal items eventually sold at fire-sale levels after the craze's inevitable collapse; bear in mind that the retailers who were most optimistic would place the biggest orders, and their sales at the eventual bargain prices would probably be disproportionately large. The actual magnitude of the craze would be better reflected by info on how long retail sales stayed above, say 10,000 or 20,000 a week, or -- availability of that info being far-fetched -- the total wholesale orders, discounted by some guesswork (in light the pattern of their dropping off) to estimate the volume of the later sales on which the retailers likely took a loss.
--Jerzy•t 01:51, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

• Cool story, bro!Ezra c v mildew desire Jr (talk) 00:02, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

worn in every campaign

Old Estes quit wearing them after Davy Crockett became popular on TV. His son told him that they were just for kids now, and he should give it up. However I believe he was convinced to don one briefly at his '56 campaign announcementEzra c v mildew desire Jr (talk) 00:02, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Interesting, but we can't put it in an article unless there are reliable sources for it. --Orlady (talk) 00:18, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Spurious

"An account of actor Noah Ludlow introducing the popular song "The Hunters of Kentucky" while wearing a coonskin cap is shown to be spurious in Ludlow's autobiography."

I just can't help but think...do most people know what spurious means? Is this kind of language really needed in an encyclopedia? It's not a vocabulary contest. I mean, I could tell what it means just by reading the sentence but I don't think most people know this word. It's an encyclopedia, not an academic journal. The knowledge contained within should be accessible. Just my opinion Kronos o (talk) 13:45, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

@Kronos o:, what word would you suggest in place of "spurious"? -- ℜob C. alias ALAROB 15:29, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

@Alarob: Huh. I don't know. It's been several years, I'm no longer unfamiliar with the word, and it doesn't seem odd to me anymore. Kronos o (talk) 23:01, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

“Traditional Native American”?

The claim in the lede that the coonskin cap is "traditional Native American headgear" is dubious and needs to be proved or removed. Which tribe or nation wore raccoon pelts on their heads? How do we know? Could it just be an assumption?

While we're at it, does anyone have a source for the claim in the lede that "[t]he original coonskin cap consisted of the entire skin of the raccoon including its head and tail"?

I am guessing that no one will be able to find evidence for the coonskin cap before the 20th century. To be clear, I'm not promoting original research, just suggesting that we must not assert facts that are unsupported by good evidence. -- ℜob C. alias ALAROB 15:32, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

That's right! -- Kürschner (talk) 19:03, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

I agree. Raccoon pelt headwear appears to have originated from the late 18th century U.S. western border with very identifiable Indigenous nations. The territory claimed within the Northwest Territory, especially in the southwestern portion where the population of White settlers largely occupied, was disputed territory within the Delaware Nation, the Shawnee Nation, and the Miami Nation (each nation listed from east to west). The territory claimed within the Territory South of the River Ohio was included within the Cherokee Nation in the east and the Chickasaw Nation in the west.

I am Indigenous and study Native American history, and I have never seen a historical photograph of a citizen of any of these nations wearing a raccoon pelt on their heads. I have never seen a contemporary citizen of any of these nations wear a raccoon pelt as regalia.

It is most probable that the idea that the White Americans occupying these disputed lands copied the Indigenous people is apocryphal. A review of sources, none of which are contemporary, merely repeat this same claim without citing an original source. This should be deleted and I am going to do it. Indigiwiki (talk) 20:34, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

More than Davy in the 1950s

The post-war history of the coonskin cap is more complicated than just Davy Crockett in 1954-55. Newspaper ads in Boston, Chicago, and Washington D.C. were pushing coonskin caps for the Christmas season in 1949 and 1950. They were attributed to Daniel Boone. And an ad for boys’ jackets in the New York Times in August 1951 also showed a coonskin cap. 74.104.189.176 (talk) 22:41, 22 July 2021 (UTC)