“Good taste in footwear,” muttered bootmaker “Daddy Joe” Justin as two outlaws swung from the gallows wearing his handcrafted boots.
It was the wry humor of a hard man — one born of a trade he’d been shaping since 1879 in the frontier town of Spanish Fort, Texas, where the Chisholm Trail carried dust, cattle, and men of true grit past his door.
Orphaned young, he inherited no land, no money, no family connections — only the craft he learned with his hands.
Bootmaking then was a slow art, a week or more in the making. Daddy Joe’s boots weren’t cheap — up to fifteen dollars, half a month’s wages for a cowboy — but they were worth every cent. His boots could carry a man for years, while the cheaper, store-bought kind often meant blistered feet and tattered leather before the end of a drive.
Daddy Joe worked slow and steady.
Hide cut by hand. Pulled wet over wooden boot forms. Needles driven through leather thick as a man’s palm. Heels stacked one layer at a time. No machines, no shortcuts — just awls, thread, and the patience to shape a boot that fit like it was born on a rider’s foot.
In his memoirs, Robert Staffanson wrote, “A cowboy’s boots are his foundation, his connection to the earth, and his most loyal companion.”
Daddy Joe knew this, and built boots for the trail, not for the show: heels high to lock in a stirrup, toes narrow to slip free in a hurry, shafts tall to guard against brush and rattlers, no laces to tangle and drag a man to death, and leather tough enough to ride a season straight.
Every stitch was a wager against distance and weather; every pair, a tool for men who lived hard and rode harder. In a world that has since traded craft for machines and practicality for spectacle, his work feels almost mythic.
Daddy Joe Justin didn’t invent the cowboy boot, but he gave it the soul of a man who knew survival was something you stitched yourself. He carried the pride of a craftsman who believed — cowboy, outlaw, or lawman — every man deserved a good pair of boots to die in.