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Coonskin cap
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A coonskin cap is a cap fashioned from the skin and fur of a raccoon. The original coonskin cap consisted of the entire skin of the raccoon including its head and tail. The caps were originally a traditional Native American article of clothing, but when European pioneers began settling the Tennessee and Kentucky areas, they made it their own, evolving its use and wearing them as hunting caps.
The coonskin cap eventually became a part of the iconic image associated with American frontiersmen such as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. Boone did not actually wear coonskin caps, which he disliked, and instead wore felt hats. When, in the 1820s, actor Noah Ludlow incorporated the popular song The Hunters of Kentucky into his minstrel show, he dressed in buckskins and moccasins like the famous Daniel Boone. However, he could not locate the style of hat that Boone wore, and so he instead wore a coonskin cap. Ludlow's show was a hit and created the popular image of frontiersmen in coonskin caps. Davy Crockett later adopted this image for his public persona, although he also did not otherwise actually wear a coonskin cap.[1]
In the 20th century, the iconic association was continued in large part due to Disney's 1954 television show Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter and its sequels, starring Fess Parker. In the show, which once again made Crockett into one of the most popular men in the country, he was portrayed wearing a coonskin cap. The show spawned other similar Davy Crockett shows and movies, with many of them featuring Fess Parker as the lead actor. Parker went on to star in a Daniel Boone television series, again wearing a coonskin cap.
Crockett's new popularity initiated a fad among boys all over the United States as well as a Davy Crockett craze in the UK; the coonskin was the thing to wear. The look of the cap that was marketed to young boys was typically simplified; it was usually a faux fur lined skull cap with a raccoon tail attached. Thousands of hats were sold through the end of the 1950s, when Crockett's popularity waned and the fad slowly died out. The fad among American boys died out sometime by the late 1970's virtually altogether.
- Bob Dylan referred to the coonskin cap in Subterranean Homesick Blues.
- The fictional Disney universe organization The Junior Woodchucks uses a uniform with coonskin caps.
- Scut Farkas, the sadistic bully in the movie A Christmas Story, is shown wearing a coonskin cap.
- Estes Kefauver, a US Senator in the 1950s wore such a hat during his political campaigns
- ^ For Ludlow's creating of the image and Crockett's later adoption of it, see John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York: Holt, 1992), pp. 334–35.