Wyoming sheriff to deputies: no more cowboy hats

By John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times, February 4, 2015

The Earp brothers must be twitching in their graves. The same goes for Bat Masterson, Doc Holliday, Wild Bill Hickok and a posse of Stetson-wearing TV Wild West lawmen.

There’s a new sheriff in one rural Wyoming county, and he has banned his department from wearing cowboy hats. It’s a move that has caused an uproar and led one deputy to retire in protest.

And it’s not just those wide-brimmed symbols of the Old West. Those dusty old cowboy boots? Told to get out of Dodge.

New Sublette County Sheriff Stephen Haskell, who took office last month, requires deputies to wear black trousers, a tan shirt, black boots and a black ball cap.

Haskell, who is based in the tiny community of Pinedale, says the change is for safety and uniformity.

But critics contend the change ignores the history: an unofficial cowboy dress code that dates to nearly the 1800s, especially in Pinedale, a place recently heralded by True West magazine as one of the nation’s top 10 true Western towns. And this is Wyoming, where cowboy images are everywhere, including on license plates.

Haskell, a semi-professional bull rider and bareback rider for seven years who keeps a “Cowboy Code of the West” plaque on his office wall, took his argument public: He posted on social media that cowboy boots are slippery on ice, and cowboy hats blow away.

“Have you ever stood on the side of the highway on a blustery Wyoming day and tried to keep a cowboy hat on your noggin?” he wrote on the Sublette County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page. “I’d rather my deputies were concerned with their safety and the safety of the public than trying to chase down a fly-away cowboy hat.”

But 70-year-old Deputy Gene Bryson wasn’t buying that argument. He retired last week, partly because he felt that if his cowboy hat was gone, well then, so was he.

“I am not going to change,” he told the Star-Tribune.