Down in south-west Colorado, not far from Four Corners, where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado meet, lives a cat in a hat called Nate Funmaker.
He is a Winnebago Indian from Wisconsin. “Can you say Indian,” I ask. “I thought it was supposed to be Native American.”
“Well, I’m an Indian so I get to say Indian if I want,” says Nate.
Funmaker is a hatter, and he makes all kinds of hats – fedoras, Australian outback hats, but his forte, he says, is the Western hat.
This is not to be confused with a Stetson. Stetson is a company, and Nate’s hats, he says, are 100 times better than Stetsons.
Nate and his wife Kerrie live in Mancos, a pretty small town near the national park of Mesa Verde, famed as the site of the ancient homes of the Pueblo people, who farmed on the top of the mesas but who built some of their villages into the cliffs below. The writer Louis L’Amour lived near Mancos. This is cowboy country, and men here need cowboy hats.
So how does an Indian, ah, Native American, get into the business of making cowboy hats?
“I stumbled into it,” he says. “I met a guy making hats here in Mancos 18 years ago and helped him at first, and a few years later I bought the business.
“Now I sell hats all over the world, through trade shows, online, through word of mouth, also locally. There’s been a hat shop here for 40 years, and I’m the third dummy to own it.”
Funmaker’s hats are very cool, and it’s irresistible when wandering into his shop not to try a few on. But the price tag will give you pause – they sell from $400 to $800 (about R3 200 to R6 400) each. Not your average tourist impulse buy.
The price is due to the fact that the hats are handmade and hand-trimmed, and also that unlike Stetsons, which are made of wool, Funmaker’s hats are made from felted rabbit or beaver fur. Funmaker buys blanks – the sort of shapeless hat you might see Van der Merwe wearing to the rugby. The blanks come from Tennessee, the fur from Canada. Rabbit fur hats are at the lower end of the range, beaver at the high end, and a blend in the middle.
Funmaker takes the raw blank and blocks it and steam-irons it to create the finished product. Kerrie then applies a satin lining and a ribbon trim around the brim.
In blocking the hat Funmaker relies on more than simple measurements – he uses a 100-year-old French device called a conformateur, which looks a little like some form of torture weapon which minutely measures the contours of the head. “I’m good at judging the right hat for you,” he says. “I don’t want you to leave your hat hanging on a hook. I want you to wear a hat that looks good, because that way I’ll sell more hats.”
He has a framed picture in the shop of Josh Bernstein from the History Channel’s programme Digging for Truth, wearing a Funmaker hat, with the dedication: “To Nate – thanks for the world’s best hat.” Will Smith in the movie Wild Wild West also wore a Funmaker hat, and Nate says he has made four hats for Bob Dylan.
“I’ve made quite a few hats for celebrities, but my favourite people to make hats for are ordinary working people.”
They’re popular – he says he has 40 orders backed up which will take him 14 weeks to work through.
And while the price tag may put many people off, a Funmaker hat is a life-time investment. “The hats can cope with rain, snow or sun – all kinds of weather, because they’re made of fur,” he says.
What about the anti-fur lobby? “Look,” he says, “I believe in honesty. Are the beavers killed? Yeah, they’re killed. That’s what it is.
“But these are good hats. We do this properly. And they last.”
l If you’re feeling flush and fancy a Nate Funmaker hat, see www.nathanielsofcolorado.com - Weekend Argus