Hitched Horsehair: Wyoming's Prison Craft That Became a Collector's Art

Hitched horsehair work is the craft of knotting horse mane and tail hair, a hitch at a time, into bridles, hat bands, belts, quirts and cuffs. Prisoners in about a dozen Western states made it, most of all between 1885 and 1920, and inmates at Wyoming’s Territorial Prison in Laramie were among them. Tom Horn, the most famous man ever held in a Cheyenne cell, spent his last months braiding horsehair rope while he waited to hang.

It never entirely stopped. Some prisoners still hitch bridles, and outside the walls the craft has had a revival among Western gearmakers, who learned in part by studying the old prison pieces.

The craft itself

Hitched horsehair begins with the raw material: mane and tail hair, sorted by color and length. Wyoming’s prison bridles were mostly black and white, the same as at Montana’s Deer Lodge prison, and most of the Laramie patterns formed diamonds. No dye is needed for the contrast. Black and white hair alternated in a geometric grid creates a design that stays legible at a distance.

The work is a series of tight half hitches tied around a core, row after row, with the colors changed to build the pattern. A dowel or form holds the work. The complex patterns, the diamonds and the borders that frame them, have to be planned before the first hitch, because the color sequence has to come out exactly right along the whole length. Hours of work, patience and concentration are what every hitcher shares.

The distinguishing mark of skilled work is pattern uniformity: consistent stitch depth, and diamonds that line up precisely across the full length. That regularity is what to look for when judging a piece.

The prison origin in Wyoming

The Wyoming Territorial Prison was built in Laramie in 1872 and held convicts for about thirty years. Its biggest industry was a broom factory that turned out as many as 720 brooms a day. Horsehair work was smaller and more personal. Horse hair was a normal byproduct of the ranching economy, not contraband, and a bridle that sold “on the outside” could earn an inmate money for tobacco or a stake for his release. Wyoming’s prisoners combined hitched horsehair with braided calfskin in their bridles.

When the new Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins opened in December 1901, the Laramie prisoners were moved there. Rawlins is one of the Western prisons the Western Folklife Center names as historically associated with hitched horsehair, and pieces attributed to the Wyoming State Prison at Rawlins sit in collections today. The Rawlins prison’s main industries ran from brooms to shirts to wool blankets to license plates before it closed in 1981.

The main building of the Wyoming Territorial Prison State Historic Site in Laramie, a two-story stone structure with multiple windows, operated from 1872 to 1901. — The Wyoming Territorial Prison, Laramie, built in 1872. Inmates here hitched horsehair bridles, mostly black and white, mostly in diamond patterns. Its prisoners were moved to the new Rawlins penitentiary after it opened in December 1901. *Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA.*

Tom Horn and the Cheyenne jail

Tom Horn came to Wyoming in the 1890s as a stock detective for big cattlemen, among them John Coble of Iron Mountain. Range talk put a price on the rustlers he was hired to stop, often quoted as $600 a man. In July 1901, 14-year-old Willie Nickell was shot near his family’s place at Iron Mountain in Laramie County, and Horn was charged with the killing.

Horn was arrested in January 1902. The Laramie County jail in Cheyenne held him through his trial in October 1902 and his appeals. He spent the months braiding horsehair ropes, and a Wyoming State Archives photograph shows him in the sheriff’s office during his trial, holding a rope he braided. Braiding is a different technique from hitching, but it is the same raw material and the same way of filling empty time.

He was hanged on November 20, 1903, on the water-operated gallows the Cheyenne architect James Julian had designed: the condemned man’s weight on the trap opened a valve, and the draining water pulled the bolt. Only a small group of witnesses was let into the jail yard. His story, the trial, and the arguments about his guilt are covered in full elsewhere on this site.

What the pieces look like

A complete horsehair bridle set includes the headstall (the part that goes over the horse’s head), the bit, and the reins. The reins are where most of the hitched work appears: long sections of woven horsehair, sometimes 8 to 10 feet, with the color pattern running the full length. The headstall typically shows simpler construction than the reins because the horse’s movement and the buckle hardware require different structural considerations.

The classic Wyoming prison pattern is the black and white diamond grid, achieved by changing between black and white hair while running a consistent hitch throughout. Wyoming makers set it off with braided calfskin. The visual effect is geometric and almost machine-made, achieved entirely by hand. Adjacent to the diamond sections, many makers added chevron borders or herringbone bands that frame the central pattern and demonstrate the maker’s range.

Hat bands are the entry-level piece in hitched horsehair: 6 to 8 inches of the same hitching technique in roughly one inch diameter, fitted to the hat’s sweatband. They are the most readily available collectible and the usual place to start.

The Wyoming Frontier Prison

The old penitentiary in Rawlins opened in December 1901 with 104 cells and no electricity or running water, held about 13,500 people over 80 years, and closed in 1981. In 1988 a joint powers board took it over, named it the Wyoming Frontier Prison, and opened it as a museum. Its 1916 death house held an indoor version of the Julian gallows, and later the gas chamber.

The prison itself can only be seen on a guided tour, which runs about an hour; tours run year-round, more often in summer. Rawlins is on Interstate 80. Check the schedule before making the trip.

In Laramie, the restored Territorial Prison is now the Wyoming Territorial Prison State Historic Site, which has hosted horsehair hitching demonstrations.

Finding and collecting authentic work

The market for Wyoming horsehair work, both historical and contemporary, runs through several channels.

Western Americana auctions are the main source for historical pieces, and their past sale results are the best guide to what pieces bring.

Contemporary makers sell at Western gear shows and directly. The Western Folklife Center in Elko, Nevada, which also runs the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, has profiled working horsehair artists, among them Casey Backus of Cheyenne, and Alfredo Campos, who received a National Heritage Fellowship in 1999 for leading the hitching revival. Ask about the time invested in a piece and look at stitch consistency before buying.

Books. Jody and Ned Martin’s Horsehair Bridles, A Unique American Folk Art (Hawk Hill Press, 2015) is a collector’s reference on prison bridles.

The key authentication question for historical pieces is provenance. Many old hitched bridles were long assumed to be Native American work when inmates made them, and many are called prison-made, or Wyoming prison-made, without proof. A photograph, an accession record, or a documented prison sale is what turns a fine piece into a documented artifact. Provenance in Western folk art is not an abstraction.

Long narrow cellblock corridor with a tiled floor, a row of open latticed steel cell doors on the left, and a second tier of cells on a railed gallery above. — A cellblock at the Wyoming Territorial Prison in Laramie, where inmates hitched horsehair bridles. The scale of the place explains the craft better than any technical description does. A bridle takes weeks of small repetitive motions, the raw material weighs nothing, and the work fits in a lap. Very little else could be made in a room this size. *Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress (LCCN 2017884451). Public domain.*