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If you wish to read the information regarding Spain in he New World scroll down to THE WEST INSEPARABLE. Our items for sale start just below this statement.

SMF014-SOMBREROThis is a beautiful sombrero. We acquired this item at the Colorado Gun Collectors Show in Denver the first part of May. After we acquired the item we just left it setting on one of our tables. An attendee came be and commented on the Sombrero. It said it obviously had belonged to a man of means. We wondered why. He said the hat was made with a material around the brim and that appeared to have a lot of gold thread. In additon there were two hat bands, one of top of the other. Those hat bands had a lot of gold thread. He said in Spanish those bands were called galieons (do not know proper spelling but that is pretty close how he pronouned the word) The wealthier the person the more gold thread and number of galieons (hat bands). He said that is where the the term 10 gallon hat came from (close to 10 galieon). He indicated this was all described on a display at a State Historical Museum is Santa Fe. We found this interesting and had not heard that before. I assume it to be true. PRICE: $1500

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SMF014-CLOSE UP HAT BAND (GALIEON)Picture

SMF014B-VIEW FROM BACKPicture

SMF014COTHER SIDE Picture

SMF014D-BOTTOM VIEWPicture

SMF014ETHREADS ON BOTTOM OF BRIM Picture

THE WEST INSEPARABLE

When Spain was ousted by their Mexican Colonist in the New World, they left behind a three hundred year history of exploration, conquest and settlement that included Florida, portions of South Eastern United States and a much larger version of today’s Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

It is little known or understood that colonial Spain backed our war for independence against the British with money, provisions and Spanish lives. But they soon realized this young, independent power called the United States, “was active, industrious and aggressive and it would be an unpardonable error not to take all the necessary steps to check their territorial advance.”

That error was committed. By 1797, American squatters made up half the population of Spanish Louisiana before Spain gave it back to France. Texas was next. In the last months of Spanish rule, the royal government offered land grants to responsible Americans in hopes they would fend off the lawless ’dregs and castoffs’ of frontier society crashing Texas’s borders.

The new Republic of Mexico, of 1821, initially embraced Spain’s settlement policy in Texas and allowed commerce to flow across the plains from St. Louis to New Mexico via the Santa Fe Trail. Within three decades, through revolution, war and treaty, the United States had broken Mexico’s hold on its northern most provinces. The voice of Spanish-Mexican West and the events that led up to was silenced.

Hollywood, from Tom Mix to John Wayne, (with the exception of Zorro), reduced three and a half centuries of heavy western drama to a few decades of cattle drives, Indian depredations, cavalry charges, outlaw banditry and possies to the rescue. It appears that version of the West is branded on America’s collective consciousness.

But the West becomes considerably more interesting by laminating the Spanish, Mexican and American Experience; same geography, different times and perspectives. Few know that the Spanish sent soldiers from Santa Fe across the plains to intercept Lewis and Clark and arrest them on the Missouri River, but missed the expedition coming and going. And the Texans had the Mexican Army trapped in the Alamo in 1835 and let them surrender and depart.

As the Americans took the Oregon Trail to settle the West in the third decade of the 19th century, Santa Fe had been thriving since1610; Tuscon, 1700; Albuquerque, 1706; San Antonio, 1718; and San Diego, 1769. For English discoverers to have gone toe to toe with the Spanish penetration into the unknown, they should have traveled from Plymouth Rock to Colorado in twenty years and have established Denver within ninety years.

The point is simple. Those of Hispanic background should know they invested in the birth of our Country--that the foot slogging American Indian hunter rode to the height of his culture of the backs of Spanish horses and the American Cowboy received centuries of cattle management from the Spanish and Mexican Vaquero. There is more to the story and it belongs to us all in common heritage.

For the Western Collector, the Spanish Mexican Frontier expands the narrow band of collecting filled with Colt pistols, Winchester rifles, and Bowie knives (mostly English). Available is a cross section of fascinating arms and armor and related items used by the Spanish in conquest and settlement in a multitude of variations and character.

Cultural and ethnographic material encompasses the stuff of everyday life, in many mediums down through the centuries. Items of furniture fine art, folk art, ranching, and equestrian, agricultural, culinary and architectural and the list goes on.

There are a remarkable number of books and scholarly articles on exploration, adventure, expansion and settlement, historical biographies, ethno-history, historical archaeology and geography.

This Spanish Mexicon Frontier site offers history, information, books, and items for sale. It also offers a larger perspective that history binds us together whether we like it or not. What we do today determines tomorrow. The study of the past is the solution to the future. Look at our choices. It must work. We thought we should define a few of the terms we will be using.

The CLASSIC ESCOPETA is of Spanish or Mexican manufacture and is described as a lightweight, smooth-bore musket of varying lengths, usually of large caliber and used a MIQUELET flintlock system to ignite the charge. Buttstocks, (the end of that is placed against the shoulder), came in two varieties, i.e., the CATALONIAN, with its basic hooked shape and the MADRID, rectangular often with elongated grooves or furrows down its length. On the frontier, stocks used or damaged were often replaced to the individual taste of the re-stocker creating an interesting array of firearms.