Cowboy Gear: Your Guide to Western Chaps

Chip Schweiger
8 min readAug 26, 2019

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If you’ve ever wondered about those sturdy leather leg coverings you see cowboys wearing, well, you’ve come to the right place. Those are what we in the cowboy class refer to as chaps or leggings, and come from an early form of protective leather garment used by cattle herders in Spain and Mexico. Originally called armas, meaning “weapons”, they were two large pieces of cowhide that were used as a sort of protective…

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Chip Schweiger

I’m the CPA who writes about the American West, and the cowboys who feed a nation.