Sugarloafs Supremo

 April 3, 2025

   I recently realized I am not the only person who totally digs the classic sugarloaf sombrero. When I was in Tucson for the Tucson Book Festival, Stuart and I picked up our custom hats at Arizona Hatters, I found out the guys who work there are just as thrilled as I am with those old style gargantuan Mexican lids. Some are trying to duplicate the style, but so far, it's a bit out of reach. Here's why.

Sugarloaf Supremo

(note the curled sweep and the pinch at the top)

   It is not a Spanish style (as some have posited), but totally Indio, and you can see in old photos that the brims and the crowns just keep growing and growing from the 1880s until by about 1915 when they are off the charts humungo.

Daily Whip Out: "Sugarloafs Galore"

   And, then, unfortunately because of the Mexican Revolution, the style is inseparable with the insurgents and when they are defeated it loses its appeal. And by the 1950s only a caricature style remains (the charro sombrero) but it's a pale substitute for the mighty sugarloaf. 

Daily Whip Out: "Sugarloaf Paisano"

Daily Whip Out: "Barefoot Sugarloaf"

Daily Scratchboard Whip Out:

"Mexican Sugarloaf Study"

 

  And, of course, in the states it gets chopped down to size

Daily Whip Out:

"Buster McCumber wearing a sawed-off sugarloaf"

   Arrested twice for bunco-steering in San Angelo, Texas, Buster M. was a master conman who fled across the border into Old Mexico and gravitated to the Bacanora, Sonora region. Some believe he is the real Guero from Divisadero. This is all fictional and a character I am developing at the moment.

   I just got a sneak peek at forthcoming book, "The Undiscovered Country" by a certain author I know. Here's my take on it.

"An epic telling of a history I thought I already knew. I was mistaken. No one threads the needle between the dark contradictions of American history with such breathtaking clarity, honesty and wit as Paul Andrew Hutton. He is the undisputed king of western history."

—Bob Boze Bell, executive editor True West magazine