King of the saddles - saddlemaker in Sheridan, Wyoming

Sunset, Nov, 1997 by Peter Fish

There are three good stops you can make on Main Street in Sheridan, Wyoming. There is the Mint Bar, whose exterior sports a neon cowboy and whose interior is varnished with decades of whiskey fumes and cigarette smoke. There's a restaurant that makes chicken soup with homemade noodles. Best of all, there is King's Saddlery and King Ropes.

King's is a convivial place. Back in the rope shop, a wrangler sprawls in a barber chair while his buddy tests a jerk line, the rope sizzling through the air. Up in front, at King's Saddlery, the Kings educate customers on the fine points of hand-tooling, and the air is filled with that incomparably comforting smell of leather: leather chaps and chinks, belts and poker chip racks, and, especially, saddles - saddles that have made Don King and his family among the most famous saddlemakers in the world.

"I was always brought up around horses," Don King says. "The leatherwork was just a hobby."

King is 74 now. He has a broad face and white hair, and he looks his life. He was born in Douglas, Wyoming, but didn't hang around long. At age 5 he left with his father, a cowboy who moved all over the West. When King was 14, he, too, struck out on his own, breaking horses at Arizona dude ranches, exercising polo ponies in Santa Barbara, discovering he had a gift for tooling leather. When he was wrangling in Glacier National Park, he remembers, "I'd wake up at 3:30 in the morning. I was supposed to catch up on sleep, but I'd make a belt. And I was making more money selling belts than I was on my wages."

In this way a career was born. After World War II, Don King married and settled in Sheridan. The town had dude ranches and real ranches and cowboys and tourists who appreciated fine leatherwork. King apprenticed himself to a saddlemaker. "Oh, they were pretty rough," he says of his first efforts. "But I learned. I'd copy saddles at first. But I figure if you use someone's style you should change it or improve it. I'd throw in my own ideas."

King's ideas helped shape what is now called the Sheridan style of saddlemaking. It's exuberant, yet controlled, with designs - often garlands of wild roses - intricately carved into the leather, not stamped as with cheaper saddles. "This area has a history of exceptional floral tooling," says Jim Jackson, who tools King belts and wallets. "Don took patterns they were stamping, large flowers, and turned them into smaller, tighter patterns. Guys had never seen anything like that before."

These days King is retired from saddlemaking and spends his time producing much-in-demand leather-carving tools. But the King tradition carries on. Son Bruce runs the shop, son Bob runs King Ropes, and son John produces the saddles. John King's custom saddles can run upwards of $4,000. "There are other people who try and do our style," he says. "But they don't know how."

The Kings' way with leather has earned them fame surprising for a place on Main Street in Sheridan. Bill Clinton owns a King belt. The National Endowment for the Arts brought Don King to Washington and honored him as a living treasure of American folk art. Photographs on the saddlery walls show a familiar-looking woman touring the store. The photos are accompanied by a letter of thanks from Buckingham Palace: "Her Majesty was fascinated by everything she saw and was much impressed by the skill involved in the making of the saddles."

Toward the end of my visit, I follow Don King through what someone has referred to as his retirement fund - the Don King Museum, one of the largest private collections of saddles in the world. There are Texas saddles, Mexican saddles, and Native American saddles, but not as many Don King saddles as you might want to see. He made them to sell, after all, and even ones he didn't want to part with got sold. One saddle in particular he misses. "Everything just came out a little bit better. The crown prince of Saudi Arabia wanted it. I told him it wasn't for sale. But that's just like raising a red flag to a crown prince."

Still, a few Don King saddles stand ready to be admired, and we stand admiring them. One early saddle he dismisses as "rough." Nearby is one of his last. Every swell of seat and skirt is emblazoned with wild roses. The saddle seems to glow with that aura of something far more beautiful than it needs to be. Any crown prince would want a saddle like this. "It took me a while to take more pride in my work," King says. "To put more effort than I had to. It's a matter of trying to be one of the best, of trying to improve. I'd lay awake at night thinking of lots of things. I'd know what I wanted to do."

King's Saddlery and King Ropes, 184 N. Main St., Sheridan, WY 82801; (800) 443-8919.