About a half hour from Reno, there’s a place called Virginia City, Nevada, where everything feels like it’s 1859 and the US’s largest silver deposit was just discovered. The bars say “saloon,” and look the part. The cemetery is definitely haunted. And of course there’s a custom hatmaker—who shares a space in one of Virginia City’s oldest surviving buildings with bespoke cowboy bootmaker Jake Houston.
Jake Houston wasn’t the first person to fall victim to the wonderful folly of “the boots I want are too expensive, so I’ll just figure out how to make them.” One Lisa Sorrell DVD set, a few rodeos, and over a decade later, Jake has put together an impressively well-rounded business in Virginia City, making fully custom cowboy boots, while also finding vintage pairs to sell in the shop alongside his more affordable Houston Boot Company “shelf” boots made in León, Mexico.
Jake and I had a fantastic chat about his bootmaking journey, the time he glued the lasts into a customers’ pair, the half-decade path to get those shelf boots manufactured, his insistence on sharing his bootmaking knowledge—for free—and why people sometimes get really, really upset when you tell them what bespoke cowboy boots cost.
Here’s Jake Houston, on the Shoecast.
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