Description

Chinchilla Cowboy Hat

For hat style you can go with any hat we currently make. View our hat catalog.

Any hat, any style – same price.

Our century grade mink and chinchilla cowboy hats come with a hat brush, and in their own hard shell hat can.

The chinchilla is a rodent whose natural habitat is the Andes Mountain Range, up to 15,000 feet in elevation.

When Naturalists first saw chinchillas they declared they were the “missing link” between the rabbit, the squirrel, and the rat.

Valued for their fur since the days of the Spanish Conquistadors of the 16th Century, wild chinchillas were almost extinct by the 1920s. Enter an American mining engineer who had seen them in 1918 while working on a project in Chile. And he was determined to bring chinchillas to the USA. M.F. Chapman lobbied the Chilean Government for years until he was finally granted permission to export live chinchillas. It took Chapman and 23 men over 3 years to trap just 11 chinchillas.

No live chinchillas had ever survived the journey off the Andes, so Chapman planned his travel accordingly. He took a year to bring the 11 rodents out of the mountains, and they survived the journey afterwards to the USA. Where these 11 animals formed the breeding stock that started 3 chinchilla ranches in the mountainous western states.

Chinchilla Fur

Chinchilla fur is beautiful, rare. A human hair follicle has one perhaps 2 hairs grow from it. A chinchilla can have up to 85 hairs grow out of one hair follicle making it the warmest fur on earth. No matter the color of the chinchilla, all their fur has a black tip. So hard to get that it was worn only by monarchs and their queens, the fur has been available to the rest of us, thanks to Mathias Chapman,  since the mid 20th century or so. Chinchilla fur is made into an assortment of garments and can go as high as a 100,000 dollars for a full length coat.