Davy Crockett Coon Skin Hat with Real Tail Size Medium

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The founder of the fictional Springfield in The Simpsons, Jebediah Springfield, is depicted in his statue as wearing a coonskin cap. In its time, it had gone from the reigning emblem of anti-consumer frontiersmen to a commercialized poster child of the 1950s. It had donned the heads — if only briefly — of famous pioneers and, a century later, had found its way into the wardrobes of millions of admiring American children.

Parker's coonskin cap costume was fashioned from the skin and fur of raccoon, including its head and luxuriant tail. He donated it, along with other costume elements, to the National Museum of American History in 2004. The cap that was marketed to young boys was a simplified version and was usually made of faux fur with a raccoon tail attached.The class of men to whom I allude as ‘coonskin cap fellows’ are worth but very little to merchants. I do not include in the ‘coonskin cap’ [category] the larger, more respectable, middle class all over the country. These [coonskin cap] fellows, who number in the hundreds of thousands, are worth very little to anyone.” By the late 1700s, white settlers had evicted large numbers of indians; simultaneously, they chose to adopt native attire — including the coonskin cap:

In 1902, the New York Times adamantly declared the coonskin cap out of fashion and out of favor. “The coonskin hat served a good purpose in its day when there were no fashionable hat stores in the forests,” wrote the fashion critic. “[But now], this cap of our squirrel-shooting grandfathers is relegated to the glass cases holding treasures of the past.” The pioneer, who’d once been defined by “his religion, his politics, his moral code and his coon-skin cap,” was, from that point forward, a character of the past. Coonskin caps are powerful cultural symbols that continued to be seen in film, television, and other contexts in the latter decades of the 20th century. General San Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana then took over the Mexican government, and his dictatorship put stricter controls on these areas. Santa Anna led an army of up to 6,000 troops to secure control of the Texas territory.Until then, the coonskin cap had only been revived as a semi-joke; in the 1950s, everything changed. During his successful 1948 campaign for election to the United States Senate, Estes Kefauver started wearing the coonskin cap after rival Tennessee politician E.H, Crump called him a coonskin communist. During a speech in Memphis, he would declare: “I may be a pet coon, but I’m not Boss Crump’s pet coon.” he would wear it in every campaign afterwards including when he ran for Vice President alongside Adlai Stevenson in 1956. Over the next century, the cap became a reigning symbol of the free-spirited American pioneer. A Colliers article simply titled “A Coonskin Cap,” recounts a tale from the early 1800s in which an old-school pioneer is swindled out of his land by a railroad tycoon. The court minutes copiously make reference to the man’s coonskin hat — an allusion to his “steadfast values.” When he loses the case, tragedy unfolds, but because of the hat, the presiding judge takes pity:

For two periods in our country’s history — once in the days of freewheeling, westward-bound pioneers, and again in the 1950s — a hat made of raccoon fur was the talk of the town.Hollywood similarly revelled in pioneer nostalgia and pumped out a bevy of 1790s-inspired films featuring the caps. A NYT review of 1939’s Allegheny Uprising, starring a furry-capped John Wayne, was not kind: “It’s a sprawling, confusing costume picture,” wrote the dismayed critic, “which just seems like a lot of actors dressed up in coon-skin hats, wandering around on location.” Coonskin caps were originally popular Native American article of clothing. [1] [ bettersourceneeded] With much of the land along the Eastern Seaboard already settled, immigrants from Scotland and Ireland (particularly Northern Ireland) ventured into the forested and mountainous Appalachian region. These groups lived a subsistence lifestyle and often interacted with Native Americans in the area which included adopting some of their customs and dress. The Simpsons depicts Jebediah Springfield, the early 19th-century founder of the fictional town of Springfield, in a coonskin cap.