Mark Barcus, an award-winning leather worker, began making gear for his own cowboying. His passion for building traditional gear eventually grew into his own shop, Cow Camp Saddlery, where he teaches leather working classes. Mark’s extensive knowledge of the form and function of traditional gear adds valuable context to the gear he makes and teaches about. In just three weeks, Mark will share his expertise in Elko at the 39th Gathering in his Leather Working Basics workshop.
This interview has been edited and reordered for length and clarity.
Last year was your first year at the Gathering. What was the experience like for you? How did you first hear about the Gathering?
It was good. I’ve been following the Gathering since its inception way back when it was all cowboys that showed up. I remember reading about [the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering] in Western Horseman and stuff as a kid. This is the 39th year, so I’ve read about it, I’ve seen it, and I’ve seen the old cowboys. Those guys that showed up there with their spurs on and their cowboy hats, those were the guys I looked up to, so far as their gear and stuff like that.
Do you come from a ranching background?
Yeah, I’ve cowboyed my whole life and tooled leather my whole life, virtually. I started tooling leather when I was about five or six years old, started playing with it. I entered my first 4-H competition when I was I think eight or nine. I’ve been doing it for quite a while.
How did you get started in leatherworking?
Mainly, how I got into doing a lot of it was I started wanting gear to cowboy with, and the gear I liked was not made in the area I was at, really, so I had to build my own gear or figure out how it was made. I spent lots of time literally studying Western Horseman and the gear I liked, and then just created my own patterns based off of what I had seen. And you know, just over a period of time, I came up with the same type of stuff they were, and it became my passion to build it. Of course, working ranches, once you build one, then everybody on the ranch wants one, so you start building for everybody on the ranch. It just kind of grew from there. Mainly, I got started, you might say, out of necessity for the gear I needed.
What inspired you to start teaching leatherworking classes?
When I quit ranching full-time and went to leather work[ing] full-time, I just saw a decline in quality leatherwork. There’s a lot of people doing it, but they don’t follow the traditional ways of doing it. For me, it’s more about sharing the old-school ways: hand stitching and laying out basket stamps and construction. Today, I believe we have some of the best carvers in the world that can carve leather, but most of them can’t put a project together. To me, one of the most important things you need to know how to do is to literally be able to construct it in a way that’s functional and understand what it is you’re making.
My biggest item that I build lots of are chaps, and to see how they’ve transitioned from the old ways to the new ways, and how there’s a lot of—I don’t want to say misinformation, because I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily misinformation, it’s just lost information—people that don’t truly know where it came from and why it was used. Or when you hear people on a regular basis talking about chaps, they’ll say “Yeah, they were leg coverings, they were built this way traditionally,” and when you study it traditionally, they weren’t built that way. The whole purpose was completely different than what some people think of today, and so I just want to share that as much as I can. They’re a functional tool. So knowing all that is just something that I like to share, a true understanding of what it was designed to be used for, how to do it.
What’s your involvement with institutions like the Buffalo Bill Center of the West?
The Buffalo Bill Center of the West was started out as an apprenticeship program where there were three apprentices. We were going to learn how to build saddles and do leatherwork in the traditional manner. The shop was set up from 1900 to 1930, so we made traditional 1930s gear, and what methods we used were a lot of those same methods [used in the 1930s]–lots of hand stitching, lots of hand tools, machinery from that era. That lasted for nine months, and then it kind of took a change. We were there for almost another year, me and another gentleman. We went from an apprenticeship program to an educational program… [to] educating the general public. We went from building or learning ourselves—the master saddlemaker was no longer there—to teaching what we knew, what we had studied, what we had learned.
“After they watched us stamp and handwork a belt with five or six hours worth of labor in it, and they’d see all that went into it, they’d go and buy a 400-dollar belt because they understood the time and the quality. They got to feel the quality. ”
What we learned very quickly is the amount of people that don’t understand what quality gear is, how it’s made. In the summer, we would literally have over three hundred people stop and talk to us a day—the two of us—and we got to answer questions about leatherwork, make them understand what it was that went into leatherwork. We fielded questions that were as far out there as “What plant does leather come from?” because people don’t know. They don’t know where the stuff comes from. And we would field questions like—and it wasn’t really a question, it was a statement they’d make— “Well, we’re not going to buy a belt for more than 50 dollars.” And then, after they watched us stamp and handwork a belt with five or six hours worth of labor in it, and they’d see all that went into it, they’d go and buy a 400-dollar belt because they understood the time and the quality. They got to feel the quality. Most of them were wearing “genuine leather” belts from Walmart or somewhere like that, and they’d never felt good leather.
Through the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, that became our opportunity to educate people about quality. There’s a lot of those people there that have been so far removed that they don’t even know what goes into [leatherwork]. That’s what we did at the museum. We let people see us draw patterns. We let them see us tool leather. We let them touch the finished product. We let little kids take a hammer and mallet and a stamp and stamp on a little punched out coaster and they get to take it home. And we had kids that would not go through the museum because they wanted to watch us do what we did.
Students from Mark Barcus’s Cow Camp Saddlery with chaps they made. Photo courtesy Mark Barcus.
[The museum program has been shut down] for two years now. I’ve been out on my own. I rent a place outside of Cody, Wyoming. We’ve got a shop here. People come from all over the United States to learn how to make chaps and do leatherwork. Last year we had 27 classes. Some of [the students] drove all the way from Texas twice. One of [the students] came from Louisiana. Two of them came from Utah twice. So, it’s a big endeavor to come learn this, but it’s something that is not offered in very many places.
What are you looking forward to at the Gathering this year?
It’s a great opportunity to hear great poetry, great singing. One of my favorite people that will be there this year is Trinity Seely. And Dave Stamey and those guys. Trinity is like my little sister, so it’s going to be fun to get to visit with her and her husband Jeff. That’s the thing I see, is that there’s been a lot of camaraderie over the years.
