Arizona made the bolo tie the official state neckwear in 1971. The cowboy who gets credit for inventing it probably didn’t. The story everybody in this state has heard goes like this. Late 1940s, a Wickenburg cowboy named Victor Cedarstaff is out on horseback when his hat blows off. He doesn’t want to lose the silver trimmed hatband, so he slips it around his neck. A guy riding with him says that’s a good looking tie you’ve got there, Vic. Cedarstaff went home, messed around with silver and hatbands, and eventually patented a slide design in the 1950s. He named it after the boleadora, the South American weighted throwing cord. Good story. Probably not the whole one. Hopi, Navajo and Zuni silversmiths in the Southwest had been making cord and slide neckwear before that. A shop owner in New Mexico named Manny Goodman documented Hopi, Navajo and Zuni men wearing bandanas clasped with silver and shell conchas back in the 1930s, a full decade before the hatband story. Most historians n...