# @downinnadesert on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd1r4sWGpTm
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/71151556-downinnadesert-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/7f9f542299.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-09-28T17:08:21.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Down In The Desert🌵 (@downinnadesert) — https://gondola.cc/downinnadesert

## Caption

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 now credit Cedarstaff with commercializing and patenting the thing rather than inventing it. ASU’s own fashion and design museum calls the cowboy version probably apocryphal.

Even the detail people repeat about his hatband gives it away. The silver ornament on it was made by Navajo craftsmen.

Arizona made it official on April 22, 1971, when Governor Jack Williams signed it into law. We were the first state to do it. New Mexico followed with a non-binding measure in 1987 and made it law in 2007. Texas has one too.

One last thing. The 1971 Arizona statute spells it bola tie, not bolo. So if you have ever argued about that at a wedding, the state law is on the bola side.

Show us your bolos.

Send us your stories to be featured on the page.

#BoloTie #Wickenburg #ArizonaHistory #ArizonaNews #DownInnaDesert

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## Credits

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## Tags

arizonahistory, arizonanews, wickenburg, bolotie, downinnadesert

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