(2) Dipsomania, expressed in tremendous debauches following long spells of abstinence.
(3) Suicide.
Every range man will remember how these three forms of nervous disorder have wrecked the lives of his friends, and how the best men were taken, not the weaklings. If so much disaster is avoided by wearing colours which protect the body from actinic burning, it seems a reasonable conduct to avoid blue clothing, and to copy the hues—such as dun, bay, or brown, which nature provides to guard the animals.
PROTECTION FROM CHILLS. To absorb sweat, all underwear should be woollen.
Dress for concealment
CONCEALMENT FROM ENEMIES. Man is the only animal whose figure is upright, cutting the lines of the landscape, and therefore conspicuous at a great distance. A single colour is therefore more easily seen than two blobs of colour such as a khaki shirt and brown trousers, or a bay shirt and dun trousers. As armies paint their guns in broken splashes of colour, men's uniforms should not be whole coloured if they are to blend with the landscape.
The hat
THE HAT. The Red Indian calls the white men "hat-wearers," and takes notice of our baldness. Savages who wear no hats are never bald. Why then should we wear hats? I think that on the range, if we began early enough, we should do well to let our hair grow for the protection of the head and the nape of the neck from the sun. On the old American Frontier the pioneers did grow long hair because a man with no scalplock was not worth killing, and therefore barred from councils of the Indians.
The primitive hat of the range was a disc of bison skin, sodden, and the middle, thrust into a hole in the ground, was filled with stones. A leather string laced round the edge kept the brim from flopping. A leather band fitted the crown to the head.
Later came a Mr. Stetson of Philadelphia, with a copy of this range hat in beaver-fur felt soaked in shellac, and so felted that the edges did not flop. A bootlace round the front of the hatband passed through an eyelet above each ear, and was tied with a hard knot behind the head. This prevented the hat from blowing away and let in air behind the head to ventilate the crown. Pinching the crown with four dints for the words North West Mounted Police, branded the cowboy Stetson as a soldier's hat which was adopted in South Africa by most of the mounted Irregulars of the British Empire, and by the Boy Scouts who copied the design in felt of rabbit fur.