Our German today was born in 1829 in Bavaria, and might be surprised at the world wide attention which he created in his lifetime and even up to today. His family was modest and our man was ambitious and desirous of "getting ahead". He came to America when he was 14 years old and lived with an uncle in Louisville, Kentucky. Along about 1849 he became infected with the gold-rush fever.
He traveled to New York, where his brothers Jonas and Lewis were in the dry goods trade and he bought a supply of silk, cloth, and a few luxury items. On his way west, he took along a supply of canvas intended for the Conestoga wagons made by German wheelwrights in Pennsylvania. These wagons were used by many prospectors crossing the continent to get to the gold fields in California. Our man though took the sea route instead and sailed around the Cape Horn to California. Before arriving in California, he had sold all of his trade goods except the canvas.
An old-timer in the gold fields chided our young man for not having brought along a supply of pants because prospecting for gold was hard on pants. The canvas was still unused and unsold so it was turned into some pants. The pants proved to be very popular and our man formed a trading company with his brothers in New York.
The brothers collectively decided to switch from bleached canvas to "serge de Nimes" (a particular kind of cloth from Nimes, France) which was renamed "denim". Another change was made when a prospector, Alkali Ike, complained to his tailor, Jacob W. Davis, that his pockets tore loose from the pants as a result of Alkali's carrying nuggets in his pockets. Jacob was tired of the complaints so he secured the pockets with copper rivets. Alkali tried these pants, which proven to be a great success and he never tired of bragging about them. Jacob, the tailor, reported this to the man who had created the first pants from canvas. Alkali and our man applied for a patent on this feature, and patent 139,121 was issued on 20 May 1873.
This last date, several years after the first pants were made from canvas, is regarded by many as the start of the firm Levi Strauss and Company. Levi himself never married and the company was run in later years, after Levi's death in 1902, by his nephews. Levi himself hated the word, "jeans", which some people called his pants. He always called them "overalls" which to us has a slightly different meaning.
Whatever one calls the product, they sold by the billions, and are still selling, around the world. In some countries one had to buy them on the black market because of the difficulty of getting them. Psychologists have studied them and written about them (or about the people who wear them). The phenomena all started with a piece of canvas and the imagination of a young German immigrant.
(19 Jun 03)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.