How do you pronounce chaps?

Shaps, with an sh sound. Theodore Roosevelt spelled it that way in print in 1885, and working ranch writers still specify the pronunciation today. The word is a clipped form of the Mexican Spanish chaparejos or chaparreras.

Why do chaps have no seat?

Because they descend from armas, leather flaps hung from a Mexican saddle's pommel rather than worn on the body. The first body-worn version, the chaparreras, was already seatless: leather trousers with no seat and buttons up the sides. Chaps go over trousers, so every pair is open at the back.

What is the difference between shotgun, batwing and woolies chaps?

Shotgun chaps have straight, narrow legs closed along their full length and trap body heat, which suits cold and windy country. Batwings are cut wide and fasten only around the thigh, giving airflow and easier mounting. Woolies are shotgun-style legs faced with fleece or angora, and are the warmest of the three.

What did chaps evolve from?

From the armas, or armas de agua, two large leather flaps hung from both sides of the pommel of a Mexican saddle. A traveller's account published in 1828 describes them being spread over the rider's legs in the rain. Body-worn chaparreras began replacing them around the 1840s.

Why Do Cowboys Wear Chaps? They Began as Saddle Flaps

Q: Why do cowboys wear chaps?

To protect their legs and their trousers while riding and working cattle. Chaps turn brush and thorns, shed rain, trap body heat in cold weather, and absorb the saddle wear that would otherwise fall on ordinary cloth trousers.

Two undressed calf or goat skins, hung at the pommel of the saddle. That is the leg protection a traveller wrote down when he described a Mexican saddle in 1828, and the working word is hung. The skins were part of the horse’s tack. Nobody was wearing them.

Almost everything odd about modern chaps is a leftover of that arrangement.

Why do cowboys wear chaps?

Chaps are leather leg coverings worn over ordinary trousers, and they do four jobs at once:

Brush. The name is the job. Chaparreras were “leather overalls worn to protect riders’ legs from the chaparro,” the evergreen oak, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary.
Rain. The rain version had a name of its own: armas de agua, water shields, spread over the legs when the weather turned.
Cold and wind. Close-fitting styles hold body heat, which is why the snug cuts held on across the northern ranges.
Wear. They sit on top of the trousers and take the saddle abrasion that would otherwise fall on cloth.

The first version hung off the horse

A Sketch of the Customs and Society of Mexico, published in 1828 from letters written on the road, describes a Mexican saddle down to the brass lion’s head sometimes set on the pommel and the black bear-skin housing spread over the horse’s back. Then it reaches what hangs off it.

“At the pummel, the armas de agua, two undressed calf or goat skins, are hung; these are kept there, because the dress would not be considered complete without them, but are of use only when it rains; they are then spread over the legs of the rider, and are a good defence from a passing shower, but an hour’s heavy rain would wet them through.”

Wikipedia’s article on chaps fills in the mechanics: armas were large flaps of goat, deer or calf skin hung on both sides of the Mexican saddle, pulled over the legs and feet and tied behind the waist when needed, left dangling when not. Off the horse they doubled as a sleeping mat. The same article notes that the costly sets were made up in jaguar, puma, bear or otter fur.

The very next sentence records what else rode on that pommel: a sabre. In 1828 the job of keeping a rider dry belonged to the saddle rather than to anything he had on.

Around the 1840s, body-worn chaparreras began replacing the armas. The old flaps had been pulled over the legs and feet together and tied behind the waist, then left hanging on each side once the rain stopped. The new ones went wherever the rider went.

The word is pronounced shaps

In 1885, Theodore Roosevelt published his own sketches of ranch life on the northern cattle plains and inventoried the cowboy’s dress: “a broad felt hat, a flannel shirt, with a bright silk handkerchief loosely knotted round the neck, trousers tucked into high-heeled boots, and a pair of leather ‘shaps’ (chaperajos) or heavy riding overalls.” He spelled the spoken form first and put the Spanish in brackets, which tells you which one people said out loud. A foreman, he added, wore the same outfit with “the shaps of seal-skin.”

Ranch country has not changed its mind. Writing for the South Dakota cattle paper Tri-State Livestock News in 2018, Savanna Simmons was blunt about it: “Also, they’re pronounced SHaps.”

The Spanish underneath is contested. Etymonline dates English chaps to 1844 as a clipping of chaparejos, from chaparreras, and ties the root to chaparro, the oak that also gives us chaparral. Wikipedia records a rival derivation from chaparron, a cloudburst. Working vocabulary often keeps two plausible parents; the number American police get called over the radio has the same unsettled paper trail.

The styles track the weather, not the look

Style	When	Cut	Built for
Shotgun	the late 1870s	straight, narrow, closed the full length of the leg	wind, snow and cold, because they hold body heat
Woolies	around 1887	shotgun legs faced with fleece or hair-on hide, often angora	northern plains and Rocky Mountain winters
Batwing	after the open range closed	wide and flared, fastened only around the thigh	hot-country airflow, and swinging a leg over a horse

Shotguns were the earliest design Texas cowboys used. Chinks, the half-length version that stops two to four inches below the knee, are the fourth style, seen most often on cowboys in the Southwestern and Pacific states.

All chaps are already assless

The internet treats “assless chaps” as a separate novelty garment. It describes every pair ever made. Chaps are, by construction, two separate legs fastened to the waist with straps or a belt, with no seat between them. Simmons puts it in ranch terms: “All chaps are ‘hinder’less. If they have a hinder in them, they’re just leather pants.”

The transitional design was odder still. The same Wikipedia entry describes the earliest chaparreras as leather trousers with no seat and buttons up the sides, a form Mexico had abandoned by the early 20th century in favour of the two loose legs joined at the top by a strap, which has been the standard ever since.

The open back is inherited from a saddle flap. A skin hanging off a pommel never needed a seat, and the two-legged replacement did not grow one, because it went over trousers the rider already had on.

The rodeo silhouette gets read backwards in the same way. Batwings look like Wild West show costume, but the wide cut and the two or three fasteners around the thigh were for air circulation and for freeing the lower leg enough to get on the horse. Labels stick to objects and then outlast the description, which is roughly the story of how the world’s largest island got its cheerful name.

Some of the belts were built to snap

Certain historic riding chaps used a single break-away leather string in front instead of a buckle. The stated purpose was for it to give way if the rider’s chap belt somehow hooked over the saddle horn.

That detail is a fossil of one specific accident, in the same way that the milled edge of a coin is a record of a fraud almost nobody commits now.

By about 1875 they had travelled well past the vaqueros

The National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum catalogues a pair of leather chaps made on the Northern Plains and attributed to Crow makers, dated around 1875, on display in its Native American Gallery. Within roughly a generation of leaving the Mexican pommel, the design had crossed most of a continent.

So cowboys do not really choose to wear chaps. They inherited a piece of saddle equipment, cut it in half, strapped it to a belt, and kept every compromise the change forced on them. The pair on a bull rider tonight is a rain flap that got off the horse and never went back. Strictly FYI.