No horsing around at Hickman Saddlery

POST FALLS – Bob Hickman’s broad smile and “Ah, shucks” attitude belie his status as an internationally known saddle maker.

The owner of Hickman Saddlery in Post Falls, his handmade saddles are held by aficionados in France, Italy and Sweden, according to his store’s Web site.

Perhaps more importantly, his leather saddles, chaps, chinks and packs are popular on the range, the trail and in the show ring.

Hickman says he caters to the “working cowboy.”

It’s seeing buckeroos all over the West relying on his gear that’s most gratifying, Hickman said.

“These are tools to a working cowboy,” Hickman said, strolling through his shop where saddles and other riding necessities jam the sales floor and dangle from the rafters.

What’s the secret of a good saddle?

“It makes your butt smile,” he said with a grin.

He now turns out between 45 and 50 handmade saddles a year, he said. Prices start at $2,500 and can go up to $17,000 with silver embellishment.

His latest innovation is a lightweight, cable-rigged saddle with a custom, carbon fiber “tree” that’s “going like gangbusters,” he said. It’s got free-swinging stirrups, too.

All told, he’s turned out 335 saddles over the last 20 years. But business didn’t really take off until 1997.

Western traditions come easily to Hickman. He grew up on his family’s 3.000-acre Colfax farm, running 300 head of cattle and tending 15 horses, he said.

Among his distant relatives is late Oscar-winning stunt rider Yakima Canutt, a fixture in the old Westerns baby boomers grew up on.

Hickman got hooked on leather work when his mother gave him his first tooling kit. He was 12 at the time.

“In high school, I made belts and wallets and it just took off from there,” said Hickman, a large man who favors jeans, a silver-buckled belt and black cowboy hats.

After that, he enrolled in a now-defunct saddle-making school at Spokane Community College.

While determined, he was restless sort. He lasted only a year, he said, made one saddle and dropped out.

By then, Hickman had mastered the basics and honed his skills making saddles on his own.

Among his novel creations are leather-tooled toilet seats.

“General Norman Schwarzhopf, Ricky Schroder, Tom Selleck and former President George Bush Sr. all own them,” he said.

Meanwhile, his heavy-duty leather and elastic suspenders are staples among loggers, cowpokes and other guys who do heavy work.

He sells most of his wares from a trailer he hauls about 100 days a year to such events as Hell’s Canyon Mule days!; the International Draft Horse and Mule Show today in Sandpoint; and late fall’s National Rodeo Finals in Reno.

“When I go to the shows, I take my sewing machine and can make a pair of chaps right there,” Hickman said. In addition to ordinary leathers, lavender, turquoise, yellow, deep chocolate, buff and other colors are on hand for the fashion-minded.

Grandparents go nuts over the tiniest pairs he sews from scraps for toddlers.

Besides store walk-ins, people buy a lot of his merchandise by mail, he said.

“I’m really pouring the coal to the advertising” in American Cowboy, Western Horseman and Rocky Mountain Rider magazines, Hickman said.

A visit to his workshop and store is akin to touring the Cowboy Hall of Fame. Mounts of Scottish Highland and Texas longhorn cattle and bison watch over scores of antique saddles from as early as the 1880s.

Saddle making, Hickman said, is becoming a lost craft.

“There’s not many making a living at it like there used to be,” he said.