Fay Ward.

The period rodeo press gives us valuable fragments, with a harder limit. In March 1918 Billboard printed a Fort Worth bronc-riding result for “Fay E. Ward.” Earlier reports name a Fay Ward in an El Paso steer-roping result and in the 1917 Rio Grande Frontier Days coverage; a 1916 column described a rider of that name in response to a reader’s inquiry. A 1901 show notice named “Fay Ward and sister.” None of those pages identifies the later West 48th Street business or the author of The Cowboy at Work. The 1918 middle initial is closer to the author’s printed name, but similarity is still short of an identity record. Until a programme, personal paper or dated photograph joins the people, the notices belong in a research file rather than being strung into a seamless first-person career.

That distinction does not thin the story. It sharpens it. The museum’s Ward had an active life in rodeo and ranch work; the printed contest pages show the world in which a name like his could circulate. Their columns record placements, day money, dates and competitors, the practical accounting behind a performance industry. One 1917 report even mentions a “Fay Ward Special contest tree” without explaining who made, sold or owned it. It is a promising lead, not evidence of a Ward saddle or tailoring product.

The clothing had its own printed grammar. On an undated Fay Ward Company catalogue page displayed by the Hall of Fame, six numbered shirts occupy one sheet. No. 421, at $21, is spare: a pointed back yoke, arrow pockets and a shaped front. No. 401, at $59.95, adds generous fringe and floral work. Between them are more choices in yoke shape, cuff, pocket and decoration. The page shows the front and hints at the back, so a buyer could imagine the garment as a whole. Ward did not offer one compulsory version of Western style; the drawings made a scale of choices visible, from a clean shirt to an outfit built to command a room. The prices and claims belong to this undated page, not to an assumed year of sale or a ledger of completed orders. [CMH-FWMR; FW-03h]

The companion introduction tells the customer how to use those pictures. It offers individually tailored clothes, invites samples or drawings for a special design and gives the shop’s West 48th Street address and telephone number. Its range runs from ranch and riding clothes to movie garments. This is the company’s sales language; the page does not prove that every named kind of customer placed an order. But it explains the mechanics of distance tailoring: a shirt could begin with a catalogue image and a measurement, then change to suit a wearer the shop might never meet in person. [CMH-FWMR; FW-03i]

The 1946 buyer’s guide grouped Fay Ward with Stockman-Farmer Supply and Edward H. Bohlin under Western and farm clothing. It is a map of advertising neighbours, not proof they worked together. A 1953 Down Beat advertisement places Fay Ward Co. at 306 West 48th Street and solicits customers in rodeo, radio, television, records and screen. In 1960 an advertisement in Country Music Who’s Who still offered custom shirts, complete suits, parade outfits and an illustrated catalogue from the same address. The notices show how persistently the company sought performers and riders. They cannot tell us how many orders came in, who cut each suit, or who owned the business in each year.

A New-York Historical Society finding aid describes “Fay-Ward Cowboy Tailors” above the Pierre au Tunnel French Restaurant on West 48th Street. That unglamorous placement is one of the best images in the record: Western tailoring above a French restaurant in Manhattan. The finding aid does not date the individual exterior view or give a street number, so the association with the documented 306 address remains a strong contextual possibility rather than a measured doorway identification. If the original stereograph can be inspected and cleared, it could show readers the city setting that the directory line only names.

The Hall of Fame says Ward sold his business and moved to Arizona in the 1950s. The firm name and West 48th Street address nevertheless appear in the 1960 advertisement. Both statements can be true: a name may continue after a sale. We do not yet have the sale record, successor name or date, so the 1960 ad cannot be treated as proof that Ward himself was still at the counter. That unresolved handover is part of the business history worth finding.

Another garment survives through a dealer’s camera. A blue two-piece outfit presented on 1stDibs has cream fringe, floral decoration and broad trousers, with a photographed Fay Ward Co. label at the collar. Its shirt’s yoke and cuffs repeat the same colour language found at the trouser pockets and hems. The dealer’s proposed 1940s date and ownership history have not been independently established. What can be studied from the pictures is the way this one outfit holds together: the surface work is distributed across the full figure rather than loaded onto one panel. [1D-FW-2015; FW-03g]

These labels are more than a collector’s trophy, but less than a ready-made chronology. The auction-presented wording “Fay-Ward / Cowboy Tailors” and the dealer-photographed “Fay Ward Co. / Cowboy Tailors” each belong to a particular pictured object. Their address connects them to the advertised New York firm; their spelling variations do not, without dated shop records, tell us which garment came first or who was running the workroom when it was made.

Ward’s story is richest where a working culture and a selling culture meet. The museum preserves a biography of a rodeo hand who went into tailoring; the directory and ads show the shop trading from Manhattan; the catalogue turns a choice of cut and decoration into something a distant customer could order; the garments carry particular wearers’ names and show how those choices looked in cloth. The early rodeo notices still need the identity bridge. The later sale still needs its paperwork. In between stands a firm that could make the West legible from a shop over a New York street.