A Grand Master of Western Saddle Making
Duff Severe Made Some of America's Best Horse Saddles
Mar 9, 2009
Western saddle maker and leather craftsman Duff Severe, who died at the age of 84 on February 23, 2004, was declared one of America’s first “Living National Treasures” by the National Endowment for the Arts back in 1982. Credit his lifetime of exceptional work stemming from talent, inspiration, vision, uniqueness, and dedication.
Duff was born in 1919 in Oakley, Idaho, the eighth of 15 children. He grew up in the saddle and became expert at breaking and training horses, while also learning to braid rawhide.
At 21, Duff joined the Marines and was stationed aboard the USS Helena at Pearl Harbor. On December 7, 1941, recounts his nephew Randy, “he had just finished his duty station when the first bomb hit.” Duff rushed to a machine gun and fired away as planes filled the skies.
Throughout the war, says his son Casey, Duff spent all his spare time learning more about braiding. After his discharge, he answered a newspaper ad for apprentices at the premiere Pendleton, Oregon saddlery Hamley & Company. “The youngest saddlemaker there was 70,” Randy says. “This young sprout learned from the old masters.”
The Start of Severe Brothers Saddlery
Duff showed a rare instinct for great saddles. “He had a keen working understanding of a horse, and why gear had to do what it had to do,” Randy explains. In 1955, Duff opened his own Pendleton shop with his brother Bill, an expert at carving the wooden trees upon which Duff crafted his horse saddles.
Business boomed. Located in an old barracks at the airport, Severe Brothers Saddlery and its upstairs bunkhouse became home away from home for rodeo cowboys passing through, especially during September’s Pendleton Round-Up. Rodeo legend Casey Tibbs nicknamed the place with a sign he gifted to the Severes, still on display: Hotel de Cowpunch.
Cowboys knew they could count on a Duff Severe saddle. “It had to withstand the heaviest of use,” says Randy, who with his brother Robin took over the business in 1982. Duff continually innovated. “At the time Severe Brothers started,” Randy recalls as an example, “all rodeo saddles had horns. Duff thought that not only were those horns extra work for him and expense for the cowboys, but if you touched the horn in a saddle-bronc event you were disqualified, and if the horse fell down that horn could really injure you.” Around 1957, Duff began making bronc-riding saddles without horns, today’s norm.
Artistry entered more subtly. “Duff taught me that men like to see gentle curves, and he used a lady’s leg as an example,” says Randy. Then came Duff’s exceptional skill with over 200 cutting and stamping tools he used; silver ornamentation he often added; and intricate knotting and braiding. Adds Casey Severe, “I don’t know that he ever set out to do artwork. But he was always trying to do something different.”
The results were undeniably art.
Recognition as a Living National Treasure
Ironically, it was only after he handed off Severe Brothers Saddlery that Duff’s artistry won acclaim. In 1982, the National Endowment for the Arts chose him as one of the first 15 master craftsmen to be named a National Heritage Fellow and “Living National Treasure.”
That same year, Duff began building himself a log home outside Pendleton. He handcrafted all its furnishings, from his bed to the toilet-paper holders, horseshoe gate latches to elaborate “squirrel condos” in the cottonwoods.
To leave a record of his knowledge, in his upstairs workshop he started creating the first of an estimated 116 miniature saddles. They caught the eye of the Smithsonian, which included samples in a two-year national tour. Duff also accompanied his work to Morocco in 1988, courtesy of the State Department, and was featured in a 1991 National Geographic article and documentary.
Duff continued going strong into his eighties. But a broken hip and several leg operations starting slowing down a man who, says Randy, up to then “had to get two or three dances in with every gal at a party.”
Feeling his end was near, Duff began giving select pieces of his work to his late brother Jerry’s daughter, Pam Severe, executive director of Pendleton Underground Tours, a nonprofit corporation that preserves the city’s historic red-light district. She opened a gallery devoted to Duff.
At his funeral, the plain knotty-pine casket had been built by Duff’s own hands. “He’d lined the inside with blankets decorated with red, white, and blue stripes and American eagles,” says Casey. “He’d even laid out polished boots, a new pair of well-pressed Wrangler jeans, a new Wrangler shirt, and a really nice black felt hat.”
To the very end, Duff Severe remained a true Western artist.
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