Seidel’s Saddlery “McKinley Laced Edge” custom “Collector Grade” saddle. Specs are: 56 Wade tree, 15 1/2″ seat, Guadalajara wood post horn, 4″ cantle, alligator inlaid padded seat, In skirt rigging, California poppy floral carving, cognac color with dyed background, regular round skirt shape, leather covered stirrups with outside drop for silver concho, ENTIRELY braided edge in kangaroo lace. There is absolutely no machine stitching on this saddle—it is ALL held together with leather kangaroo lace.
The edge braiding on this saddle is incredible—because it has 4 different styles of lacing, as well as variable sizes of lace—1 (Spanish round braid) for cantle back, gullet front, horn, 1 for the skirts (to account for the extra edge thickness), 1 for the rest of the edges, and 1 for lacing the skirts and jockeys together. Even the stirrup leathers, back cinchas, and back billets were all laced—no detail was left out. I don’t even know how many kangaroo hides we went through—by the way, we make our own kangaroo lace. We buy the hides, cut them in circles, make long strips, and then bevel both bottom side edges. We cull (throw away) anything that doesn’t meet Keith’s standards. The effort is well worth it, as you can see. It probably took almost as long to do the braiding on this saddle as it did to hand tool the whole thing! The reason that we use kangaroo, is for its strength—they even make cowboy boots out of it. You can take a piece of length, and wrap it in both hands and try to break it, and it just won’t break! It wears extremely well. We use it a lot on the edges of our hand tooled belts as well.
The conchos on this saddle were custom designed with slots at the bottom, rather than in the middle, for a nicer presentation of the strings, and to allow for the engraving on the silver conchos to really show.
The drop on the stirrups to show off the round embossed rope edge sterling concho is a really nice touch, and is reminiscent of the show saddles that the “Cowboys of the Silver Screen” (Roy Rogers, Tom Mix, Hopalong Cassidy, and others) rode at that time. Highly decorated saddles like this one dominated the television shows and cowboy shows at that time.
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