Antique Dick Custer Cigar Label 🤠 Gold Embossed Cowboy NOS Chromolithograph

Why Would a Cigar Brand Be Called Dick Custer? 🤠 An Antique Dick Custer Gold Embossed Cigar Box End Label

Size: 4 1/2" x 4 1/2"

A long-haired, mustached cowboy in a tall tan hat and a red neckerchief, aiming his revolver right at you. DICK CUSTER arches over him in raised red-and-gold letters, with gold scrollwork and coin medallions down the sides. The label is square with clipped corners. It's embossed so deep that the cowboy shows in reverse on the blank back, and it was never glued into a box.

🤠 Dick Custer cigars

Dick Custer was a real boxed cigar brand. It had this square label for the end of the box and a bigger label for the inside of the lid. The inside label reads SMOKE DICK CUSTER CIGARS - HOLDS YOU UP. That's the joke. The gunman has you covered, and the cigar holds you up. A stick-up and a good smoke in three words. The Center for Sacramento History has this same square design in its collection, catalogued as the outer box end label and dated to the 1910s; dealers who sell the brand's labels put them anywhere from the early 1900s to the 1920s. No maker or printer is named on this label.

🌵 Why Custer?

Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer died with his command at the Little Bighorn in Montana in June 1876. Collectors have long wondered whether the brand borrowed that name to catch the ear of buyers who grew up on newspaper stories of the battle, or whether it was just one more tough-sounding gunslinger name. Either way, the timing was right. Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show opened in 1883, played London for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887, and acted out Custer's Last Stand for crowds. All the while the real thing was slipping away. Through the 1880s the long cattle drives out of Texas ran into quarantines and barbed wire, and the cattlemen turned to the railroads. A bulletin from the 1890 census reported there could hardly be said to be a frontier line anymore, and in July 1893, in Chicago during the World's Fair, a 31-year-old University of Wisconsin professor named Frederick Jackson Turner stood up before the American Historical Association and built his famous argument on that one line. The more of the frontier that vanished, the more folks wanted to read about it. Dime novels about outlaws and lawmen sold by the millions, mostly to young working fellows in the cities and mill towns. Old-timers and collectors will tell you this is when the cowboy stopped being a working man and became a character that advertisers of every stripe put to work, cigar makers first among them.

A gunman pointing straight at the viewer was a thrill of the day, too. In 1903 a short film called The Great Train Robbery ended with the outlaw leader firing his pistol into the camera, and that shot is still one of the best known in early movies. Put the same idea on a cigar box and the buyer gets robbed by a picture before he's even lit up.

🎨 How a label like this was made

Labels like this were stone lithographs. Each color was printed from its own slab of limestone, one after another, lined up by hand. Some labels used more than 20 colors. Then the sheet went into a heavy press between matched brass dies, which raised the lettering, the hat and the gun. That step took off in the 1890s. The raised parts were then highlighted with 22-karat gold or bronze leaf, and that's why the coins and the letters on these labels look like metal. The paper was a long-fiber rag stock, because embossing stretches it hard. Cheap short-fiber paper would have broken under the die, and it also browns and turns brittle with age, so that's a big part of why a label this old still looks fresh. The artists were very good, badly paid and never credited. Their names are mostly lost, but their work isn't. My pictures honestly can't keep up with the gold on these labels.

🚬 A crowded trade

Cigar making was a small-time business back then. Tens of thousands of little factories were on the government's books, and a newcomer needed little more than a cutting board, a knife, some tobacco, a few boxes and a clever label. The label did the selling. Lithographers competed hard for the work, and many drew designs on speculation and showed them to factories as samples. A brightly colored inside label under the lid, the one a smoker saw every time he opened the box, helped a brand stand out from a sea of rivals. Most of those labels were thrown out with the empty boxes. These were never pasted into one.

📅 How old is it?

Nothing on it is dated. The deep embossing and the gold fit the 1910s.

🤠 About these labels

Every one I have is this same unused end label, 4 1/2 inches square. It's a natural for a Western collection, a den, a cigar room, or a frame next to an old dime novel or a Wild West poster. The supply is finite. Nobody embosses labels like this anymore, and once these last unused ones are framed, they'll be very difficult to acquire.