I
t’s pretty much always been the “Cowboy Way” for
local bootmaker Keith Rohwedder. After all, growing up
on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon is about as west-
ern as it gets. It’s the kind of place where the Spirit of the
West just seems to seep into bones, get into the blood.
His father maintained the cabins, hotels and restaurants
perched at the edge of that vast chasm.
“Our house was a 10-minute walk from the rim of
the Grand Canyon, if you walked there, and about a
five-minute walk through the woods to the barn where
they kept all the mules and horses. That’s where I was if
I wasn’t in school. It didn’t take them long to put me to
work,” Rohwedder, 73, said with a chuckle.
Working around seasoned cowboys and guides,
Rohwedder started out cleaning up after the animals and
learned to repair tack used on the some 200 head of
mules and horses used at Grand Canyon Village.
“I got into doing a lot of the saddle repair,”
Rohwedder said in an easy drawl. “A lot of stuff was
custom made. You wanted a belt or chaps or horse gear,
you had it made. So I did quite a bit of that. It kept me
out of trouble as a teenager.”
Decades before turning his hands to bootmaking,
Rohwedder did custom leatherwork, beginning in a
school shop class.
“I’ve been doing leatherwork since the 8th grade —
small leather projects all the way up to making a few
saddles,” he said. “Bootmaking is just something that for
40 or 50 years I thought, ‘I sure would like to learn about
that,’ and in 2005 I decided I was going to get serious
about it.”
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