A few friends and I were sitting around drinking coffee a few days ago, and the subject of blue jeans came up.

We started comparing notes on how old our jeans were.

“I’m not sure how old my jeans are, but they’re older than my kids,” Roy said.

Then the origin of blue jeans came up. And being the historian, I was assigned the duty of finding out who invented them.

I found the answer in a neat little book, “The Best of the West,” by a fellow historian and friend, Bill O’Neal of Carthage.

The inventor was Levi Strauss, who was only 18 in 1847 when he came to America from his native Bavaria to work as a merchant in New York City.

In 1853, he joined his brother-in-law, David Stern, in the dry-goods business in San Francisco.

Leaving New York with a supply of cloth, Strauss sold almost all of it on the way to California, arriving in San Francisco with a single bolt of canvas tent cloth.

Meeting a mine worker in the city, he designed for the man a pair of heavy canvas pants. Recognizing his opportunity, he bought large quantities of canvas sail cloth from ships standing in the harbor.

Within a year, Strauss and Stern had become the largest pant makers after switching from canvas to heavyweight blue denim.

The pants with copper rivets quickly became known as “blue jeans” or “Levis.” They quickly became popular with western workers because of their durability.

Levi Strauss & Company was incorporated in 1890 and the San Francisco plant employed 500 workers to meet the demand.

Strauss, who now had the most famous name in the west, grossed $1 million in 1902. He died that year, but his four nephews continued to produce Levi’s.

At first, cowhands resisted the strong denim trousers, looking upon them as the uniform of miners and other workers the cowhands disdained.

In time, however, Levi’s became regulation wear for cowboys.

Turned-up cuffs on the trouser legs were used to hold horseshoe nails while shoeing horses and by the early 1900s Levis were often worn with shirts sporting snap buttons.

Rodeo cowboys, who sometimes were caught on saddle horns by unyielding shirt fronts, requested the snap buttons so they could quickly free themselves from a wild bronco.

Bowman is the author of more than 40 books about East Texas. Visit bob-bowman.com.