White's Boots

White’s has been making boots since 1853 and in Spokane since 1915, and the hand-welted Smokejumper is one of the few boots in America with a genuine folk history behind it. The company names its factory, publishes its address, and describes a 25-stage hand process in detail.

It also sells a series made in Europe. The Grande Ronde boots — Lochsa, Owyhee, Payette, Selway — carry the line “Made in Europe” in their specifications. That single line is why this brand-level mark is the floor rather than the top, and why the candidate list’s top-tier estimate has been corrected.

The split now reads in both directions, though not in the same place on the page. Two work boots outside that series say so themselves: the Perry’s page is headed “Made in USA Moc Toe” and the Hardtack’s “USA-Made Work Boots Without Compromise.” Both are listed below with a mark of their own, one step under the top — White’s stocks hides “from the best tanneries around the world,” and its president has said some of the leather comes from India, which makes these US-built boots of partly imported material rather than all-American ones.

The asymmetry has not gone away, it has moved. The imported boots name their country in the specification block; the two domestic boots that name theirs do it in a marketing headline, and their specification blocks say nothing. And the boots White’s is actually famous for — the hand-welted Smokejumper, 350 Cruiser, 350 Cutter, Packer and Semi-Dress — still carry no origin line anywhere on their pages. The Our Legacy page’s reference to “our Spokane, WA factory” and the constructions described on the Construction page point the right way, but a construction type is not a country of origin, and this catalogue does not award marks on inference. Until White’s states origin on those boots, they get no individual records here, and the gap is worth naming: the most expensive, most hand-made thing the company sells is the thing it says the least about.

One more thing worth knowing before the flag on the box does any persuading: White’s was bought by Portland’s LaCrosse Footwear in 2014, and LaCrosse has been owned by ABC-Mart of Tokyo since 2012. The bootmakers are in Spokane. The owners are not, and neither are they American.