While the fashion world likes to try and to draw a distinction between outdoor gear and workwear, in real life they’re often the same thing – and Filson is a case in point. This Seattle-based brand has been outfitting loggers, hunters, farmers, gold prospectors and wilderness guides for nearly 130 years, with a cast-iron reputation for ‘unfailing goods’ that’ll withstand the toughest trials of the great outdoors.
Most famously, Filson supplied many of the bold (or foolhardy) souls who took part in the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s. In just a couple of years, around 100,000 prospectors from all over the United States and beyond made the perilous journey up to the Yukon – right in the northwest corner of Canada on the Alaskan border. Most never got rich and a fair number perished along the way, but a lot of them did it wearing a mackinaw coat from CC Filson’s of Seattle.
Born in 1850 in Ohio, Clinton C Filson had solid pioneering experience under his belt by the time he was in his twenties. His family were among the early settlers in Humboldt, Nebraska, and Clinton went on to spend years rattling around the Midwest as a conductor on the Chicago, Milwaukee and St Paul Railroad.
At 40, he and his wife moved to the newly minted state of Washington, where he opened a general store in Kirkland – now a suburb of Seattle – with his brother and a friend named Albert Timmerman. This venture didn't work out, so Filson decided to try a more targeted market.
At the time, there was a steady flow of gold and silver prospectors heading up the Sauk river to Monte Cristo in the Cascades. Together with another friend, Edward Howard, Clinton opened the Filson Howard & Co clothing and outfitting store in Sauk City (near modern-day Rockport). Alas, Sauk City was an ill-fated place. It was bypassed by the railway in 1893, tolling the death-knell for businesses like Filson’s that relied on passing trade. The town was later flooded, burned and finally abandoned in the early 20th century.
So far, so unlucky. But Clinton Filson was about to strike gold.
In the summer of 1897, the Filsons moved to Seattle. The Pacific northwest was in the grip of a gnawing recession, and some of the townsfolk were digging clams from the beaches of Puget Sound just to survive. But the port city’s fortunes changed abruptly and forever at 6am on July 17, when a ship called the Portland tied up at Schwabacher’s Dock with two tons of gold dust on board. Five thousand spectators cheered as a procession of ragged frontiersmen literally staggered down the gangway under the weight of their new-found fortunes, tied up in bundled blankets or packed into battered suitcases and even old food tins.
The gold had been discovered in the Yukon the previous summer, but winter had kept it – and most of the stories that went with it – contained in the frozen north. Now, with the arrival of the Portland(and another ship called the Excelsior which had docked two days earlier in San Francisco), the full extent of the Klondike’s wealth became apparent. One miner, for example, had taken a borrowed $300 and turned it into $112,000, and his story was by no means unusual. ‘Yellow fever’ gripped the nation overnight, and Seattle became one of the major staging points for expeditions into the north.
The really wild thing about the Klondike stampede was that it lasted barely a year. By summer 1898, the newspapers were full of the Spanish–American War instead and the men who made the trip north found themselves struggling to find jobs, let alone gold. The Yukon gold rush was actually the fourth one of the century – after California, Australia and South Africa – and the least profitable for most of those involved. But somehow it became part of modern American mythology, immortalised by its very own bard, the writer Jack London.
Some canny operators, of course, realised that the smart money was not in gold but in gold miners.
The journey north from Seattle to the Yukon sorted the wheat from the chaff – and there was plenty of both among the prospectors. Jack London’s stories are full of adaptable outdoorsmen like Malemute Kid and John Thornton, but he also does an excellent line in feckless fantasists without the grit to go the distance.
While many of the prospectors were fundamentally unsuited to what London called ‘the rough edge of the country’, the winners and the losers all needed outfitting – and top-quality kit could be the difference between life and death.
Clinton C Filson knew the mining market inside out from his days in Sauk City. Based in downtown Seattle, the ‘Seattle Woolen Manufacturing Company, Pioneer Alaska Clothing and Blanket Manufacturers’ did a brisk trade in boots, clothing, blankets and other equipment. Many of his products featured the heavy mackinaw wool fabric that's still at the heart of Filson’s range even today.
Clinton was fastidious about quality and quickly developed a reputation for tough and dependable gear. His motto was ‘might as well have the best’; a line that still appears on the brand’s labels and hang tags today. He offered lifetime guarantees – which admittedly for some customers in those early days was only about six months – and insisted on producing the wool fabrics in his own mill. His marketing was superb, and he even offered an on-site ‘information bureau’ run by a seasoned Klondiker.
While the gold rush itself might have been short-lived, Clinton’s kit certainly wasn’t, and Filson’s good name began to attract customers from other sectors.
The forestry industry has always been famously hard on gear. In his picaresque short story, Logging and Pimping and “Your Pal, Jim”, Norman Maclean describes the archetypal 1920s logger:
Foresters were extremely discerning about where they spent their money, and Filson’s unfailing goods quickly became a favourite in the lumber camps of the Pacific Northwest. Always a shrewd trader, Clinton dropped the references to Alaska from his branding and instead began to market himself as a ‘Miners’ and Lumbermens’ Clothing Store’.
It was for the logging industry that Filson named one of the company’s most famous and enduring garments – the Cruiser jacket. ‘Timber cruisers’ were scouts for the lumber firms, who ranged deep into the ancient forests of Washington and Oregon, earmarking areas of the best quality wood for felling. Though the basic design of the jacket actually dated from the late 1890s, it was first patented as the ‘Cruiser Shirt’ in 1914 and originally produced in mackinaw wool. It’s been a forestry and hunting staple ever since, and to this day the US Forest Service uses a Cruiser variant as their uniform jacket.
Filson still makes Cruisers in a variety of cuts and materials. A common feature, much valued by those original timber scouts, is the full-width map pocket in the back panel.
Along with mackinaw wool, the other key fabric for Filson gear is their signature ‘Tin Cloth’ – an old-school heavyweight waxed cotton canvas. Tough enough for environments that would shred your Gore-Tex cag, it offers solid weatherproofing that can be renewed easily with a fresh coat of wax.
Tin Cloth is a fairly recent development in Filson terms, since they've only been using it for about a century – but it might surprise you to know that this American icon isn't actually American at all.
Introduced in the 1920s as ‘waterproof khaki’, the material actually came from the UK – where the waxed cotton coat is a perennial favourite. As the British producers began to tout their fabrics to the US market in the years after WW1, the Filson company was quick to see the potential. Made up in a heavier weight for the forestry and agricultural industries, it was an immediate hit. Casting around for a fancier term, they began calling it ‘Shedpel khaki’ – and a 1934 catalogue described the Filson ‘khaki loggers’ coat’ as ‘a real friend to the man in the open’.
The ‘Tin Cloth’ nickname came a lot later from lumber workers in the 1970s, and the fabric got a major upgrade in the ‘90s when they switched from a hard wax treatment to a more flexible oil finish. Filson have used various different suppliers over the years, but these days the Tin Cloth for their Cruiser jackets, bags and other products comes from the famous British Millerain company.
Tin Cloth is a bit of an unusual material. The original oil finish cloth can take a while to soften and wear in, but it shapes to your body rather like leather, offering an extremely comfortable fit once it’s broken in. It lasts pretty much forever and takes on a fantastic patina over time.
Clinton C Filson died in 1919, described in his obituary as ‘a merchandiser of the old school, who believed in his goods and vouched for their quality’. By then, his market was already expanding beyond the mining and logging industries. Hunters, hikers, fishermen and other outdoor enthusiasts were becoming familiar with Filson gear, and advertisements from the 1920s and ‘30s feature pipe-smoking chaps in jaunty plaid Cruisers, off to bag a buck.
Clinton’s widow, Winifred, took over the helm and sailed the good ship Filson with the help of other family members and trusted allies until her own death in 1958. Though the company is no longer run by the Filson family, they’ve continued to develop trusted staples for successive generations of outdoorsmen and women.
A more recent example is the celebrated Alaskan Guide Shirt – which hit the market in 1996 and has been the workwear of choice for wilderness guides and bush pilots for more than a quarter of a century. It's your classic brushed cotton flannel shirt par excellence, with a dense but breathable 8oz weave and action pleats in the shoulders. It's proved so popular over the years that they've introduced a lightweight 5oz version and even a 3oz feather cloth one for fishing and safaris.
Filson in the present day is an uncommon hybrid of history and evolution. On the one hand they’re a big global brand that continues to innovate and adapt as Clinton Filson did more than a century ago – introducing new lines that bring their classic frontier apparel and bags into more modern and urban environments. On the other hand, they’re still using garment designs and materials that saw hard use in the Klondike gold rush of 1897 and the logging camps of the 1920s. This is heritage-quality stuff, proven in the field and built to be passed onto the next generation after a lifetime of adventures.
Shop the Filson range at WildBounds
Selected sources: Fred Poyner IV at Historylink.org, the Filson.com blog, The Klondike Fever by Pierre Berton, The Son of the Wolf by Jack London, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories by Norman Maclean.
