Old school Old West

Shelton's friend and protege Brennan Byers, who crafted the leather gear used in the movie "Pirates of the Caribbean," describes his mentor as an uncommonly gifted artisan schooled in a nearly extinct code of honor. "He's a piece of living history," Byers says. "You tell some teenager that somebody you know broke horses for the U.S. Army, they look at you like you're from Jupiter."

Started in a saddle shop

Shelton grew up in a small Colorado town, quit school at 14, hit the road three years later during the tail end of the Depression and wound up at a Wyoming ranch herding cattle and taming wild horses. Shelton married briefly -- his daughter lives in Seattle -- before finding his metier at a Fort Collins, Colo., saddle shop in 1943.

He remembers, "I went up to the head carver, showed him my billfold I'd done a little work on, and he said, 'That's pretty good; how would you like a job doing this?' So I started at 50 cents an hour, which wasn't that bad in those days. I caught on pretty quick."

After the war, Shelton came to California and plied his trade at the Los Angeles Farmers Market, attracting tourists as well as rival carvers eager to poach his tooling techniques. In 1957, after a five-year stint with Nudie Cohn, the famed country and western outfitter, Shelton hung his shingle at 12317 Ventura Blvd. An admirer of Western artists C.M. Russell and Frederic Remington, Shelton says, "I always thought my timing was wrong because I wanted to live in the old cowboy days."

In fact, Shelton's timing was perfect. He set up shop in Studio City just as TV westerns were taking off. Actors pretending to be cowboys at the nearby production lots were thrilled to have Shelton lend a stamp of authenticity to their belts and leather-backed directors chairs.

Shelton later took up oil painting and in 1972, he devised his own system for sculpting detailed wax miniatures used to cast limited-edition bronze belt buckles. "This new business kept me going nearly full blast for 10 years," Shelton says. "Then, like a change in the weather, westerns died and so did buckles."

When he was 68, Shelton contributed the boots, saddle work and holsters for the Gene Autry "Back in the Saddle Again" sculpture at the Museum of the American West, which owns four other pieces as well. "Probably the most spectacular thing we have is a saddle he made for the TV program 'Tales of Wells Fargo,' " says Michael Duchemin, a senior curator at the museum. "The leather is carved to have a filigree effect and there's a gold foil laid down underneath it, so when that saddle was on a horse and the star, Dale Robertson, was riding, that gold foil would sparkle in the sun showing through the carved leather work.