Rubber barons: Weirdly fashionable and always functional rubber boots

Winter is the time of year when conversations turn to footwear with good traction on icy surfaces. Regardless of the season, however, rubber boots are popular with Southeasterners year-round.

XtraTufs are now an emblem of belonging and identify the wearer as a bona fide outdoor Alaskan. The distinctive sole pattern, patented in 1972 by William Gottlieb of Davenport, Iowa, is believed to provide excellent stability on slick surfaces such as fishing boat decks, harbor docks and icy trails. Occasionally the boots are worn with the upper portion folded over to expose the liner and presumably make the wearer’s legs cooler.

That interior exposure helped rubber boots become a fashion statement as well as essential footwear due to recent embellishment with designer linings. No longer just for working and playing, they have long been the preferred footwear for locals regardless of the weather. Occasionally they are worn in formal settings, even by brides on their wedding day.

Ron Flint, owner of Nugget Alaskan Outfitter, has been wearing — and his family has been selling — the boots for more than 50 years. His parents, Donna and Bill Flint, started Nugget Department Store in 1974 in the newly-opened Nugget Mall. His store displays early XtraTufs as well as new pastel versions for little kids’ feet.

“It’s one of the top ten items we sell,” Flint said of the classic brown boots with tan rims. “There’s nothing else like it.”

He held up a folded-top boot with a rugged fishermen design on the liner.

“It’s for men who wish they had Salmon Sisters (artwork for guys),” Flint said. Nugget also sells the Salmon Sisters’ original octopus liner design.

Salmon Sisters, a business owned by two women in Homer, introduced a lining pattern featuring an octopus. Sisters Emma Laukitis and Claire Neaton have been commercial fishermen since childhood. They started with fishing-designed apparel then branched out.

Today their website www.aksalmonsisters.com is an online boutique featuring many small businesses making specialized products. Their own line of XtraTufs show halibut, salmon and orcas on interior and exterior waterproof boots for women, kids and men. The classic “Legacy” boot liner is decorated with their original octopus artwork.

“The XtraTuf brand reached out to us in 2016, wanting to work with Alaskan artists to design interior prints to use in their first ever women’s boots,” Emma Laukitis wrote in a Nov. 22 email. “Salmon Sisters was just a few years old then, but we shared a customer base of Alaskans and commercial fishermen, and we were honored to make good gear for women to wear out on the water.”

“We grew up wearing Xtratuf boots while commercial fishing in western Alaska,” Emma wrote, “but always wore men’s sizes because there was nothing available for women at that time. We were proud to help design the first women’s Xtratufs and to help make them extra special with artwork that celebrated the ocean and the work we do as fishermen. Since 2016, we have continued collaborating on new styles for each season.”

Elsewhere close to Juneau, Sitka-based Allen Marine Tours proposed a Tlingit formline design boot liner created by Alaska Native artist Mary Goddard, said Chief Marketing Officer Zak Kirkpatrick.

“We cold-called (via email) XtraTuf and told them about our Alaska Native-owned company,” said Kirkpatrick on Nov. 25 from his home in Sitka, which is Allen Marine’s headquarters. “With our small ship cruise line we share the Indigenous culture through visits to small Alaska Native villages.”

The company also operates whale watching tours in Sitka, Juneau, Ketchikan and other Southeast communities. Regional and locally-made products are sold on board the vessels.

“The boots arrived in mid-August this year,” Kirkpatrick added, having initially contacted the bootmaker in September of 2023. The new boots were first offered to employees, then Zak brought a supply to Juneau for October’s Alaska Travel Industry Association convention in Centennial Hall where he held up one of the new Eagle-pattern boots.

“Betty Allen was an Eagle,” Kirkpatrick said of the late co-founder of Allen Marine with her husband, Bob. Thus, the first Alaska Native boot liner design honored her and her Tlingit Eagle moiety heritage.

Despite their popularity, things haven’t always gone well for Southeast Alaska’s favorite footwear. Flint’s store newsletter devotes the July 2015 online issue to some history of XtraTufs, providing an explanation for a manufacturing stumble that earned disgruntled responses from loyal wearers who grumbled at a failed product.

“In 2011, production of the XtraTuf brand was moved from Rock Island, Illinois, to China,” states the store’s newsletter. “It was the last American boot brand to make this transition and both customers and the company say the quality of the product suffered from the move. For over two years the company fought to upgrade the production of the boots. According to the company, the equipment, materials and molds used in the U.S. were moved to China, so the compounds and production methods would be the same. However, for the first two years of production in China the glue holding the boot together was poorly applied. During the next two years, Honeywell was able to identify and fix the quality control problem, stating that ‘the boots are now better than ever’ at the Pacific Marine Expo in Seattle in 2013.”

The website’s newsletter tracks the sale history of the company since 1955.

A revolution of rubber

Waterproof footwear was once an easy and perfect fit. A person simply dipped their foot into a white milky substance that dropped from a tree then smoked their feet over a fire, in a manner similar to smoking salmon. The smoking process solidified the milky liquid into a custom-made waterproof boot.

That was an early use of natural rubber which at the time was found only in dense jungles in South America. Indigenous people knew which trees to tap and developed the smoking process to harden the liquid.

Harvesting rubber is similar to tapping the sap of birch or maple trees. The thin outer bark layer of a rubber tree is stripped carefully in a pattern that directs the white milky rubber sap to flow into a container. The original hardening process involved smoking the liquid which was wrapped around a stick and held above a fire like campers today roast marshmallows.

First observed by European explorers in the 1700s as they watched Indigenous Amazonian people, rubber became a much sought-after material once its properties were understood. But there were challenges, too. The trees grew only in dense and remote jungles plagued with malaria-carrying mosquitoes. The deadly disease needed to be conquered along with the terrain. Cinchona trees offered the solution. Their bark was ground into powder then liquefied to make quinine, the treatment for malaria. All this took time.

Meanwhile, American Charles Goodyear invented a process that chemically stabilized rubber. He called it “vulcanization.” He showed off his creation at the Great Exhibition, an event similar to a world’s fair, in 1851.

“From 1850 to 1913, the Amazon Valley had been the world’s single source of high-quality rubber, and the ambitions of the Great Powers had transformed the jungle. Great Britain was the first to realize rubber’s geopolitical promise,” wrote author Joe Jackson in his 2008 book “The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power and the Seeds of Empire.”

Getting control of rubber was key. In 1876, an enterprising Brit named Henry Wickham smuggled 70,000 rubber plant seeds from the Amazon to London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, known as “Kew Gardens,” for germination into saplings. The small trees were transferred to colonial plantations in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), India and other tropical British possessions. Plantations undercut the Brazilian trade but gave rubber the start of its global enterprise.

Demand grew as the Industrial Age matured. Factories needed rubber belts for steam-powered factories. Electricity needed rubber for wire insulation. Bicycles and automobiles needed rubber for tires, especially inflatable tires.

In 1928, Henry Ford decided to grow his own rubber supply in South America to make tires for his burgeoning automobile business. He built a utopian settlement in the Amazon, named it Fordlandia, and cleared vast acreage to plant rubber trees. They all died. Rubber trees thrive in the dense jungle of their origin, not in barren-ground fields.

World wars cut off natural rubber supplies and spurred alternatives. Eventually a synthetic product replaced natural rubber. Akron, Ohio, became the American center for rubber manufacturers BF Goodrich, Goodyear and Firestone. Another Ohio manufacturer became Rocky Brands with a plant started in 1932 in Rock Island, Illinois, and a maker of Southeast Alaska’s popular brown rubber boots.

Once only the classic fishermen’s boots, XtraTufs have joined wool halibut jackets as branding authenticity in Southeast Alaska. With new designer linings, boots can now make additional statements about the wearer’s wardrobe sense than merely demonstrating stability on slippery terrain.

• Contact Laurie Craig at laurie.craig@juneauempire.com.