At some time between the 1893 first edition and the 1896 second edition of his novel Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane added the earliest known instance of cold feet: “I knew this is the way it would be. They got cold feet.”

The new slang term, referring to the loss of courage or enthusiasm, appears also in George Ade’s Artie, another novel of 1896: “‘I see. He turned out to be a boodler [corrupt politician], eh?’ ‘I don’t see no way o’ gettin’ past it. I like Jimmy. He’s one o’ them boys that never has cold feet and there’s nothin’ too good for a friend, but by gee, I guess when it comes to doin’ the nice, genteel dip he belongs with the smoothest of ’em. And he learned it so quick, too. Ooh!’”

By the turn of the century, college students were getting cold feet too. A glossary of college terms published in 1901 includes this definition from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York: “‘To get cold-feet in a subject,’ abandon it for weariness.”

In the West in the twentieth century it has also been possible to call a person cold-footed, as in an example from New Mexico, “you are cold-footed on this proposition of marriage.” The term was noted by Elsie Warnock in her rhetoric classes in 1914-17 when she asked them to list twenty disparaging terms used in everyday speech.

An echo of cold-footed comes from a book with a Texas setting in 1920: “We were not allowed to cross the cattle on the bridge, so we had to swim for it. Two of my men stayed with me, and the third, a ‘cold-footer,’ crossed on the bridge.”