10/10/2023
TEXAS & BARBED WIRE
BARBED WIRE was described by early salesmen as "light as air, stronger than whiskey, and cheap as dirt.". Its widespread adoption by landowners facilitated the enclosure of the open range. Barbed wire permanently changed land uses and land values in Texas.
BARBED WIRE. By the 1870s westward expansion of the agricultural frontier across the Great Plains had been halted by the lack of adequate fencing material to protect crops from cattle. Texas substitutes for the stone and wood fences common in the East included ditches, mud fences, and thorny hedges, the most popular being those of Osage orange or bois d'arc. Bois d'arc is native to Texas and Arkansas, and export of its seed was an early enterprise in Texas. Hedges of it were claimed to be "pig tight, horse high, and bull strong." Experiments with varieties of thorn hedges and smooth wire failed to solve the problems of plains ranchers and farmers, however, and so their features were combined into barbed wire fences.
On November 24, 1874, Joseph F. Glidden of DeKalb, Illinois, was granted a patent for fencing material consisting of barbs wrapped around a single strand of wire and held in place by twisting that strand around another. Known as the "Winner," this was the most commercially successful of the hundreds of eventual barbed wire designs. Another DeKalb inventor, Jacob Haish, who had applied for a patent on a similar "S barb" design earlier in 1874, undertook a protracted legal battle that failed to halt the progress of the Glidden design.
In partnership with Isaac L. Ellwood, Glidden sold his interests, which included other barbed wire patents, to the Massachusetts wire manufacturer Washburn and Moen in May 1876. Ellwood remained an active partner in the new organization as sole agent and distributor for the South and West. Washburn and Moen, eventually absorbed by United States Steel Corporation, had acquired all major barbed wire patents, except that of Haish, by 1876, thus achieving a near-monopoly on this important product.
Henry Bradley Sanborn traveled to Texas in 1875 as representative of Glidden and Ellwood's Barbed Fence Company. Though he sold the first barbed wire in the state, he failed to exploit the large potential market. In 1876 salesman Pete McManus with his partner John Warne (Bet-a-Million) Gates conducted a famous demonstration on Alamo Plaza in San Antonio in which a fence of Glidden's "Winner" wire restrained a herd of longhorn cattle. Gates reportedly touted the product as "light as air, stronger than whiskey, and cheap as dirt."
Charles Goodnight, a pioneer of the open plains, fenced along the Palo Duro Canyon, accepting the need for clear title to grazing rights and hence the eventual end of the open range. Enclosure of the open range upon which the early cattle industry had been based resulted in the fence-cutting conflicts of the early 1880s.
Fence cutting in Texas in the summer and fall of 1883 was a part of the conflict between landless cattlemen who wanted to retain practices of the open range and those who bought barbed wire to fence the land to establish themselves on permanent ranches. The fence war was precipitated by the drought of 1883, which made it all the harder for the cowman without land of his own to find the grass and water necessary for his herds.
By the fall of 1883 damage from wrecking of fences in Texas was estimated at $20 million-at more than $1 million in Brown County alone. The Fort Worth Gazette asserted that fence troubles had caused tax valuations to decline $30 million. The clashes discouraged farming and scared away some prospective settlers. Politicians shied from the explosive issue, but on October 15 Governor John Ireland called a special session of the legislature to meet on January 8, 1884.
After a deluge of petitions and heated debates, the legislature made fence cutting a felony punishable by one to five years in prison. The penalty for malicious pasture-burning was two to five years in prison. Fencing of public lands or lands belonging to others knowingly and without permission was made a misdemeanor, and builders of such fences were to remove them within six months. Ranchers who built fences across public roads were required to place a gate every three miles and to keep the gates in repair.
These measures ended most of the fence troubles, although sporadic outbreaks of nipping continued for a decade, especially during droughts. Texas Rangers were sent after fence cutters in Navarro County in 1888, and for several years the rangers had occasional fence cases in West Texas.
Barbed wire, still an essential tool in the livestock industry, is today a popular collector's item. The official depository of the papers of the Texas Barbed Wire Collectors Association is the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon.
