HOW WIRE WON THE WEST

By Christi Corbett

When it comes to settling the American west, many images come to mind: teams of oxen pulling overloaded Conestoga wagons across dusty plains. Tattered wagon covers flapping in the wind. Horses—ridden by rough men barking out orders—trotting alongside wagon trains. Weary travelers depending on a seasoned trail guide who used landmarks and stars in the sky to lead his charges to a new life. The bravest of men, women, and children traveling thousands of miles across the country, and then spreading out across a new land.

Cowboy hats and log cabins. Gunslingers and outlaws. Campfires, canteens, and coffee. Buffalos and barbed wire.

Wait, barbed wire?

Yes, barbed wire. It’s not as well-known as everything I listed above, but as I learned a few years ago, barbed wire was vital to the settling of the American west.

My interest in the subject started during a visit to the Applegate Pioneer Museum in my small town of Veneta, Oregon. The place is crammed with all sorts of displays from pioneer days, so I made my way slowly through them all, happily inspecting artifacts from years gone by.

Then, in a dark room at the back of the building, crowded between other bits of pioneer memorabilia, I discovered a dusty picture frame. Inside was a display of several lengths and types of barbed wire.

A few of the many types
of barbed wire

At first, I wondered what sharp pieces of wire had to do with taming the west. Then, I went home and did some research.

*Settlers in the prairie areas needed a cheap, reliable way to keep their animals in, and predators out. Fences made of barbed wire solved the problem of lack of local wood. 

*Barbed wire outraged both cowboys and Native Americans, earning it the nickname the “Devil’s Rope”.

*Gunfights, and even deaths, resulted from large gangs of masked men participating in “fence-cutting wars”.

*In 1880, one barbed wire factory produced enough wire to surround the earth ten times.

Nowadays, inventive repurposing of barbed wire is happening. A glance through Etsy or Pinterest can give plenty of ideas and examples of “artsy” ways to use or display barbed wire.

Thanks for reading!

More about Christi

Christi Corbett had an early love for the written word. As a child she could often be seen leaving the library with a stack of books so tall she used her chin to balance them in her arms.

Over the years she’s put her love of writing to good use; in addition to writing over three hundred television commercials, she earned the position as head writer for a weekly television show. She left her television career when she and her husband found out they were expecting twins, but she couldn’t leave writing altogether.

She’s now an award-winning author, writing stories of brave men and spirited women settling the American west. 

Connect with Christi:

Email at christicorbett@gmail.com

Facebook at Christi Corbett-Author

Twitter at @ChristiCorbett

Instagram at @ChristiCorbett

Pinterest at https://www.pinterest.com/christicorbett/

Website at https://christicorbett.wordpress.com/

This Means War: the Devil’s Rope Comes to Texas

I’m going to leave old Texas now.
They’ve got no use for the longhorn cow.
They’ve plowed and fenced my cattle range,
And the people there are all so strange.

                                     —from "The Cowman's Lament"

                                               (Texas folksong, origin obscure)

The Fall of the Cowboy, Frederic Remington, 1895 (Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas)

In the late 1860s and early 1870s, Texas saw a massive influx of former Confederates dispossessed by the Civil War and seeking a place to start over. Texas seemed like a good spot: The state offered plenty of open range and brimmed with feral cattle called longhorns. Many a man with nothing more than guts and grit built a fortune and a legacy by shagging longhorns from deep scrub and driving the tough, stubborn, nasty-tempered critters north to the railheads in Kansas and Nebraska. Others pushed herds to Montana and Wyoming to begin new lives where the West was even wilder.

Between 1866 and 1890, cowboys drove an estimated twelve million longhorns and one million horses north. A crew of twelve to twenty men could push a herd of 2,000 to 3,000 beeves about ten to fifteen miles a day, reaching Kansas railheads in three to four months.

(Photo by Darius Norvilas. Used with permission.)

The development of barbed wire in the mid-1870s — along with an incursion of sheepmen and farmers — put a crimp in the cattle drives by crisscrossing Texas’s wide-open spaces with miles and miles and miles of fence. To protect themselves and their herds from the yahoos who would use Texas range for something besides Texas cattle, wealthy ranchers strung wire around the land they owned or leased, often extending their fences across public land, as well. What once had been open range across which cowboys drove enormous herds of steak on the hoof became parceled off, causing no end of frustration and unfriendly behavior.

Fence-cutting began almost as soon as the first of the wire went up. Small confrontations over “the Devil’s rope” happened frequently, with wire-nipping taking place in more than half of Texas counties.

In 1883, the conflict turned deadly. Instead of merely cutting fences that got in the way during trail drives, bands of armed cowboy vigilantes calling themselves names like Owls, Javelinas, and Blue Devils destroyed fences simply because the fences existed. Fence-cutting raids usually occurred at night, and often the vigilantes left messages warning the fence’s owner not to rebuild. Some went so far as to leave coffins nailed to fenceposts or on ranchers’ porches. During one sortie, vigilantes cut nineteen miles of fence, piled the wire on a stack of cedar posts, and lit a $6,000 bonfire.

In response, cattlemen hired armed men to guard their wire…with predictable results. Clashes became more violent, more frequent, and bloodier. In 1883 alone, at least three men were killed in Brown County, a hotspot of fence-cutting activity, during what came to be known as the Texas Fence-Cutter War.

The bloodiest period of the Fence-Cutter War lasted for only about a year, but in that period damages from fence-cutting and range fires totaled an estimated $20 million — $1 million in Brown County alone.

Although politicians stayed well away from the hot-button issue for about a decade, in early 1884 the Texas legislature declared fence-cutting a felony punishable by a prison term of one to five years. The following year, the U.S. Congress outlawed stringing fence across public land. Together, the new laws ended the worst of the clashes, although the occasional fracas broke out in the far western portion of Texas into the early part of the 20th Century.

Texas Ranger Ira Aten, courtesy
University of North Texas Libraries'
The Portal to Texas History

The Texas Rangers were assigned to stop several fence-cutting outbreaks, and being the Texas Rangers, they proved remarkably effective…with one notable exception. In February 1885, Texas Ranger Ben Warren was shot and killed outside Sweetwater, Texas, while trying to serve a warrant for three suspected fence-cutters. Two of the three were convicted of Warren’s murder and sentenced to life in prison.

In 1888, a brief resurgence of fence-cutting violence erupted in Navarro County, prompting famed Texas Ranger Ira Aten to place dynamite charges at intervals along one fence line. Aten’s method was a mite too extreme for the Texas Adjutant General, who ordered the dynamite removed. The mere rumor of the explosive’s presence brought fence-cutting to a rapid halt in the area, though.

In my novel Prodigal Gun, a barbed-wire fence touches off a war in the Texas Hill Country, bringing an infamous gunman home to Texas for the first time since he left to fight for the Confederacy sixteen years earlier. Prodigal Gun is one of four full-length novels that compose A Cowboy's Touch, a boxed set of spicy stories about loves as big as Texas. Livia J. Washburn, Cheryl Pierson, and Kit Prate also contributed. The set is 99 cents at Amazon or FREE for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

I'll gift a copy of A Cowboy's Touch to one of today's commenters who answers this question: In post-Civil-War Texas, would you have been for or against fencing?