It would be hard to exaggerate the effect that barbed wire had upon the American West. Until the end of the Civil War, the western range was open for the use of all people. The grass and the water were available to anyone who had cows to graze.

But with the rapid expansion of cattle ranches eager to jump on the growing meat wagon, cattlemen began to fear that there wouldn’t be sufficient feeding ground to take care of all the cattle. So the big ranches, where once they let their cattle out to graze on free government land, now began to make sure no one else would fence it off for themselves.

The homesteader, of course, was the first to holler because what once had been free land to settle now was illegally enclosed in huge cow pastures. He was to fight back, of course, and with the help of this very same barbed wire, he would help change the face and life of the once unconquerable West.

Barbed wire, the irritating, insignificant, pinprick of a steel string which was to have such a powerful influence over the mighty West, could not have come into existence at a more propitious time. The Western cattle ranges were being overrun with Indian raiders, rustlers, straying calves and just general disorder because no decent enclosure system had ever been devised.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture suggested growing thorn bushes to help hold cattle together. But this was hardly practical. One inventor got a patent on wood rail fences with protruding nails, but where would you get wood on the forestless plains of Texas and New Mexico?

It was in 1874 that Mrs. J. F. Glidden of De Kalb, Ill., asked her husband to protect her flower garden from marauding dogs. He placed a wire fence around the garden, which the dogs ignored—until he wound small pieces of wire in the shape of barbs around the strands.

Factually, the first barbed wire patent was granted to Alphonzo Dabb on April 2, 1867, and the Patent Office has recorded some 400 ideas on the subject, so Glidden wasn’t really the first, although his version was really the best.

When Glidden began to suspect the usefulness of the gadget, he broached the idea to Isaac L. Ellwood, a local hardware merchant. Ellwood then produced a rather cumbersome specimen of barbed wire on which he had been working. Upon seeing the two samples, Mrs. Ellwood firmly announced to her husband that Glidden had the better wire. Glidden got a patent on his barbed wire in 1874 and he and Ellwood formed the Glidden-Ellwood Barbed Fence Co.

About the same time Jacob Haish invented an “S” barb which was almost as good but never achieved the popularity of Glidden’s barb. The two men fought court battles over the legal rights for 18 years. Haish never understood that many minds were working on the same idea at the same time.

The first barbed wire was manufactured in the factory by boys who were employed to string the barbs on the wire. One boy would climb a windmill tower carrying a pail of loose barbs and another boy would bring up the greased wire. The barbs were strung on the wire and carried down by the force of gravity. The wire was then hauled into the factory, where the spacing of barbs and the twisting of the wire was done.

Manufacture was easy when the two-point Glidden wire was made by machine. Four coils of wire on reels were placed behind the machine. The wire from two of the reels served to form the strands, while that from the other two was used to form the barbs. At certain spacing the two “barb” wires were caught by a pair of revolving fingers and twisted around one of the strand wires and cut by mechanical shears at a diagonal to form sharp points.

The cost of barbed wire in 1874 was $20 per hundred pounds, but it shrank to $1.80 by 1897—reasonable when you consider it cost 30 cents per rod for lumber, the most common type of fence.

It was one thing to produce a worthwhile fencing wire and quite another to find a market for it. Three salesmen, Henry Sanborn, J. S. Warner and John W. Gates were responsible for introducing the wire to the West.

Cattlemen were skeptical of the practicability of barbed wire fence at the beginning. Wouldn’t barbed wire injure the cattle? Was the wire fence capable of holding the cattle? Was a wire fence durable? These and other questions were flung at the salesmen as they journeyed through Texas.

The barbed wire peddlers’ answers to the cowmen’s questions were simple. “The advantages of wire fence are easy to see: it takes no room, exhausts no soil, shades no vegetation, is proof against high winds and is both durable and cheap.” In short, he had a good, useful product.

The best advertising stunt in favor of barbed wire was staged by John W. Gates, better known as “Bet-A-Million” Gates, who later became a multimillionaire. Gates was determined to show these cowmen that their future lay with barbed wire. With plenty of flamboyant showmanship, Gates fenced in the plaza in front of the Alamo. Herding in steers, Gates stampeded them; after charging the fence a couple of times, the bewildered steers huddled in the center of the plaza and refused to move. This demonstration won more converts to barbed wire fencing than a mountain of literature and lecturing.

Shortly after Gates’ stunt there was a terrific race to fence in the open range. Higher cattle prices in 1883 enticed speculation in more stock and grasslands, and cowmen, foreseeing the end of the open range, wanted to grab all the land in reach before it was fenced out of their control. Appeals were made to eastern and foreign capital; some cattle magnates borrowed large sums at 18 to 24 percent interest.

Wagons groaning with wire came rumbling out to the cattle ranches. Posts every 30 feet and four strands of wire spider-webbed the West.

In some sections, “fencing bees” were held. In Western Kansas and the Indian Territory, small cattle companies combined into huge “pools” and fenced off thousands of acres. Large cattle empires were already fencing off massive chunks of the domain. In 1882 Sanborn and Glidden placed fence around the 250,000 acres of the Frying Pan Ranch in the Texas Panhandle at the cost of $30,000.

Four years later saw the XIT Ranch—the largest in the world, extending from the northwest corner of Texas south for 185 miles and which fed 125,000 Longhorns on its 3 million acres—put 300 carloads of fence around 1,500 miles of their land at the cost of $181,000. Production of barbed wire fence leaped from five tons in 1874 to 200,000 tons in 1900. Charlie Goodnight in New Mexico was supposed to have 3 million acres of government land under fence. Bartlett Richards, a big rancher in Nebraska, had gulped up 1 million acres of land with wire.

The West went fence crazy. Fences even ran across roads and travelers had to cut their way through. “Why, if you left your family alone more than a day you might come home to find the caboodle fenced in,” wrote one small rancher.

Illegal fencing became a national scandal in 1870-80. At the peak around 1887 there were about 10 million acres of land illegally fenced in by the big companies.

In 1885, a severe law was passed by Congress and President Cleveland ordered the removal of all illegal fences and forbade any interference with the peaceful occupation of public lands by homesteaders.

But apparently the fences were slow in coming down, for when Teddy Roosevelt became president in 1901, he also ordered them down. Ranchers sent delegates to parley with “ole” Teddy who once had hunted and bullied with them on the badlands. But gritty Teddy, with all his teeth showing, was adamant. “The fences must come down,” he [ordered]. “It is illegal to enclose government land, you varmints.”

The change from an open to a closed range caused a revolution in the social and economic structure of the West and it was unavoidable that war would follow. A sharp conflict developed between cowmen and settlers. In barbed wire the settler had found a tool, which for the first time, made the small homestead a possibility on the Great Plains.

Actually, barbed wire was a double edged weapon in the conflict between the cattlemen and settlers. The ranchers could fence the farmers out of their range, but in many cases, the settlers had the option of keeping the cowmen out of waterholes by fencing them in. As one Texas daily newspaper put it, “Barbed wire makes it possible for the citizens of Texas to own and control the land of Texas in common with the Lords, Dukes and Mighty Sires of Europe.”

Nor was it always a conflict between ranchers and settlers; sometimes fencing feuds arose between cowmen. Some cattle associations passed rules that no foreman should be allowed to register and own a brand of his own.

“Fence wars” began breaking out in 1882-1883. Many times individuals and even organizations of fence cutters with monikers such as the Owls, Blue Devils and Javelinas, cut miles of fence on the midnight rides.

A young Texas Ranger, Ira Aten, served as an undercover agent with a notorious gang of rustlers and fence cutters. Pretending to be a homeless range drifter, Aten was accepted by the Brown County Bunch, one of the roughest, smartest gangs in the West. He gathered evidence right in their midst, then alerted the Rangers who later trapped them at Pecan Bayou.

There were a multitude of causes for these “fencing wars.” Many of the motivations were revealed in a heated debate carried on in the pages of the Cheyenne Leader during the years 1883-1884.

The most obvious reason was the desire for free grass and open range. Second, the hatred of many of the larger corporations was symbolized by miles of fenced land. The Wyoming Sentinel grimly warned, “Some morning we will wake up to find that a corporation has run a wire fence about the boundary lines of Wyoming, and all within the same have been notified to move.”

Third, some of the economic protest movements, such as the Greenbackers, encouraged fence cutting. Fourth, probably one of the most important causes was the damage to stock caused by fencing. In a winter storm, cattle drifting in search of shelter would be stopped by a wire fence and stand there until they froze to death.

Drifts of dead cattle

Oliver Nelson, an old-time cowman, wrote, “I saw drifts of dead cattle along that fence sometimes 400 yards wide, just like they had bedded down. There would be some vacant places but not many; carcasses pretty much all along.”

Ranchers of the Indian Territory had built a barbed wire fence 170 miles long across the Panhandle to New Mexico, with a parallel fence south of it along the Canadian. During one big winter storm, tens of thousands of cattle lay piled along the fences.

However, the effects of barbed wire were not all bad. Barbed wire fences broke up the long cattle drives. The end of this practice benefited the cattle industry in several ways. Stock disease that had bedeviled the frontiersmen for a decade was materially reduced. With the passing of the cattle drives came better beef since more attention could be given to better breeding. Now the cattle could be held in pastures and fattened with alfalfa and corn.

Rustling and Indian raids were partially reduced by fenced land. Finally, wire fencing induced many ranchers to provide a water supply for arid lands. The drilling of wells and erection of windmills closely followed barbed wire. Law and order, better towns and churches followed. The barbed wire fence had succeeded in doing what the rifle or the Colt never did—it domesticated the Wild West.