The wire simultaneously contributed to the end of the long cattle drives and Indian raids. Barbed wire, still an essential tool in the livestock industry, is today a popular collector's item.
Robert T. Frank W. Henry D. The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style , 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry. Frances T. Published by the Texas State Historical Association. Others say the cattle were a docile bunch. And there are those who wonder whether this particular story is true at all. But never mind. John Warne Gates - who would become known as "Bet A Million Gates" - took bets from onlookers as to whether the powerful beasts could break through the fragile-seeming wire.
They couldn't. Even when Gates's sidekick, a Mexican cowboy, charged at the cattle howling Spanish curses and waving a burning brand in each hand, the wire held.
Bet-A-Million Gates was selling a new kind of fence, and the orders soon came rolling in. Gates described it more poetically: "lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust". You can find more information about the programme's sources and listen online or subscribe to the programme podcast.
Calling it the greatest discovery of the age might seem hyperbolic, even allowing for the fact that the advertisers didn't know Alexander Graham Bell was about to be awarded a patent for the telephone. But while we accept the telephone as transformative, barbed wire wrought huge changes on the American West, and much more quickly. Joseph Glidden's design for barbed wire wasn't the first, but it was the best.
The wicked barb is twisted around a strand of smooth wire, then a second strand of smooth wire is twisted together with the first to stop the barbs from sliding around. American farmers snapped it up. The act specified that any honest citizen - including women, and freed slaves - could lay claim to up to acres 0. All they had to do was build a home there and work the land for five years.
But the prairie was a vast and uncharted expanse of tall, tough grasses, a land suitable for nomads, not settlers. It had long been the territory of the Native Americans.
After Europeans arrived and pushed west, the cowboys roamed free, herding cattle over the boundless plains. But settlers needed fences, not least to keep those free-roaming cattle from trampling their crops.
And there wasn't a lot of wood - certainly none to spare for fencing in mile after mile of what was often called "The American Desert". Farmers tried growing thorn-bush hedges, but they were slow-growing and inflexible. Smooth wire fences didn't work either - the cattle simply pushed through them. Until it was developed, the prairie was an unbounded space, more like an ocean than a stretch of arable land.
Private ownership of land wasn't common because it wasn't feasible. The homesteading farmers were trying to stake out their property - property that had once been the territory of various Native American tribes.
No wonder those tribes called barbed wire "the devil's rope". The old-time cowboys also lived on the principle that cattle could graze freely across the plains - this was the law of the open range. The cowboys hated the wire: cattle would get nasty wounds and infections. Wood had long been the fencing material of choice in America. But as settlers began moving into western Minnesota, west Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, and farther west, they found that a lack of woodlands, plus high transport costs, made fencing prohibitively expensive across wide areas.
As a practical matter, it was not economically viable to settle in an area unless it happened to have a local timber plot. In effect, although Plains farmers had secure property rights to the physical land, because they could not protect their crops from cattle and other livestock, property rights in the economic value of their lands were sharply attenuated. As early as the s, the lack of timber throughout the Plains was recognized as the single most important barrier to settlement.
The barbs prevented cattle from breaking the fence, and the steel wire was relatively weather-resistant. Within short order, barbed wire came to dominate fencing and to transform the economic decisions of settlers.
In , five tons of barbed wire were produced; in , 40, tons were manufactured; and by the turn of the century, annual production had reached , tons.
This rapid rise in sales was stimulated in part by the practical superiority of wire. By , not only had fencing stocks in the prairie states increased more than tenfold, wooden fences had essentially disappeared.
First, it made it economically feasible to settle lands without regard to proximity to timber stands. Thus, the total amount of land settled rose. Second, the lower-cost fencing increased the incentives of farmers to invest in quality-enhancing improvements to their lands.
And third, the invention changed the choice of crops. Low-value hay, for example, is relatively resistant to livestock damage before being harvested, and hay fields can even be intentionally used for grazing at certain times of the year.
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