Short Stuff: Barbed Wire

Barbed wire changed the Western US as much as the railroad and the six-shooter. Before barbed wire arrived, the West was free and open; after, the West became concentrated in the hands of a few big ranchers. No wonder it was called “devil’s rope.”

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's guest producer Dave Coustan
over there, and um, this is short stuff, So get up,
get e up, literally, because we're gonna go back to
the Old West, the root and two. In Old West,
we're jumping in the old way back machine. We're going

(00:25):
to eighteen seventy six, like Back to the Future three.
That's right. The movie I only saw once. That's all
you need. Uh. Some people love those. I didn't like
the sequels, but we don't have time for that. I
never saw the second one. Okay, go you skipped you
did one in three? Yeah? How interesting? Yeah, I like
odd numbers. Uh. So it's eighteen seventy six. And there

(00:49):
we're in San Antonio, Texas. Yep, there's no basement in
the Alamo. There's not. And the Alamo is quite tiny,
actually it really is. It's like the Mona Lisa of buildings,
that's right, or the Josh and Chuck of podcasters. People
don't know. We're only two ft tall. So, uh. We're
looking upon a scene. We're at a ranch and there's

(01:10):
a man over there named John Warren Gates, and he
is they call him bet a million Gates, And we
have just thrown some money down on a bet of
whether or not this little wire pin he has can
hold in these bulls and cows and horses and these
crazy longhorn steers. And my money is on no way, Gates,

(01:35):
no way, that little wire is going to hold these
animals in. Yeah. And I mean we put a significant
amount of money down because we just printed it ourselves,
because it's eighteen seventies six in the Old West, and
you can do that right, hundred semolians. But I bet
against him as well, Chuck. And the reason why is
because it's just a little a little couple of things
of wire with some barbs on it, and these are

(01:55):
some angry steers. And what's more, he has a gaucho
assistant wearing in Spanish at these um these cows and uh,
trying to get them riled up and buy goodness, we
just lost our bet, you know. But it was quite
a party, and we're hammered and we're gonna go back
to our canvas tent and sweat I ate the worm.

(02:16):
So here's the deal. That story may or not be
not true. May or be not true. Mayor be not
true your mayor. That's right. I'm glad we leave stuff
like this in. Yeah, that's what makes this us so. Uh,
we don't know if that's all true or not. It's
a great story, that's for sure. But what is super

(02:36):
true is that bed a million Gates was trying to
drum up some early press for this new fence made
by a man named Joseph Glidden that uh, the Native
Americans called, well, some people called the thorny fences. The
Native Americans called it what the devil's rope because they
didn't like it. But we just call it barbed wire. Yep,

(02:59):
barbed wire and um, and so Joseph Glyndon didn't invent
that stuff, although he did have a patent on what
we When you look at barbed wire, what you're looking
at is the variety that Joseph Glinden came up with,
But there are plenty of people who came up with
their own version prior to him. And I was looking
at like this list of them with pictures. Some of
those are just vicious looks like that. Um, they're basically

(03:21):
like cut up razor blades stuck in wire. I mean,
just horrible stuff. But what Glinton did was he took
a barb and he twisted it around a wire, and
then he added a second wire, just a plain wire
to twisted around the first wire to hold the barb
in place, keep it from sliding. But even more important
than that, because it's pretty simple, and somebody probably would

(03:43):
have come up with that sooner or later, was he
patented it, and he invented a method of um producing it,
mass producing it. And brother, did he mass produce it? Yeah,
I mean before he he very brilliantly decided to keep
those barbs in place, which was the key. Those cows
would just go up and hoof of them over to

(04:05):
the side and slip right on through and sneak out
to the skating rink because they are cows are well
known as being among the smartest animals. Yes, and their
hoofs are you know, they can do very fine detailed work,
like an abacus work. That's right, So I believe before
my dumb jokes, you were saying how much he was
pumping this wire out by eight his factory into cab, Illinois.

(04:29):
We're turning out two hundred and sixty three thousand miles
of wire. Yes, and chuck, that is enough to circle
the Earth ten times over max. That's a trillion big
max stacked and yeah, and this was a big deal.
It wasn't just like, oh, he invented He invented some
stuff and it helped keep some cows in and now

(04:50):
we all use it and it's pretty neat. Like this
changed the face of the American West, along with other stuff,
but it had had a big impact on the foundation
and settling of the American West. Yeah, I mean at
least as much as like the locomotive, the telegraph. Um Like,
it was an enormous invention, especially for something so simple

(05:11):
barbed wire. It's extremely simple. But up to this point,
the Native Americans had been um living nomadic existences, hunting,
buffalo um, just basically moving around the Great Plains and
the prairie for basically fifteen thousand years. Uh, Like European

(05:32):
ancestry whites had showed up, but the first ones that
showed up basically said, Hey, I think this is I
think you guys are onto something. I'm gonna embrace this
kind of free range stuff and I'm bringing cattle and
sheep and all sorts of other animals but I'm not
gonna I'm just gonna let them just graze warever and
just move them around as the weather permits. And that

(05:52):
worked okay. But when barbed wire came along, all of
a sudden, these open, enormous, vast expanses suddenly became closed off.
And what used to just be common property that belonged
to everyone and no one, suddenly huge slices of it
were being um fenced off, literally, and that changed tens

(06:13):
of thousands of years of tradition in ten years maybe less. Yeah,
And here's the thing. It's not like this was the
first fence. In the West. There were you know, they
could build wood fences, but in the Prairie States they
didn't have a ton of lumber. Uh, there weren't trees everywhere.
Wooden fences are super expensive, rock and stone walls like

(06:33):
are you kidding me to do for a whole farm?
Super expensive and also scarce. But what barbed wire did
is it democratized it and made it super cheap or
relatively cheap, I guess, compared to the other things, and
easy and fast to say this is my area and
you're not coming in, and these cows aren't getting out. Yeah,

(06:53):
and we'll we'll talk about how that changed the nuts
and bolts of it. Right after this, so chuck. When

(07:25):
people started putting up these fences, not everybody was on
board with this. The Native Americans didn't like it, like
you said, They called the barbed wire devil rope the
old timey cowboys. Um, they didn't like it because they
embraced free range practices and all of a sudden, they're
cattle were getting caught up in this stuff. Because part
of the problem with barbed wires not only did it

(07:47):
keep stuff in, it kept stuff out, and so you
could get tangled up in it either way. And the
cattle that were used to just kind of roaming around
free range will get caught in this stuff and would
die of starvation infections. Um, they just get stuck in
the fence. It would never move again for the rest
of their lives, the rest of their short lives. Well, yeah,
and consider the Homestead Act. President Abraham Lincoln signed this

(08:11):
in eighteen sixty two that said, hey, are you an
honest citizen of the US. You can be a freed slave,
you can be a woman. You can go claim up
to a hundred and sixty acres of land out there
in the west. Just build a house, work that land
for five years. So all of a sudden, there's a
lot of people you talked about, the Native Americans ranging around.
Imagine your tribe, riding your horses to where you want

(08:35):
to go, and all of a sudden you're like, well,
here's a hundred and sixty acre fence that I now
have to drive around right. Drive, yeah, yeah, you just
a cattle drive okay, drive your horse right, all right.
I sounded like a city slicker there for a second.
But in the same way, you accidentally stumbled into the
proper termin knowledge. And that's right. But you know, like

(08:55):
we said, these European cowboys, the Native Americans, they're used
to this free range, and all of a sudden, these
homesteading farmers, a lot of whom were European. They were
staking their claim to property. Uh, sometimes legally, sometimes illegally, right,
But the result was the same. Man, if you put
up these fences, whether that was your land or it
was actually like common land, um, you were claiming it

(09:19):
as your own. And if you had a gun and
a rifle and some hired hands, you could defend that
land that was really common property. But you claimed for
your own and so the for all intents and purposes,
it was your land now. And this had an extensive
domino effect where the free range cowboys and Native Americans

(09:41):
UM lost that common grazing area. It got smaller and smaller.
And so as the grazing land became more and more concentrated,
there are more and more people, UM whose herds were
eating off of less and less land, and so it
no longer became a viable existence free range. And then
if you were a smaller landowner, you would have your

(10:04):
land encroached on by these larger landowners. Probably some guys
would show up with a gun and be like czar
heard now. And so all of this UM. The the
upshot of all this is that the people who had
the most land ended up taking over even more land,
and just a handful of people got the American West
concentrated into their hands. That's right. So, which is kind

(10:27):
of the history of America in a lot of ways.
It's still going on today. I mean, think about when
like Home Depot or Lows shows up in town. The
hardware store goes out of business, and the people who
used to work there now work at Lows. Or home depot.
So there were plenty of disputes. This was the Old West.
Plenty of them involved this fights and guns. But there
were actual gangs. There was gangs called the Blue Devils

(10:47):
or the have Alina's, and they were called fence cutting wars.
They would go in and the dead of night or
maybe in broad daylight, even if they were brazen and
well armed, and they would cut these wires and they
would leave messages and threats saying don't rebuild the stuff.
There were shootouts, there were people that were killed in
these fence cutting wars. Authorities eventually stepped in were like,

(11:09):
you know, the West, it needs to be a little
less wild, uh. And those wars ended, but the barbed
wire endured. It did. And I mean, you know, when
you think of the barbed wire, you think of the
Old West, but you also nowadays think of you know,
barb barbed wire stretching from Switzerland to the English Channel

(11:30):
in World War One, or wire uh uh um barbed
wire around um prisons. UM W. H. Olden wrote a
poem about it. He said that um barbed wire proclaims
that you are kept out or kept in, and when
you resist, it ripped you other barriers weather, crumble, grow, moss.

(11:51):
Wire merely rusts and keeps its sting, which reading which
doesn't doesn't really it doesn't rhyme, but it's still pretty good. Yeah,
I mean the military has been using it since Teddy
Roosevelt used it. Certainly world War One, it was used
as a weapon. And uh, yeah, any any prison movie
you're ever gonna see, you're gonna see a formidable coiled

(12:15):
strip of razor wire around the top of those fences.
It's like an extra silent character in most movies, right,
especially You've got mail. Oh that was from the last episode. Right. Uh,
If you want to know more about barbed wire, we'll
just start walking and fella, you're bound to wander into
it sooner or later. Just brings some antibiotics because you're

(12:37):
going to get an infection. And since I said that,
that's the end of the episode, and since it's a
short stuff, that means that short stuff it's over. Stuff
you should know is a production of iHeart Radio's How
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(12:58):
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