Barbed wire history Entwined with The St(Ed DeRousse) In the early days of ranching, northern landowners relied on ditches and hedges to mark property lines and control stock. In Texas, some stockmen employed wooden fences and others ranged cattle on open lands. Joseph Glidden, an Illinois resident, would change that with his invention of barbed wire. His invention played an important role in how America was settled and shaped. Barbed wire, along with the Colt pistol and the railroad is most often listed as one of the three main factors in how the West was won.
The landscape of American frontier was wide open. The Homestead Act of 1862 opened millions of acres of the Western United States to new settlers. That land with its tall, tough grass was suitable for nomadic life of the Native Americans, not settlers. It was vast and uncharted when the settlers and cowboys arrived. With them came herds of cattle roaming free over the endless plains.
The need to establish boundaries became evident as more settlers arrived. Ranchers and settlers needed a way to maintain their lands and to keep their herds in and the unwanted elements out. The farmers needed something to protect their crops from free-roaming cattle and bison. Wooden fencing was not a viable option. The American desert was lacking in trees. Because of that, wooden fences were expensive and were susceptible to fires.
Some farmers tried to grow thorn-bush hedges. Thorny hedges would provide effective barriers to cattle, but planting thousands of miles of bushes was not practical. Prickly vegetation grew too slowly.
Other resourceful settlers experimented with wire. Simple wire fences had some advantages. They were light, inexpensive, and easy to put up. Snow would not pile up against them and wind would not blow them down. But a lush green pasture placed between a 1,000-pound Texas longhorn and a wire fence proved to be no match for the wire fence. That was a task very difficult to accomplish. Until the invention of barbed wire. A spiky fence seemed to be the answer.
Hundreds of entrepreneurs from across the country rushed to create a new type of fencing.
In 1867, the first recorded type of fencing with defensive points or barbs, named “The Picketed Strip”, was created by Alphonso Dabb. It was designed to attach to existing fence. It was not successful.
Another attempt was made by Lucien B. Smith. His “thorny wire” was a normal wire fence hung with wooden spools hammered with nails. It also was not successful.
In 1871 Lyman P. Judson named his projecting metal points “barbs”. Although the term stuck his design did not.
The barbs in those early designs had to be clamped to their wire individually by hand. It was a slow, tedious and often painful process. Lightning proved to be a big problem. The barbs were not firmly held in place and when lightning struck the fence the barbs would often run together and fuse into a melted lump. Stretches of fence would be barb free.
In 1874 Jacob Haish patented a type of double stranded barbed wire. With his wire a barb could be mechanically placed on one wire with another wire twisted around it to hold the barb in place. Unfortunately for him, though, Joseph Glidden from DeKalb, Illinois had the same idea at the same time. They both had invented a simple design for the barbed wire we know today.
The two men became entwined in a battle for the patent. Glidden was declared the winner and began branding his design eventually becoming one of the richest men in America.
Glidden came up with his idea for barbed wire from a county fair he attended. He had seen a demonstration that showed a wooden rail with sharp nails, protruding from its sides. The nails were hanging inside a smooth wire fence. Glidden made his improvements to it and in 1874 was granted the patent for his barbed wire.
Isaac L. Ellwood, a DeKalb hardware store owner bought a one-half interest in Joseph Glidden’s barbed wire patent for $265. The two soon formed a partnership. Together they founded the Barb Fence Company of DeKalb and began manufacturing their product. In their first year, only 10,000 pounds of barbed wire was produced, mostly by hand.
By the end of their first year in business, their company had built its first factory. Glidden created a machine to mechanize the barbing of the wire. As a result, more than 600,000 pounds of barbed wire was manufactured. By 1879, fifty million pounds of barbed wire were being produced annually. Glidden’s wire was so popular because it was cheap to manufacture, and relatively inexpensive to purchase. It changed the landscape of the American frontier.
Before barbed wire, communal grazing and long cattle drives were the norm. But barbed wire and its ability to parcel off land, legally owned or not, led to heated and sometimes violent disputes in the American Southwest. Some large landowners took advantage of the new invention and used it to claim prime grazing lands and a few significant watering holes for their herds.
Consequently, disputes known as range wars developed between free-range ranchers and farmers. The ranches needed vast amount of land on which to run their cattle. As a preventative measure farmers used barbed wire fences to keep cattle out of their cornfields.
The small farmers and ranchers who were fenced in began cutting the fences. Bands of cutters were threatening bands of fencers. Lincoln County, New Mexico and Johnson County, Wyoming were perhaps where the most violent confrontations took place. The disputes were eventually settled in court in favor of the farmers resulting in heavy penalties for cutting fences.
Nearly all the open range, within 25 years of its introduction, had been fenced in under private ownership. Many historians attribute the invention of barbed and its widespread use as ending the Old West era of American history. It essentially put an end to the long cattle drives making the occupation of cowboy obsolete. Some say it was this invention that tamed the “Wild West”.
Some Barbed Trivia
• According to Atlas, the U.S. Patent Office processed more than 200 different patents for various types of “spiked fencing” between 1867 and 1874.
• In 1876 Glidden “retired” from manufacturing by selling his half of the business to Washburn and Moen but retained royalties. The Glidden Barbed Wire company evolved into American Steel and Wire and eventually was incorporated into the U.S. Steel Manufacturing Company of today.
• La Crosse, Kansas, population 1,289, is obsessed with barbed wire. It plays host to the annual Kansas Barbed Wire Collectors Association Swap and Sell, and the World Champion Barbed Wire Splicing Contest. It is a timed event in which contestants try and repair a stretch of snapped wire.
• Glidden’s barbed wire was heavily promoted by a man named John Warne “Bet A Million” Gates. Gates would round up some of, in his words, “the toughest and wildest longhorn steers in all of “Texas” and place them inside a fence with barbed wire. Gates would pen the bulls up and then take bets from spectators as to whether or not the seemingly flimsy barbed wire could restrain the beasts. The spectators quickly lost any bet they placed because the wire fence didn’t fall over even when a cowboy charged at the cattle, a fiery hot brand clenched in each hand.

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