The wiring of America
WHO could love barbed wire? It covered the trenches of the Somme and strung hate around Auschwitz. Amnesty International has established it as the symbol of torture and repression. In “Memorial for the City”, W.H. Auden made it the ultimate emblem of 20th-century brutality and impersonality:
Barbed wire proclaims that you are kept out or kept in, and, when you resist, it rips you. Other barriers weather, crumble, grow moss; wire merely rusts, and keeps its sting.
To look at barbed wire with different eyes, you need to stand somewhere else. You might try the tiny building, the only dot on the horizon, that is the visitors' centre at the Prairie State Park in Missouri, on the Kansas border: 3,462 acres (1,401 hectares) of hard-baked land covered very thinly with wild flowers and grass. There a whole wall is given over to barbed wire, lovingly cut into 18-inch lengths and arranged in columns. From a distance, it is just wire. Close to it is actually Brinkerhoff's Not-Twisted, Forrester's Sawtooth, Three-Point, S-Lapover, Green-Brier Bob. This is the wire of greatness. These were the names that fenced in the West and allowed America to swagger, a self-sufficient Titan, on to the world stage.
Five varieties already seems impressive: but they merely scratch the surface. The Bible of barbed wire, Robert Clifton's “Barbs, Prongs, Points, Prickers, & Stickers” (University of Oklahoma Press, 1970, and from which this article's illustrations are drawn), lists 749 varieties of barbed wire, most of them patented and almost all devised in the peak years of westwards expansion. Intrepid collectors now search up and down the West for examples of the stranger kinds of wire. Enthusiasts have a magazine, the Barbed Wire Collector, a newsletter, Wire Barb and Nail, and at least 13 associations. Wire shows are held round the country, and enterprising forgers are even reproducing—and selling at a premium—the rarer old varieties. For such people, barbed wire is not just wire. It is patriotic, it is ingenious, and it is even art.
On its face, that seems outlandish. When barbed wire first appeared, in 1874, prospective buyers found it repellent to look at and were horrified at its effects on livestock. They reported horses and cattle cut to ribbons, or left with gaping wounds that were quickly infected with screw-worm. Some inventors played up the “slashing” aspect of wire: thus Griswold's Savage, Blake's Body Grip, Brink's Stinger, Connelly's Knife Edge. Yet others saw beauty in their wire. They produced stars, wheels, ribbons, coils, diamonds—Smith's Descending Beads, Riter's Visible Lace, Morgan's Perforated Star, Woodard's Teardrop-Edge. Some modelled their wire explicitly on nature—Allis's Buckthorn, Phillips's Cocklebur, Nadel hoffer's Gull Wing, Kelly's Thorny Fence. There was even a sort of nobility in wire. Jacob Haish, one of several men who claimed to have invented it, did what he could to prevent the Allied armies using it on people during the first world war. Other suppliers in other countries had fewer qualms.
The mixture of beauty and horror is only the most obvious of barbed wire's paradoxes. It was a piece of sheer inventive genius; yet it was also just a mechanical copy of something nature did. It was one of the most widely and easily imitated inventions of the century, but also one of the most ruthless monopolies, blatantly controlled for the profit of a handful of millionaires. The results it produced were paradoxical, too. Wire encouraged settlers to put down roots in the West, but also prodded stockmen to claim vast areas for their cattle, so that unmoving farmers and roving cattlemen eventually declared war on each other. Wire allowed property rights to be defended and the public range to be restricted; as a result, Americans became both freer, and less free. It connected one point with another all across the western landscape, and estranged people and animals from the land itself.
In the beginning came the need for a good cheap way to mark boundaries. As America shifted west, away from the crowded east coast into wide open territory, both timber and stones became scarce. The only tree that could provide a barrier on the prairie was the Osage orange (Maclura pomifera), an exotic-looking plant with glossy leaves, warty green fruits and rock-hard yellow wood. The Osage orange made a thick thorn hedge, but one that was still susceptible to frost, grew fairly slowly, took up space and needed time-consuming pruning.
It was easier to import timber from tree-growing states, but this was expensive in terms of money and manpower. In 1871 wooden fencing cost, on average, about $2 a rod (five metres). Trees were getting scarcer, too. In 1881 the American Agriculturalist reported that if fence-building in the new territories went on as it had been doing, in 12 years there would not be a tree left standing in Michigan, Minnesota or Wisconsin.
Farmers had tried to build fences with plain wire, but it did not keep animals out. Something pricklier was needed, but no one had much idea how to combine spikes with wire. In 1873, at a county fair in De Kalb, Illinois, a man called Rose exhibited the latest attempt: a strip of wood, one inch square by 16 feet long, which was studded with tacks and hung on a plain wire fence. Three men from De Kalb came past the stand, saw the exhibit and—by their own accounts—went straight off and invented fencing with barbs directly on the wire. Isaac Ellwood, a hardware-dealer and failed gold-prospector, made a sheet-metal strip with four-point metal barbs incorporated in it; Jacob Haish, a pushy immigrant from Bavaria, hooked short pieces of wire together so that their ends formed barbs and wound the resulting chain round a continuous strand; Joseph Glidden, a farmer, twisted short barbs around a long strand of wire which was then wound around a second strand, to make sure the barbs stayed in place—or, as he put it himself in his patent application:
All three rushed to patent their inventions and reap their reward. By the next year, Ellwood and Haish were making barbed wire commercially. (Ellwood, having abandoned his own design, was making Glidden's.) They soon faced competition. By 1876, there were four more manufacturers in Illinois alone. Since all that was required was lots of plain wire, a source of power for the barbing machine and some capital, anyone could start. In 1874, 10,000 pounds were made (each pound typically containing about 20 feet—six metres—of wire); in 1877, the figure was 12.8m pounds. Eventually, barbed wire was made in barns, blacksmiths' shops, back gardens. It appeared in fantastic varieties (including one woven of 300 strands and dotted all over with tacks), and patents were handed out like candy. By 1884 the market was saturated and prices were tumbling.
To control this industry seemed like a fool's errand, but Glidden and Ellwood were determined to try. In 1876 they went to court to establish their claim to the original or “bottom” patent for barbed wire. The fight was to go on, with some decisions in their favour, some against, for 16 years, during which time a large part of the roaring barbed-wire industry's profits went into the pockets of lawyers.
Complicating all the patent rows was the question of whether barbed wire was an invention—that is, an act of genius—at all. It seemed to some that it was nature that had done the original inventing, by putting thorns on a branch, and all Glidden had done was to copy it. There was a certain truth to that, but Glidden had undoubtedly improved on nature with a design whereby the barbs were easily made and uniformly spaced. (Popular legend had it that the key enabling technology was his wife's coffee-mill; in return Mrs. Glidden got the fence she had wanted to keep dogs off her flower-beds). In one judge's elegant phrase, “utility was suggestive of originality.”
It is hard to argue now that barbed wire should not have been patentable; but it is also hard to say who actually deserved the patent. Since much was at stake in the disputes, no one played clean. Rivals to Glidden and Ellwood sent out agents who pretended to have found, in odd corners of the country, earlier uses of barbed wire than Glidden was claiming. One man claimed to have made barbed wire between 1857 and 1860 for a “Mr. Morley” in Iowa, but later confessed that he had been paid to invent this story by agents of the Beat 'Em All Barb Wire Company of Waterloo, Iowa, who had also shown him how to “age” barbed wire by burying it in a dung-heap to rust it.
Meanwhile, Glidden's and Ellwood's agents were up to their own devices with one of the patent-case judges:
Judge Drummond was impressed; he ruled that Glidden was the true inventor of barbed wire and the holder of the original patent. Some judges agreed with him; others did not. But the minute they had received the first judgment in their favour (in 1880), Ellwood and his business partner, Charles Washburn, had set about controlling the market. They put pressure on other manufacturers either to sell their patents and become licensees of the Washburn & Moen Manufacturing Company, or else—on threat of closure by violence or ruinous damages—stop making wire altogether. Licensees paid for the privilege with a 25-cent royalty on every 100 pounds of wire.
For years, this cosy arrangement kept springing leaks. Since the decision on the bottom patent was not final, new “twisters” armed with new patents kept entering the market, and many of them refused outright to buy licences from the Washburn company. Instead, with the outspoken support of farmers and ranchers who wanted lower prices, they would make a quick killing manufacturing “moonshine wire”. Their principle, they said, was nothing less than liberty: the liberty of any man to twist a bit of wire the way he wanted and then to sell it at a profit. In 1881 the Farmers Protective Association of Iowa called the Washburn company “the most gigantic and despotic monopoly of modern times”.
Monopoly was then, as it is now, an issue regulators worried about; but it was illegal only if its avowed purpose was to fix prices and eliminate competition. Ellwood and Washburn therefore argued that their purpose was to ensure “stability” in the market and quality in the product, to the benefit of all, and also, by consolidation, to achieve economies of scale. Whether or not this was true, there is no doubt that competition gradually withered away. In 1892 the Supreme Court decided definitively in favour of Glidden's patent. In 1898, the monopolists—who now controlled 96% of the market—set their monopoly in stone with the formation of the American Steel and Wire Company of Illinois, a trust in which Ellwood, Washburn and their partners owned just under half of the common and preferred stock. The trust had its own ore reserves, river craft and railways, and the main stockholders were all millionaires.
Even those who had sold their patent rights became astonishingly wealthy. Haish (despite having spent $2m defending his patent) ornamented his home town of De Kalb with schools, libraries, opera houses and a magnificent mansion displaying, above the door, the words “Jacob Haish Inventor of Barbed Wire”. Glidden, who had sold his patent to Washburn's company for $60,000 in 1876, built a 100-room hotel there “lighted with gas and heated by steam”, with its own wagons to pick up important guests from the railway station. Yet the palm should perhaps go to one of Glidden's salesmen, John “Bet-A-Million” Gates, who earned his name because he once won thousands of dollars with a wager on a race between raindrops on the window of a train.
In the north, the frenzied barbed-wire market eventually grew quiet in the embrace of the American Steel and Wire Company. Meanwhile, however, barbed wire spread like a weed across the South and West. On the XIT ranch in Texas alone, in the 1890s, boundary and cross-fencing took up 1,500 miles of wire. Three hundred miles of it stretched round Glidden's own Frying Pan ranch, originally established as a showcase to encourage Texans to buy the stuff.
At first they had needed some encouraging. Although barbed wire was light, durable, reliable and cheap (at $1 a rod, half the cost of wooden fencing), its reception in the early years was intriguingly slow. Back east, people still preferred wood or stone to make their fences. In the West, people had political objections. Farmers in Texas (considered the prime market) disliked barbed wire not only because it was vicious, but because it came from Illinois, which meant the north. Some even thought it might be a northern plot to wipe out their cattle. The most extensive use of wire for many years in Texas was to build huge east-west fences, some 200 miles long, to stop inferior northern cattle coming over on to good Texan grass. By some accounts, barbed wire only took off in Texas after Bet-A-Million Gates demonstrated to the crowd at a San Antonio rodeo that steers spooked by burning torches a wire fence could be stopped dead by a barbed-wire fence.
The legal and social implications of barbed wire, hardly grasped at the start, soon became unavoidable. The new wire allowed fences where there had never been fences before. In some ways, this was good: it meant that arable farmers could now protect their crops against livestock. Under the western “fence out” law (the reverse of the English common law that prevailed in the eastern states) a farmer could make no claim for trespass unless he had built a fence good enough to keep cattle out. This built-in advantage to the roving cattle-men reflected the local distribution of power. Now that farmers could build such a fence easily and cheaply, the power-structure shifted: settlement in the new territories became both feasible and profitable, and as their numbers grew both law and politics began to be shaped in the settlers' interests.
The new fences encroached on lands where stockmen had always imagined they had the right to roam freely. In contrast to the prevailing notion that the land was free for all and immune from the law of trespass, it was increasingly feasible to parcel it out in private sections. Cattlemen without land—the majority of them—were ruined. Those who had land ran their wire round whole ranges and, wherever possible, round water rights. Fences were strung across public roads and, in western Kansas, even round whole counties.
As the barbed wire got out of control, gangs of vigilantes would come by night and cut it down. It soon went up again. It was sometimes hard to know what the wire was there for, but two things are certain. First, the idea of the public good, in the sense of commonly held land and water on the common range, lost out definitively to the idea of individual claims and rights, and America never became (as perhaps it would never have done in any case) a place remotely sympathetic to common ownership. Instead, it became a country of private strivers.
Second, the loss of the open range led to the end of the cowboy life, the giant “drives” and the huge drifting herds that characterised the early West. It became a country of city-dwellers and settled rancher/farmers; the rover and vigilante became permanent outsiders. Again, this would probably have happened anyway. But the wire brought it about with ruthless speed.
Lost with the advent of barbed wire, too, was the sense of invisible boundaries and markers on the open prairie. “Line riders” had once patrolled these boundaries every day, knowing as if by instinct where they were. Barbed wire, which made other lines real and tangible, obscured this notional world completely. As a result, both cowboys and Indians were disorientated. In New Mexico they said that Standing Deer, the chief of the Taos Pueblo, could no longer find his way back home from the Oklahoma Territories in 1886 because barbed-wire fences had appeared. The wire did not physically prevent his passage, but it changed the lines of the landscape. It was as if he was in a completely different world. And he was. In the barbed-wire world, a line that could not be touched did not exist. A rare layer of abstraction in American life had been replaced by plain practicality.
These conflicts continue to colour American attitudes to barbed wire. In some quarters it is still “the devil's rope” or “the devil's hat-band”, vicious stuff that can cut through leather and tears at the wind. It does not even make the perfect fence. Wire fences need constant tightening, by teams of bored line-walkers with clumsy inch-thick gloves; discarded wire is hell to roll up and awkward to dispose of; and fewer than three strands to a fence still allow the stock to wriggle through. Looking at barbed-wire fences, men grow sentimental for timber and, better still, living hedges. In modern Wyoming and Montana, fences are still cut to symbolise the “freeing” of the West from rapacious cattle-men.
Yet plenty of others are nostalgic about barbed wire. Although imported wire now accounts for more than half the market, Glidden's Winner is still considered the best wire pattern available. It carries, together with its hundreds of competitors, a whole weight of ingenuity and history. It is true that wire has never quite mellowed into the western landscape: the very name still preserves, as Walter Prescott Webb wrote in 1931, “something suggestive of savagery and lack of refinement the relentless hardness of the Plains.” Yet it is part of that landscape now as surely as tumbleweed or sagebrush. Love it or loathe it, it has done much to make America what it is. Perhaps a country could never be so entranced by networks, Internets and the constant dissolving of boundaries unless it had once been just as entranced with putting boundaries up.