How the west was really won.

When you hear the term “How the west was won” what comes to mind?  John Wayne and Henry Fonda?  Won from what or rather whom?

 For white settlement to successfully occur in the Great Plains, three things had to be accomplished.  First, the buffalo had to be killed off.  These wooly creatures caused considerable destruction to the land where they moved and grazed and were the life sustaining force of the wild plains tribes.  Kill off the buffalo and you have the second problem solved also by forcing the nomadic tribes to settle on a reservation and accept government handouts. 

 Third and most important, cut up the open range into manageable smaller ranches and farms.  One of the major problems encountered by the sodbusters was not the Indians but the large cattle ranchers that claimed hundreds of thousands of acres that did not even belong to them.

 The cattle in the late 1860’s were wild cattle that would kill a man or horse if one were foolish enough to approach.  When the white settlers came to Texas, Indian Territory and Kansas, after the Civil War, they simply put their brand on as many of these wild cattle as they could handle and drove the critters on public land.  Pretty nice set-up, huh?  Free cattle and free land!  In Indian Territory the ranchers did have to pay a fee of 10 cents per head for grazing rights on Indian land.

 It was illegal to fence more than one square mile in Indian Territory.  This was allowed so the farmer could protect his food crops and keep his milk cow and mules or oxen close to the house.  A rancher south of Sulphur had a drift fence that measured twenty-five miles long, which was highly illegal.  One night the light horsemen cut the fence to pieces when he refused to take it down.

 It wasn’t the cavalry trooper, the Iron Horse or the cattle baron that won the west, it was barbed wire.  This almost innocuous little invention, patented in 1873 by Joseph Glidden, was the most economical way to fence and control large parcels of land.

 Farmers could protect their crops from the wondering herds of cattle and the small rancher could keep his stock from getting mixed up with his neighbor’s cattle.  The purpose of barbed wire was to prick the skin of the wild cattle and make them respect the fence.

 Almost immediately the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, SPCA, got into the act and contended that the wire was cruel to the animals.  These Easterners had never seen one of these wild cows and did not realize that they were very nearly uncontrollable. So, the barbed wire manufacturers began putting in small blocks of wood and small steel plates so these wild critters could “see” the wire.

 The SPCA pushed for the use of the “Hedge Apple”, “Horse Apple”, Osage Orange or Bois d’ Arc as more humane.  Now there are several problems with the bois d’ arc hedge.  First it took five years to grow into a workable hedge.  Secondly, one good prairie fire destroyed your fence along with five years work, they collected weeds, snow, vermin and last of all, where do you get the trees on a barren prairie?

 In the book “The Wire that Fenced the West” by McCallum, it is noted that Bonham, Texas became the Mecca of horse apple seeds and sprouts.  The bois d’ arc hedges were touted to be “horse high, bull strong and pig tight”.  The hedges were allowed to grow to about six feet high and three to four feet thick before they were trimmed into the thorny hedge.

 The collecting of the horse apples was a major task in itself.  It took 1,000 horse apples to produce one bushel of seeds.  The process of extracting the seeds was no easy task either.

 The horse apples were collected and placed in piles to rot.  Then the apples were cut off on four sides and ground in a mill.  The seeds then had to be washed in three waters and put on racks to dry.  The seeds had to be raked every day to keep them from molding as they dried.  After all this work, a bushel of seeds brought only $25.

 One can readily see why the hedge apple never caught on when barbed wire was quick, easy and cheap.  In the “Northeast Farmer” of 1870, the editor remarked about the barbed wire fences, “It takes on the average for the whole country $1.74 worth of fence to keep $1.65 worth of stock from eating up $2.45 worth of crop”. 

 The rock and rail fence New Englanders could not understand what the prairie farmers were up against.  It was a different climate, different kind of cattle and different lay of the land.  The land in New England had been farmed for two hundred years but a plow had never touched the soil of the Great Plains.

 Many different designs for “armored fences” were patented in the years after Glidden received his patent on the wire he called the “Winner”.  This is basically the same design we see today.  The competitors had catchy names such as Thorny Fence, Ellwood Ribbon, Corsicana Clip and Scutt Clip.  Only the wire called the “Baker Perfect” came close to the durability of the Winner.

 In 1874, only 10,000 pounds of barbed wire was sold.  By 1880, the annual sale of wire jumped to 80 million pounds.  With this dramatic increase in the use of barbed wire, one can see that the life style of the cattle barons of post Civil War Texas and Indian Territory was severely threatened. 

 The thought in my mind is that if the truth of matter was known, there were probably more settlers killed over barbed wire fences than all the Indian attacks added together.

Contributed by Dennis Muncrief, November 2002.