Barbed wire is one of the most important inventions of modern times.
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I discovered this by accident. It struck me while watching television how often barbed wire appeared in news reports about crisis zones. You couldn&#;t escape it: there it was, in every war and every demonstration. Wherever migrants or suspected terrorists surfaced, they were held behind barbed wire.
When I decided to examine the history of barbed wire in more detail, I found out that&#;s how it&#;s been since the beginning. Barbed wire has always been used to separate living beings, first animals and later people. It&#;s what tamed the Wild West. It then entered the world stage with a grisly role in World War I. It came to symbolize totalitarianism, thanks to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. And today, it serves as an instrument of economic apartheid, by separating human beings into those who may enter and those stuck outside.
For my book on the history of barbed wire, More on my book here (in Dutch only) I travelled to the U.S., Bangladesh, South Africa, Belgium, Spain, and Morocco. I also cycled through my own country of the Netherlands and found that barbed wire is never far away. We just don&#;t notice it anymore. We&#;re as conditioned as cows; we look right through it.
Barbed wire could only have been invented in the United States. Nowhere else was the need for a cheap fencing material so immense and compelling. The migration of settlers to the West stagnated in the mid-nineteenth century. The main reason for this was as trivial as it was fundamental: many aspiring farmers were not willing to try their luck as long as they had no idea how they could fence off their land to protect their crops.
All the natural aids that farmers had traditionally used for fencing, such as stones and wood, were lacking on the prairies of the Midwest. Without fencing, the fruit of their labors was under constant threat. Any passing herd of cattle or buffalo could simply trample the growing grain or gobble it up.
From to , newspapers and magazines in the Midwest devoted more attention to the thorny topic of fencing than any other political, economic, or social issue. That&#;s revealing. The American Civil War had just ended, and the country was engulfed in a major financial crisis. But all that was irrelevant to those yearning for affordable fencing. For these farmers, the invention of barbed wire was like manna from heaven. By , people had been hoping and praying for just such a miracle for some time.
&#;Joe, these cows in my garden are driving me crazy. They&#;re eating all the flowers. Could you please do something about it?&#; Lucinda&#;s cry for help is in all likelihood where this story began. &#;Of course, Lucy my love, I&#;ll deal with it.&#; How this miracle came about is a story that spiritual father Joseph Glidden Watch a short film about Joseph Glidden here and his wife Lucinda would recount to journalists later. Glidden was a farmer from DeKalb, a small town with a thousand inhabitants in the Mississippi Valley 60 miles west of Chicago.
He bought a reel of fence wire at the local hardware store. And as the days began to get shorter, he could be found working in the kitchen in the evenings. His only tools were a pair of pliers, a set of pincers, and different kinds of hammers.
That fall, Lucinda&#;s wire hairpins started to disappear. One evening, Lucinda was surprised to see her husband fish two of her hairpins out of his shirt pocket. &#;What are you doing with my hairpins?&#; she asked. &#;I&#;m working on an idea for a fence,&#; he is said to have answered.
With a pair of pliers he twisted the hairpins one by one into spirals with sharp points. Apparently he later used a coffee grinder to make barbs out of wire. He would then attach strands of barbs onto the wire.
There was one annoyance: the barbs wouldn&#;t stay in place. Glidden eventually managed to fasten the barbs securely by twisting a second wire around the first. While he wasn&#;t the first to develop barbed fencing, it was this double-wire discovery of Glidden&#;s that made him go down in history as the inventor of barbed wire.
The product was a cash cow from day one. It seemed inconceivable, ten years after it was invented, that the United States had ever managed without it. It was light and cheap, and easy to install and maintain. The demand was so overwhelming, and the business grew so explosively, that in the weekly newspaper The Prairie Farmer devoted a special issue to the phenomenon that &#;has no equal in the history of industry.&#;
Barbed wire was the internet of the late-nineteenth century. Everyone had to have it, and have it now.
&#;Few names are as widely known as that of Joseph F. Glidden,&#; The Prairie Farmer reported. &#;Not only has he established a mammoth industry, he has also radically changed the global economy. Thanks to his ingenuity and persistence, fencing has become a piece of cake on this rural continent: simple and affordable. He didn&#;t accomplish this on his own. But he did lay the foundations.&#;
With the force of a tornado, barbed wire cleared the way for the final stages of settling the West. Settlers rushed it in its wake. "More white settlers moved further westward in the eight years after affordable material for fencing was introduced than in the 50 years prior to that,&#; noted the Texan historian Roy D. Holt. At the end of the nineteenth century, 17 million people lived in the West. That was 25 times more than just 60 years before.
Fencing off the wide-open spaces of the American West may have been inevitable, it initially met with great resistance. Barbed wire provided farmers and some cattle ranchers with unprecedented opportunities. But at the same time, it threatened the very livelihood of others, including Plains Indian tribes and small-scale ranchers, who had never had to own land to raise livestock. In some states &#; Texas in particular &#; this resistance led to bitter Fence-Cutting Wars.
But as controversial as the Devil&#;s Rope was, by the open range Robert Fletcher&#;s ode to the "Open Range" was largely a thing of the past, and the cowboy Listen to Cole Porter&#;s classic, "Don&#;t Fence Me In", based on Fletcher&#;s poem. on his way to becoming a tall tale. Barbed wire fencing had prevailed.
And barbed wire prevailed wherever it was introduced. Barbed wire was the internet of the late-nineteenth century. Everyone had to have it, and have it now. Within a quarter of a century, it had found its way to other continents, to all the other areas that needed fencing in order to develop. It reached the Pampas of Argentina, the veldts of South Africa, and the steppes of Australia.
Army commanders discovered the benefits of barbed wire too. You could use it to hold up an advancing enemy. You could imprison a hostile population on a piece of land with it. That happened on a large scale for the first time during the Second Boer War Watch a documentary about the Second Boer War here (-), the struggle between the British colonial power and two poor Boer republics in southern Africa, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic. When those young nations began to engage in guerilla warfare, the British army restricted the Boer commandos&#; freedom of movement by building a barbed-wire fence more than 3,500 miles long. And Boer women and children were imprisoned in concentration camps in Transvaal surrounded by barbed wire.
During World War I, a barbed-wire fence cut off Belgium from the Netherlands for three years. Belgium was occupied by the Germans, while the Netherlands was neutral. The Germans wanted to prevent, at all costs, Belgian volunteer soldiers from joining the allied troops via the Netherlands. They even charged the 206-mile-long fence with electricity. From August onwards, an electric screen separated the two neighboring countries, from the town of Vaals, near Aachen, Germany, all the way to the sea on the western coast. Border residents called it the dodendraad, or "wire of death." Read more about the "wire of death" here
One of the victims was 25-year-old Henricus Lenders from Turnhout, a town about 30 miles east of Antwerp. &#;The thread of my life,&#; read his in memoriam card, &#;has been severed faster than a weaver can weave. My days have gone up in smoke like a thunderbolt. Beloved wife and dearest children, it was for you that I toiled, and it was my love for you that made me fear no danger. In the darkness of night I set off to foreign parts, never for you to see me again.&#;
How many died along the border is difficult to ascertain. Belgian geography professor Dominique Vanneste, who conducted extensive archival research, estimates 800 casualties. Of the dead whose full names are known, three quarters died by electrocution, one fifth during exchanges of fire, while the cause of death is unknown for the remaining casualties. The total number of victims in three years is estimated to be approximately . By comparison, in 28 years 136 people died along the Berlin Wall.
But barbed wire really took off during World War I, Watch a BBC video about the use of barbed wire here. when trenches, barbed-wire barriers, and machine guns created impenetrable frontlines. It&#;s the only major war where barbed wire played a leading part from beginning to end. Without barbed wire, the war never would have dragged on so long. Without barbed wire, the war would never have claimed so many lives.
These are the opening lines of the poem &#;Naked Warriors&#; by British poet Herbert Read:
A man of mine
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lies on the wire.
It is death to fetch his soulless corpse.
A man of mine
lies on the wire.
And he will rot
Nonetheless, barbed wire only became the symbol of totalitarianism and human atrocity in World War II, as a result of its widespread use in a &#;monstrous web of slave camps,&#; as Italian writer Primo Levi described the Nazi system. Watch the video Prikkeldraad (&#;Barbed Wire&#;) about the camps here (in Dutch only). The eight extermination camps still obscure the fact that there were 42,000 other camps: labor camps, prisoner of war camps and concentration camps. They all had one thing in common: barbed wire.
It was also barbed wire that divided Europe into capitalist Western Europe and socialist Eastern Europe for almost half a century. An Iron Curtain was draped over the continent, from Norway in the North to Turkey in the South. As late as the summer of , future chancellor Gerhard Schröder proclaimed: &#;One should not lie to the new generation after 40 years of West Germany about the chance for German unification: it does not exist.&#;
When the Berlin Wall fell Watch an ABC News report on the fall of the wall in , it briefly seemed like barbed wire&#;s triumphant march would come to a halt. Weren&#;t walls and fences and all those other barriers absurd and outmoded in a globalizing world?
But since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, barbed wire has launched another offensive. It shines menacingly on border fences and border walls that serve to separate wealthy countries from poorer neighbors. It adorns gated communities where the well-to-do barricade themselves in countries where inequality is greatest. It meets a growing demand for security in a world of chaos.
If Google Earth could look back in time, to , the year that barbed wire was invented, and then visualize the spread of modern types of fencing, not only barbed-wire fences, but also newer versions, such as wire mesh and other increasingly clever fences, what would we see?
We would be shocked at how quickly barbed wire Listen to German singer Nina Hagen&#;s song about barbed wire managed to fill large patches of the map in a quarter of a century. And that was just the beginning. Soon barbed wire and other types of fencing reached the cities. Authorities used them to separate functions: to set off schools from neighborhoods, public gardens from streets. Businesses and citizens protected their valuable possessions behind them.
Since the world population has quintupled to more than 7 billion people. The number of people that live in cities has increased from 10% to more than 50%. The purchasing power of the average world citizen has increased by a factor of 36. The unbridled growth of fencing was a side effect. Wherever you looked, barbed wire was thriving.
If Google Earth were to show all of this fencing, then we would see a world of labyrinths. Never before has so much of the earth been closed off. Never before has such a large portion of the globe been so compartmentalized.
Today, China and India dominate the global barbed-wire market &#; good for an estimated 500,000 tons of the stuff a year. That&#;s some 5 million miles of barbed wire, enough to circle the earth 200 times. That places still exist in our world where there&#;s no barbed wire is nothing short of a miracle.
English translation by Mark Speer and Erica Moore
As one of the three classic technological innovations that assisted in the economic development of the western United States (the others being the windmill and the revolver), barbed wire played a vital role in the development of the prairie-plains of Indian Territory after the Civil War. "Barbed wire" consists of one or more strands of metal wire implanted with sharpened metal spikes, or barbs, at regular intervals. Smooth-wire fencing was in general use when the first practical barbed wire appeared in , created in New York by Michael Kelly. Because it used very sharp spikes, which often caused injuries to horses, cattle, and men, it was nicknamed "vicious" wire. In Joseph Glidden patented a more marketable "obvious" barbed wire (with larger, dull-pointed, and safer barbs). Although hundreds of varieties were patented, the most popular were 2-Point Baker and 2-Point Glidden. While most historians generally credit farmers with being the first to use the new product, in the Indian Territory barbed wire was first adopted by cattlemen soon after its invention.
After the Civil War ended in the Indian Territory, cattle raising became an important economic activity, both among the American Indian nations, to whom the region belonged, and to white ranchers from Texas or elsewhere who leased grazing land from them. Contemporary ranching practice on the Great Plains, and also in the prairie-plains of the Indian Territory, allowed cattle to freely roam and graze, restricted only by canyons, rivers, and other natural barriers. Cowboys kept the herds within the owner's range, doctored and branded them, and protected them from predators and thieves. Whether conducted by American Indians or by white lessees, open-range ranching was the common practice until the introduction of barbed-wire fences.
Open-range ranching gave rise to the semiannual roundup, spring and fall, in which cowboys from various ranches combined their efforts to gather the animals. When the cattle had been assembled in one place, they were sorted by brand, and each owner herded his own animals back to his territory. After the spring roundup the cattle were moved to the southern ranges. After the fall roundup cattle were selected to be sent to market. Cattle raised in this way were usually wild, tough longhorns capable of surviving the environmental disasters that might befall animals wandering in "loose" herds. The roundup proceeded in a circuit from ranch to ranch. For example, ranchers in the Cherokee Outlet organized a roundup circuit as early as , and it extended into Kansas. Another circuit started in northeastern New Mexico and moved eastward into present Oklahoma. In the Chickasaw Nation one of several circuits began at Atoka (in the Choctaw Nation) and moved northwest and then north to present Ada, southwest to near present Roff and Sulphur, and back to Atoka.
The open-range system on the plains allowed interregional herd movement. In winter, Kansas cattle sometimes drifted southward from the Platte and Arkansas rivers into the Public Land Strip or Cherokee Strip or southward from the Beaver (North Canadian) River into more southerly ranges, even as far south as the Little and Red rivers. Fencing could correct the problem, and thus the barbed-wire product found early application in the Texas Panhandle.
In &#;81 cattlemen there constructed a 175-mile-long drift fence from the Indian Territory border westward to New Mexico. Its probable location was approximately fifteen miles south of the southern border of the Strip (or No Man's Land, the Oklahoma Panhandle). Opposition to this kind of long-distance fencing surfaced in the severe winters of the mid-s when thousands of cattle piled up against the wire and died during a series of blizzards. The catastrophe was a huge financial loss and ever after has been known as the "big die-up." Nevertheless, during the s closed-land ranching developed as the norm throughout the Indian Territory.
In the Cherokee Outlet of northern Indian Territory, large-scale cattle raising developed in the late s. Individual Texas cattlemen and corporate ranch managers began to enclose numerous areas with fences beginning in , generally with the Cherokees' approval. These barriers, using locally cut timber as fence posts and strung with barbed wire, allowed a rancher to keep his herds on their home range and prevented other herds from using his grazing lands. Cattlemen enclosed horse pastures to keep cattle out, marked cattle ranges to keep herds from drifting too far, and separated areas to protect other property. Fences also halted the incursions of potentially Texas fever&#;infected cattle from south of the Red River. However, in early the U.S. Department of the Interior decided that the fencing was an "improvement" (implying land ownership) and threatened to remove all of it. This stimulated the ranchmen to incorporate the Cherokee Strip Live Stock Association in early . It soon negotiated a five-year land lease with the Cherokee Nation. The fencing was declared to be temporary, was deemed property of the Cherokee Nation, and was allowed to remain. When the lease was ended, the federal government ordered all cattle to be removed from the Outlet by October . Ranchers removed their cattle but left much of the fencing. It was salvaged by ranchers from Kansas and later by area farmers after the Cherokee Outlet opening of September . South of the Outlet, a similar drift fence extended westward from Vici for several miles.
Among the five major southeastern tribes of the Indian Territory, land was owned in common, and fencing was not a traditional way to protect property or cattle. In the Cherokee Nation the range generally remained unfenced until Texas ranchers began leasing land there. Officially, the Cherokee Nation remained all free range, although observers noted fifteen- to twenty-mile-long drift fences in places, sometimes eight or ten miles apart. After allotment, free range no longer existed, as Indians thereafter held small plots, and most of the cattlemen left.
In the Chickasaw Nation of south-central Oklahoma, open-range ranching was practiced on a small scale before the Civil War. Chickasaws ranched extensively, running an estimated 140,000 head in their nation by . They also used the new wire. For example, Montford T. Johnson and his son E. B. (Edward) operated a sizeable ranch on the western side of the nation. E. B. Johnson observed the use of barbed wire on a trip to the East in , and he brought back enough to enclose a mile-square horse pasture. After observing that the wire did not cut up his livestock, his neighbors also began using it. In the s, because the white ranchers had been enclosing huge ranges with wire, thereby impeding traffic across the nation and implying an "ownership" of the land by non-Indians, the Chickasaw Nation's legislature limited pastures to 640 acres. In April the Chickasaw legislature empowered Ben Pikey and a group of other ranchers to build a "barb wire drift line" along the entire length of the main (South) Canadian River in their home county, in order to protect their property from settlers coming into the Unassigned Lands to the north. By , when the allotment of Chickasaw lands to individual Indians was complete, pasture fences had become common.
In Old Greer County, technically a part of Texas until , Texas cattlemen also practiced free-range cattle raising and used barbed wire to keep their herds apart. Numerous interviews in the s Indian-Pioneer History Collection refer to lengthy fences running north and south and in one instance, the Day Land and Cattle Company apparently erected one east to west across the entire region. Anecdotal mention is also made of cattle freezing to death by piling up against barbed-wire fences during the "big die-up."
Barbed-wire fencing gradually became useful for keeping cattle out of, rather than within, areas. As homesteaders and other settlers moved into newly opened regions, they adopted the practice of fencing their fields. William Beaumont, who in settled near present Mangum, claimed to have fenced the first ten-acre farming patch in Old Greer County. However, American Indian ranchers such as E. B. Johnson saw barbed wire's other utility, and he fenced in several mile-square plots and hired farmers to grow various crops there.
The spread of barbed-wire fencing spelled the end of the open-range cattle industry and the roundup circuit as well. Ultimately, and more importantly, fencing of grazing land in all areas of Oklahoma has facilitated the development of high-grade, registered cattle breeds, such as the Hereford and the Angus, that produce superior, more marketable beef. In the process, as noted by Great Plains historian Walter Prescott Webb, the open range gave way to the enclosed pasture, and "ranching" became "stock-farming." The primary beneficiaries of barbed wire, however, were the homesteaders who came to Oklahoma Territory in the numerous land runs and other openings, established farms, and put up fences. Many farmers added cattle raising to their agricultural pursuits. The cattle industry remained a significant income-producing activity throughout the twentieth century in Oklahoma, due in large part to the universal adoption of barbed-wire fencing in the s.