99% Invisible - 157- Devil’s Rope

Episode Date: March 18, 2015

In the mid 1800s, not many (non-native) Americans had ever been west of the Mississippi. When Frederick Law Olmstead visited the west in the 1850s, he remarked that the plains looked like a sea of grasses that moved  “in swells after … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There's a pretty famous novel about the old American West called Lonesome Dub. Published in 1985, it won a Pulitzer Prize and was later made into a TV miniseries. It's one of the best books ever written, I think. That's our own Katie Mingle. So in the book, a group of cowboys from Texas, cattlemen, as they were once called, drives a huge herd of cattle through the great open west, all the way from Texas up to Montana.

It's an epic adventure story. The writing is just gorgeous. Here's a passage. As they rode north, they saw more buffalo, mostly small bunches of 20 or 30. The third day north of the Yellowstone, they killed a crippled buffalo calf and dined on its liver. In the morning, when they left, there were a number of buzzards and two or three prairie wolves hanging around waiting for them to leave the carcass. It was a beautiful morning, crisp for an hour or two, and then sunny and warm.

The country rolled on to the north, as it had for thousands of miles, brown in the distance. The prairie grasses waving in the breeze. The book, which is fiction, takes place in the 1870s. And the reason we're talking about it is that basically everything about that scene was about to become impossible. The whole premise of the book really was about to become impossible. In just a few years, cattle drives would come to an end.

The west would become populated with people and towns and railways, and almost all of the buffalo would be gone. This change would come about incredibly quickly, and a lot of it would be brought about by one very simple invention that would come to be known as the Devil's Rope. But let's back up, just a tad. In the mid-1800s, not many non-native Americans had ever been west of the Mississippi. When Frederick Law Olmsted visited the west in the 1850s, he remarked that it was like a sea of grasses

that moved and swells after a great storm. And they were so tall that in order to see where you are or to get your bearings, you had to stand on a horse's back. That's Joanne Lou. Hi, my name is Joanne Lou. I am a Texas-based writer and editor. You had to go far west. You had to go to the west coast to Washington, Oregon, California to see more settlers out there.

The middle of the country was divided into territories. And apart from Texas, most of the land was owned by the federal government. On the maps up until I would say about 1850s, 1840s, they just labeled that whole region as a great American desert. They later changed the maps to say the great American planes, but still, the middle of the country was a vast unknown. It was sparsely populated, mostly by Native Americans and by Catelman who were supplying beef to the people on the East Coast. And then in the mid-1800s, people in the East start thinking about manifest destiny and about settling the West. The American government wanted to settle the American West, and they didn't view Catelman

and Native Americans as suitable settlers of the West. What they wanted out there were people who would actually farm the land, put down the roots, improve the land with buildings and communities, and they looked to the Yomon farmer to do that. Ye old Yomon farmer. So in 1862, President Lincoln signs the Homestead Act, which basically says if he move west and settle on a piece of land that we stole from other people and farm it, and you do that for five years, the land is yours, 160 acres free for the taking. And so of course, the yeoman, you know, us common folk, started heading west. Free land, that can't be hard, right? Right? Guys? I seem like a great idea. They really didn't think about how difficult that would be for

people going out there. No towns, no roads, no stores, no schools. And of course, no fencing material. And it turns out fences were crucial to farmers, but that sea of grasses was not a sea of fencing materials. In other words, there weren't many trees to use for lumber. Yeah, the sothers started going out there and what they found was that the land was fertile. It was great for farming, but there was cattle everywhere. And so when they started to plant their crops,

the cattle would just simply wander onto the fields, trample, and destroy all their efforts. To keep cattle out of their crops, the farmers tried using these really thick and thorny osage orange hedges for fencing. They worked pretty well, but they took five years to grow. And if you had to move the boundaries of your property, tough luck.

Settlers also tried smooth wire fencing, but the cattle could just bust right through it. Everyone was getting really frustrated. A lot of settlers, they moved west and found that they had this problem on their hands, and there was nothing they could do about it, and then they left. Fencing became an issue of much discussion.

There was talk about everywhere you went. Among farmers of course, but also in newspapers, agricultural publications, and in the US government. The US Department of Agriculture, though, I think, was the land office, did a study in 1870, and they basically determined that it was not feasible to set all the West because there was no fencing. It was impossible. Our destiny could not be manifested without solving the fencing problem. And the solution, barbed wire. There were a lot of different patents filed for barbed wire-like fences around this time,

many of which attempted to replicate the deterrent properties of the thorn bush. Ultimately, the barbed wire design that prevailed was from a guy named Joseph Glidden. In 1873, Glidden was at a county fair in his hometown of Decav Illinois when he saw a fence that inspired him. It was like a strip of wood with nail-like spikes on it. The strip of wood was meant to be attached to a smooth wire fence. And he realized he could improve on that. Couldn't win home and created what we now know as barbed wire. Sharp metal barbs twisted around a strand of smooth wire. And from then he intertwined a second smooth piece of wire so that the twisted

barbs could not slide around. Glidden went into business with a guy named Isaac L. Wood and they said about trying to get barbed wire into the hands of Western settlers. But people were skeptical that barbed wire would work against the kind of cattle they were raising in the West at the time. The Texas Longhorn. Texas Longhorn's were the most unruly, belligerent cattle. And so the idea that this little piece of Barb Dweyer could keep them out of anywhere was just laughable.

So the story goes that Gliddenon Lwood sent a fast-hocking salesman and compulsive gambler known as John Betamillion Gates down to San Antonio to sell barbed wire. And Betamillion Gates basically tells all the farmers and cowboys to gather at their most unruly cattle and stick them inside this barbed wire enclosure that he built in the town square. By the end of day, there was a huge crowd.

They put the cattle in the enclosure and they got them all riled up. And the cattle just went crazy. They rushed up against the fence and immediately reared back because they met up with the barbed wire. Eventually, the cattle all just kind of neatly settled down. Better milling gate started taking orders right then there.

Word spread and sew did the barbed wire all over the west. In 1874 when Glidden and Elwood first started they produced 10,000 pounds of barbed wire. 1876 which is the same year that Betty Milling gates went to San Antonio. They were producing nearly 3 million pounds of barbed wire. Before barbed wire hit the west, the cattlemen had just been kind of watching and laughing as the yeoman farmers struggled with their bench rubs. Remember, the west before the Homestead Act was in large part populated by cattlemen and

the various Native American tribes. And though a lot has been made of the animosity between cowboys and Indians, they had this one kind of striking thing in common. Neither really believed in fencing off the land and hanging no trespassing signs. The west of the American cowboy before the homestead act was governed by something called the law of the American cowboy before the homestead act was governed by something called the law of the open range. Now I always thought that the open range was a figure of speech, like it just meant big

open pastors, but nope, it was like the way things were done. It was a big deal in the West, so it just became practice, a common practice that became unwritten code of law. Cattle need to range far and wide to fatten up. And for cattle to get the grazing lands they needed, the land had to be open. So you can probably guess who was about to ruin everything. Ye old yeoman farmer and their barbed wire fences. It was in direct contradiction of the law, the open range.

Apart from that, people also thought that barbed wire was cruel. A lot of the cattle, you know, they would be injured by the barbed wire, and their wounds would become infested with screwworm, and they would die. A whole side business of elixirs for wounded cattle sprung up. Briefly, people tried designing more humane barbed wire fences. They were made to be easier for the cattle to see and avoid, but they didn't catch on.

In any case, the cattlemen weren't happy. If you've ever seen the musical Oklahoma, and oh, I have, you might remember this little ditty called The Farmer and the Calman should be friends. I don't know. I'd like to say a word for the farmer. Let's say it! He come out western made a lot of changes.

He come out western build a lot of fences. And build them right across our cattle ranges. Why those dirtstrasches go back to Missouri? Wait a minute, Alonso! The chorus of the song implores all territory folks to stick together. But in reality, cowboys and farmers wouldn't become friends for a while. The cattlemen resented the farmers as they put up more and more fences. And that's what set off the defense-cutting wars.

The fence-cutting war. They started around 1881. It began with cowboys cutting down illegal fences. The people were putting up around land that they didn't even have a rightful claim on. What happened was as this sort of momentum built, a lot of people started joining in a lot of outlaws and rustlers, and they started cutting illegal and illegal fences and then cut them and followed suit. And it just erupted in chaos.

Starting in Texas and it spread northwards all the way up to Montana. The cowboys cut fences at night with masks on. They even had fence cutting gangs with names like the owls, the blue devils, and the land leak. This all went on for about four years. Most of the damage was in property value, but there are a few deaths on record. Eventually, the Texas State government and the feds got involved, and the fence cutting finally died down around 1885. During the 1800s, the buffalo that roamed the American West died off in huge numbers, partly

because settlers were killing them for their hides, but also because of fences. Buffalo needed large areas for their migration. And just like it did for the cattle, barbed wire impeded the buffalo's access to grazing lands and water. Before white people lived in the West, it's estimated that 65 million buffalo live there, but by the end of the 1800s. They were less than a thousand.

By the time barbed wire hit the West, a lot of Native American tribes had already been forced onto reservations, but some were still relatively free, living a nomadic lifestyle that followed the migration of the buffalo. And so of course the Native cultures also lived by the law of the open range, even if they didn't call it that. And once the bar wire went up, for the Native Americans, the way of life was just obliterated. Native Americans ultimately came to refer to the fencing as the Devil's Rope. By the end of the century, the West was basically covered in the Devil's rope. The fence-cutting wars were over, the farmers had won.

Even the cowboys had come to accept and use barbed wire. And then barbed wire finds a whole new purpose. Then it moves from an agricultural economy, as it were, to a very specific political military economy. That's Alan Crel. Hi, my name is Alan Crel and I'm the author of The Devil's Rope, a cultural history of Bob Wire. Alan says that World War One is the first time barbed wire really becomes widely associated with being a tool of war. So if you could imagine, trench warfare had a remarkable intimacy to it.

You had a line of trenches. And then just a hundred yards away, the enemy had their own line of trenches. And the area in between is so-called no man's land. And on either side of this No Man's Land, there would be barbed wire fortifications. The barbed wire kept the enemy out of your trench, but soldiers got caught and sometimes died in it. There's a British army song from that time

that captures this called the Old Barbed Wire. There ain't no be Old Barbed Wire. We sing that, we sing that, We sing that, we sing that, We sing that, we sing that, Barbed Wire shows up again in World War II, with an extra sinister innovation. Electrified, Barbed wire is a double horror. Electrified, Barbed wire was part of the architecture of the Holocaust.

It was such a ubiquitous part of the scenery that, in fact, there was a term coined in the Death Camps of World War II for committing suicide by throwing oneself on the electric fence. Embracing the wire remarkable. Embracing the wire. In the 1960s you get Barbed wire's evil spawn razor wire, also called ribbon wire. And of course now you see that stuff that prisons all over the world. Baubwire is nasty. It's menacing. It's transparently terrible.

As useful as the fencing may have been to farmers and to settling the West, Alan says that barbed wire has always been about control and possession and separation. That keeps it and it keeps it. Except for once. There's one instance where the stuff was actually used not to separate us, but to connect us. Right around the same time that Barb Wire was invented, Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for an apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically. The telephone, basically. And as telephone companies went about stringing telephone wires

in cities, they weren't really interested in the rural market. But farmers wanted phones, needed them really, which meant they needed a network of wires that connected all the farms. I think you see where this is heading. Some very clever people said, well, we have wires already. We have these barbed wire fences.

That's David Cecilia. He's a professor of business and economic history at the University of Maryland. It wouldn't transmit a signal quite as clearly as say a nice insulated copper wire, but it worked. A dozen or so farms might connect to one telephone network, so for about 25 bucks households could buy a kit that included everything they need to rig themselves up to the system. To dry batteries, float short, ring condenser,

magnet a lightning arrestor, 10 feet of interior wire, 50. Thousands of these rural, independent telephone collectives sprouted up all over the West and Midwest. In 1907, there were 18,000 cooperatives connecting an estimated million and a half rural households. Because of this, farmers ended up being the earliest adopters of telephone technology. In 1912, there were more farm households with telephones than non-farm households.

was a most unusual, but most inventive way of using the so-called devil's rope. By the 1930s, the National Bell Telephone System had penetrated into the remote rural regions of the West and Midwest. Farmers no longer had to create their own telephone collectives. And Barb Dwyer went back to doing what it does best. Keeping us in, keeping us out. 99% admissible was produced this week by Katie Mangle with Sam Greenspan, Avery Trouffelman, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to WF Strong for his reading of Lonesome Dove and for Haley Howell for Recording him. One part of the barbed wire story that we didn't explore is its wide representation in art and popular culture.

Ellen Crull's book The Devil's Rope is a really great resource for this. It does seem to me to have an aesthetic character, a calligraphic character. If for one minute you can forget about all these other uses of pop wire and just look at the shapes. Joanne Loo, who you heard throughout the piece, wrote Barb wire the fence that changed the west. You can find links to both their books on our website. We are a project of 91.7 K.A.L.W. San Francisco and produced of the offices of ArcSign, an architecture and interiors firm in of ArcSide, an architecture and interiors firm, and beautiful downtown Oakland, California.

You can follow along with my adventures at Ted on Facebook and Twitter, but the home of all things 99% invisible is 999PI.org. www.radiotepiotex you