Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - How Barbed Wire Shaped the West and the World (Encore)

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. When Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act of 1862, there was a rush of people who moved west to claim the free land that was offered. However, there was a problem. Creating physical divisions for plots of land on the prairie was difficult when there was no wood or stone. Eventually, there was a solution to the problem, which offered a cheap way to divide land, and created a whole host of new problems as well. Learn more about Barb Wire and how it shaped the American West, warfare, and much more. On this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Starting point is 00:00:39 What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The idea of putting physical barriers between land goes back a long way. When early farmers were tending their land, they would often kill two birds with one stone. They would clear the land of stone and rocks and then pile up the stones and rocks on the dividing line with other farms.

Starting point is 00:01:34 Another option that's been practiced for centuries is the planting of hedgerows. These were bushes or shrubs which were planted along the borders between farms. The oldest evidence of hedgerows goes back almost 6,000 years. England and Ireland are still filled with farmland divided up by hedges and stone walls, some of which were created over 700 years ago. When Europeans came to North America, they used many of the same practices of dividing up farmland. With the ample forests found in the area, they could also create fences that were made out of wood. Compared to the rest of world history, the expansion of the United States was quite rapid. But when the Homestead Act was passed in 1862, things went into overdrive.

Starting point is 00:02:15 The American government, giving absolutely no consideration to the native people who already live there, wanted to encourage as many Americans as possible to settle the vast American West. For just the price of a small filing fee for the paperwork, anyone could get 160 acres of federal land. This led to a literal land rush of people moving west to claim this free land after about 1870 in the end of the Civil War. Most of the first land that was claimed was the closest land to the eastern states. the Grey Plains. The Grey Plains are a vast grassland that is devoid in fence and wall-making materials such as rocks and wood. Likewise, given the speed of the spread into the west, there wasn't time to grow hedgerows. So, you had a problem and a great deal of demand for some sort of solution.

Starting point is 00:03:04 The first person to propose using wire as a barrier was the French inventor, Leontz Eugene Grassan Baldens, in 1860. His fence received several patents, but he knew. never created an actual commercial product. The idea of using wire fencing to contain animals was proposed by a New York blacksmith by the name of Michael Kelly in 1868. Before Kelly, wire fences consisted of a single wire. Single wire fences were easy to break if an animal happened to lean against it. Kelly used two strands of wire and twisted them together. Not only did they make the fence stronger, but it allowed for a sharp barb to be wound between the wires. The barbs made cattle stay away from the fence because the barbs would poke them. This fence became known as a thorny fence.

Starting point is 00:03:51 Kelly wasn't the only person working on barbed wire. There were no fewer than four patents for barbed wire in the United States by 1870. As I mentioned in previous episodes about inventions, the person who came up with the initial idea isn't necessarily the person who's often credited with the discovery. The key to most inventions is developing a practical solution that could actually be brought to market. The person who's usually credited with barbed wire is Joseph Glidden. Glidden was a farmer from DeKalb, Illinois. He developed his barbed wire with a coffee grinder to make the barbs and called his design the winner. He and a business partner established the barbed wire company in DeKalb, and he ended up becoming one of the richest men in America.

Starting point is 00:04:35 He had to deal with a host of legal issues to preserve his patent. The biggest problem was that there were many different barb wire designs, and they were all pretty similar. The Glidden design just wrapped the barb around one wire twice before the two wires were intertwined. One of his biggest legal battles was actually with another DeKalb resident, Jacob Hage, who challenged Glidden's design as not being a novel innovation. Glidden eventually won out, and his company went on to mass-produce barbed wire during the 1870s. His wasn't the only company, however. There were four major manufacturers of barbed wire in the United States at that time. Barbed wire wasn't adopted immediately. Some ranchers were concerned that it would hurt the cattle, but a series of demonstrations proved to the farmers that

Starting point is 00:05:18 the cattle weren't harmed. There were also disagreements between farmers and ranchers. Farmers wanted the barbed wire more than the ranchers did. The economics of barbed wire eventually won out. The fact was, it was really cheap to deploy. While Glidden's company was the industry leader, The market soon was flooded by barbed wire manufacturers. It was cheap to make, and all you had to do was have a slightly different design to be on legally safe ground. There were over 150 different barbed wire manufacturers in the late 19th century in the United States before a period of consolidation in the industry. As barbed wire was deployed across the American West, it radically changed the landscape. Fences prevented the annual cattle drives from north to south, where they would often move from pasture to pasture.

Starting point is 00:06:05 In 1885, as many as 75% of the cattle in the gray plains died due to being unable to move around the long stretch of barbed wire fences. This led to an episode known as the Fence Cutting Wars. This was an attempt by smaller ranchers to keep an open range by destroying barbed wire fences. To be fair, many of the big cattle ranchers were literally putting fences over public roads and across public land. Eventually, the large ranchers agreed to some reasonable limits on where fences could be put, and the legislatures in affected states put heavy penalties on cutting barbed wire fences. In the end, three people died in the fence-cutting wars. Many historians actually consider the spread of barbed wire as being the end of the Old West.

Starting point is 00:06:51 Perhaps the biggest victims of barbed wire were the Plains Indians. It prevented the nomadic migrations that they had been used to for millennia. In addition to bison being killed in incredible numbers, which they relied on, the bison's grazing land was radically diminished, which only compounded the near extinction of the bison. This is the reason why the Indians called barbed wire the devil's rope. One of the biggest innovations to barbed wire was electrification. The patent for an electrified fence was awarded in 1886, and it was initially used on many barbed wire fences because they were already made out of wire that could carry an electrical current. Today, electrified fences are seldom made out of barbed wire because it increases the risk of cattle being stuck on the fence and unable to free themselves. And the whole point of an electric fence

Starting point is 00:07:38 is to get people or animals away from it. Barbed wire didn't take long to find uses outside of farming and ranching. The first recorded military use of barb wire occurred in 1895 by Portuguese troops in Mozambique. After this initial use by the Portuguese, it didn't take long for it to become common in defensive military positions. During the Boar War in South Africa, barbed wire was used by the boars during the siege of Maffeking to keep the British inside the city. The hero of Maffeking, Lord Robert Baden Powell, who later became the founder of the Boy Scouts, noticed that he couldn't actually see the barbed wire because it was so thin.

Starting point is 00:08:16 So he figured if he couldn't see the boar's wire, then the boars couldn't see their wire either. They didn't actually have any barbed wire, so he just had his bare. men go out in front of the city to install posts and pretend that they were stringing barbed wire between them. The boars were totally fooled. Barbed wire became a key element of trench warfare in the First World War. A line of barbed wire in front of a trench would make it very difficult for a direct assault. The act of climbing over, under, or even cutting the wire would slow down an enemy force enough for machine guns to cut them down. Dead bodies stuck on barbed wire in no man's land became one of the defining images of the war for many soldiers.

Starting point is 00:08:59 Barbwire isn't lethal in and of itself, but it can be very painful. When I was 12 years old, I cut my leg trying to climb over a barbed wire fence, and I still have the scar in my leg today. The biggest development in barb wire in the 20th century was making the barbs more dangerous by turning them into razors. Known as razor wire, this is almost never used for animals, and it's almost exclusively used to contain or control people. The earliest form of razor wire was called a taped barb, which is just a flat, pointy piece of metal instead of a pointy piece of wire.

Starting point is 00:09:32 It was a pretty short step from barb tape to razor wire, as you only needed to sharpen the metal tape. The typical deployment of razor wire today is called concertina wire. It's a wire which is deployed in the form of a large coil. It's named after the instrument called concertina, which is a small handheld accordion. Concertina wire has several benefits over regular wire. For starters, it can be deployed very rapidly. You can put canisters of it on the back of a truck and just let it uncoil out the back end as you drive. Second, it can create a natural obstacle.

Starting point is 00:10:06 A regular barbed wire fence has height, but it doesn't have any width. Concertina wire has both height and width. You can deploy it in a triangular formation with two coils on the bottom and one on the top, which makes it an even more imposing barrier. In the 150 years since barbed wire was invented, there have been over 2,000 tight. types of barbed wire which have been developed. There are people who collect barbed wire, and there is a barbed wire museum in La Crosse, Kansas, which calls itself the barbed wire capital of the world. Barbed wire is a really simple thing that most people really never

Starting point is 00:10:40 give any thought to, yet it has profoundly influenced history. The American West, the First World War, and even our incarceration system, have all been shaped by this simple invention, which has earned its nickname as the devil's rope. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day.

Starting point is 00:11:13 And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - How Barbed Wire Shaped the West and the World (Encore)

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.