Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Barbed Wire

Episode Date: September 4, 2019

Barbed wire changed the Western US as much as the railroad and the six-shooter. Before barbed wire arrived, the West was free and open; after, the West became concentrated in the hands of a few big ranchers. No wonder it was called “devil’s rope.” Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

There's guest producer Dave Coustein over there. And this is short stuff. So giddy up. Giddy up, literally. Because we're gonna go back to the old West. The Rootin' Tootin' Old West. We're jumping in the old way back machine. We're going to 1876.

Like, back to the future three. That's right. The movie I only saw once. That's all you need. Some people love those. I didn't like the sequels. But we don't have time for that. I never saw the second one.

Okay, go. You skipped, you did one and three? Yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I like odd numbers. So it's 1876, and we're in San Antonio, Texas. Yep, there's no basement in the Alamo. There is not.

And the Alamo's quite tiny, actually. It really is. It's like the Mona Lisa of buildings. That's right. Or the Josh and Chuck of podcasters. That's right. People don't know we're only two feet tall. Yep.

So we are looking upon a scene. We're at a ranch. And there's a man over there named John Warren Gates. Yes. And he is, they call him Betta Million Gates. And we have just thrown some money down on a bet of whether or not this little wire pin he has can hold in these bulls and cows and horses

and these crazy long horned steers. And my money is on no way, Gates, no way that little wire is gonna hold these animals in. Yeah, and I mean, we put a significant amount of money down because we just printed it ourselves because it's 1876 in the old West and you can do that. That's right, hundreds of millions. But I bet against him as well, Chuck.

And the reason why is because it's just a little couple of things of wire with some barbs on it. And these are some angry steers. And what's more, he has a gaucho assistant swearing in Spanish at these cows and trying to get them riled up. And by goodness, we just lost our bet. I know, but it was quite a party and we're hammered and we're gonna go back to our canvas tent and sweat.

I ate the worm. So here's the deal. That story may or not be not true. May or be not true? May or be not true, your mayor. That's right. I'm glad we leave stuff like this in. That's what makes us us.

So we don't know if that's all true or not. It's a great story, that's for sure. But what is super true is that Betta Million Gates was trying to drum up some early press for this new fence made by a man named Joseph Glidden that the Native Americans called, well, some people called the thorny fences. The Native Americans called it what, the devil's rope.

Because they didn't like it. But we just call it barbed wire. Yep, barbed wire. And so Joseph Glidden didn't invent that stuff. Although he did have a patent on what we, when you look at barbed wire, what you're looking at is the variety that Joseph Glidden came up with.

But there were plenty of people who came up with their own version prior to him. And I was looking at like this list of them with pictures. Some of those are just vicious looking. Oh, I bet. They're basically like cut up razor blades stuck in wire. I mean, just horrible stuff. But what Glidden did was he took a barb

and he twisted it around a wire. And then he added a second wire, just a plain wire to twist it around the first wire to hold the barb in place, keep it from sliding. But even more important than that, because it's pretty simple. And somebody probably would have come up with that sooner or later, was he patented it

and he invented a method of producing it, mass producing it. And brother, did he mass produce it? Yeah, I mean, before he very brilliantly decided to keep those barbs in place, which was the key, those cows would just go up and hoof of them over to the side and slip right on through and sneak out to the skating rink. Because they are cows are well known

as being among the smartest animals. Yes, and their hoofs are, you know, they can do very fine detailed work. Like an abacus work. That's right. So I believe before my dumb jokes, you were saying how much he was pumping this wire out. Yeah, tell him.

By 1880, his factory in DeKab, Illinois, were churning out 263,000 miles of wire. Yes, and Chuck, that is enough to circle the earth 10 times over. How many big max? It's a trillion big max, stacked end to end. Yeah, and this was a big deal. It wasn't just like, oh, he invented some stuff

and it helped keep some cows in and now we all use it and it's pretty neat. Like this changed the face of the American West, along with other stuff. But it had a big impact on the foundation and settling of the American West. Yeah, I mean, at least as much as like the locomotive, the telegraph, like it was an enormous invention,

especially for something so simple, barbed wire. It's extremely simple. But up to this point, the Native Americans had been living nomadic existences, hunting buffalo, just basically moving around the Great Plains and the Prairie for basically 15,000 years. That's right. Like European ancestry whites had showed up,

but the first ones that showed up basically said, hey, I think you guys are onto something. I'm gonna embrace this kind of free range stuff and I'm bringing cattle and sheep and all sorts of other animals, but I'm just gonna let them just graze wherever and just move them around as the weather permits. And that worked okay.

But when barbed wire came along, all of a sudden these open, enormous, vast expanses suddenly became closed off. And what used to just be common property that belonged to everyone and no one suddenly huge slices of it were being fenced off literally. And that changed tens of thousands of years of tradition in 10 years, maybe less.

Yeah, and here's the thing. It's not like this was the first fence in the West. They were, you know, they could build wood fences, but in the Prairie states, they didn't have a ton of lumber. There weren't trees everywhere. Wooden fences are super expensive. Rock and stone walls, like are you kidding me to do for a whole farm?

Super expensive and also scarce. But what barbed wire did is it democratized it and made it super cheap or relatively cheap, I guess, compared to the other things. And easy and fast to say, this is my area and you're not coming in and these cows aren't getting out. Yeah, and we'll talk about how that changed the nuts and bolts of it right after this.

Yeah. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

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Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Chuck, when people started putting up these fences,

not everybody was on board with this. The Native Americans didn't like it. Like you said, they call the barbed wire devil rope the old timey cowboys. They didn't like it because they embraced free range practices and now all of a sudden their cattle were getting caught up in this stuff because part of the problem with barbed wire

is not only did it keep stuff in, it kept stuff out. And so you could get tangled up in it either way. And the cattle that were used to just kind of roaming around free range will get caught in this stuff and would die of starvation infections. They just get stuck in the fence and would never move again for the rest of their lives, for the rest of their short lives.

Well, yeah, and consider the Homestead Act. President Abraham Lincoln signed this in 1862 that said, hey, are you an honest citizen of the US? Yeah. You can be a freed slave, you can be a woman. You can go claim up to 160 acres of land out there in the West. Just build a house, work that land for five years.

So all of a sudden there's a lot of people. You talked about the Native Americans ranging around. Imagine your tribe riding your horses to where you wanna go. And all of a sudden you're like, well, here's 160 acre fence that I'd now have to drive around. Right.

Drive? Yeah, yeah, just a cattle drive. Yeah, okay, drive your horse. Right. All right. That sounded like a city slicker there for a second. But in the same way you accidentally stumbled into the proper terminology.

That's right. But like we said, these European cowboys, the Native Americans, they're used to this free ranging. And all of a sudden these homesteading farmers, a lot of whom were European, they were staking their claim to property, sometimes legally, sometimes illegally. Right, but the result was the same.

And if you put up these fences, whether that was your land or it was actually like common land, you were claiming it as your own. And if you had a gun and a rifle and some hired hands, you could defend that land that was really common property but you'd claimed for your own. And so for all intents and purposes, it was your land now.

And this had an extensive domino effect where the free range cowboys and Native Americans lost that common grazing area. It got smaller and smaller. And so as the grazing land became more and more concentrated, there were more and more people whose herds were eating off of less and less land. And so it no longer became a viable existence free range.

And then if you were a smaller landowner, you would have your land encroached on by these larger landowners. Probably some guys would show up with a gun and be like, this is our herd now. And so all of this, the upshot of all this is that the people who had the most land ended up taking over even more land

and just a handful of people got the American West concentrated into their hands. That's right. So which is kind of the history of America in a lot of ways. It's still going on today. I mean, think about when like Home Depot where Lowe shows up in town. The hardware store goes out of business

and the people who used to work there now work at Lowe's or Home Depot. So there were plenty of disputes. This was the Old West. Plenty of them involved fistfights and guns. But there were actual gangs. There was gangs called the Blue Devils or the Havilinas. And they were called fence cutting wars.

They would go in in the dead of night or maybe in broad daylight even if they were brazen and well armed. And they would cut these wires and they would leave messages and threats saying don't rebuild the stuff. There were shootouts. There were people that were killed

in these fence cutting wars. Authorities eventually stepped in and were like, the West needs to be a little less wild. And those wars ended. But the barbed wire endured. It did. And I mean, when you think of the barbed wire, you think of the Old West.

But you also nowadays think of barbed wire stretching from Switzerland to the English Channel in World War I. Razor wire. Yeah, barbed wire around prisons. And W.H. Auden wrote a poem about it. He said that 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 it sting. It's a nice reading. Which doesn't rhyme, but it's still pretty good. Yeah, I mean, the military's been using it since 1888. Teddy Roosevelt used it. Certainly World War I, it was used as a weapon.

And yeah, any prison movie you're ever going to see, you're going to see a formidable coiled strip of razor wire around the top of those fences. It's like an extra silent character in most movies. That's right. Especially You've Got Mail. Oh, that was from the last episode. That's right.

If you want to know more about barbed wire, well, just start walking. And, fella, you're bound to wander into it sooner or later. Just bring some antibiotics, because you're going to get an infection. And since I said that, that's the end of the episode. And since it's a short stuff, that means that short stuff is over.

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