“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What was I walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offense.”  Robert Frost, “Mending Wall” (1914)

On October 27, 1873, a farmer named Joseph F. Glidden applied for a patent on barbed wire.  He wasn’t the first.  There were six patents alone in 1867 issued for barbed wire, including one by a guy named Lucien B. Smith.  What made Lucien Smith’s and Joseph Glidden’s different from the rest was that they were specifically addressing livestock.

Smith’s design was fairly basic.  It was two strands of wire with shorter pieces, the “barbs,” wrapped around it.  Glidden’s design was twisting the two strands together and trapping the barbs at regular intervals in the twisted wire.  You’ve seen barbed wire.  Glidden felt that his design was significantly different from Smith’s, and therefore warranted a new patent.  Smith disagreed, but in the end Glidden won, and he named his barbed wire “The Winner.”

There were several variations on barbed wire in the following years with a lot of little guys trying to stake a claim in the market.  Predictably, one really big guy eventually took charge and he pretty much bought everybody else out, including Glidden.  The American Steel and Wire Company, which later became American Steel, was established in 1899.  And they sold it all:  wire, staples, tools – anything you needed to fence off your land.

The whole idea with barbed wire is to create a fence that is painful to cross, so you don’t.  It requires very little to install barbed wire, then as now, making it still a cheap and effective way to keep critters out or in, whatever the case might be.  Just stick some poles in the ground and tack the wire to them.  It wasn’t just keeping the critters in, though.  It was keeping the settlers out, and following the Civil War there were a lot of them headed west.  With fences it was clear to see whose land was whose.  And it was easy to keep track of your cows and to keep other farmers' cows out of your crops.

Then came the really big guys who fenced off huge tracts of land, often fencing off traditional cattle trails, keeping the smaller guys’ cows from food and water.  Mix in a drought and severe winters, especially in 1883, and a lot of cattle died.  And that caused folks to sneak in at night and cut those fences, and then people started shooting at each other, often not missing, and for a while it was open warfare.  It even became a felony punishable by prison to cut fences in Texas. 

But the barbed wire remained.  It was the end of free ranges.  It was the end of cattle drives.  And it was the end of the traditional cowboys. 

Can’t get enough barbed wire?  If so, if you’re ever in DeKalb, Illinois, then visit the Barbed Wire History Museum.  I imagine to this day there are Old Timers who would refuse to take a step inside.

And, if you’re wondering... or not... Joseph Glidden is related to Francis Glidden, the guy who founded Glidden Paints.  They were the cousins of cousins’ cousins, more or less.  And they are also obscurely related to Carlos Glidden who, along with the Shoals Brothers, invented the typewriter in 1868.

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