HOW IT BEGAN

Waikato Independent, Volume XLIII, Issue 6035, 21 October 1946, Page 2

HOW IT BEGAN

STORY OF BARBED-WIRE Or.e day in 1873 three men, named, Glidden, Kaish and Ellwood, stood side by side gazing at a crude device on exhibition at a United States fair. It consisted of a strip of wood about an inch square and sixteen feet long, with nails at intervals driven through in such a way that the sharp The strip of wood was designed so as points projected out the other side, to hang on the wire of a fence, and so prevent cattle from pushing their way through. It was Mr Ellwood who recalled many years later the effect of that simple device on the three spectators. “Mr Glidden, Mr Haish and myself, all prominent later in barbed wire manufacture,” he wrote, “were at that fair, and all three of us stood looking at this invention, and I think that each one of us at that hour conceived the idea that barbs could be placed on wire in some way instead of being driven into the strip of wood.” The three men each got to work independently at the improvement of the device. On November 24th, 1874, Joseph Glidden took out a patent for a “twisted fence wire,” with barbs held in position by the twists. But he had lodged his application a month previously, and it had been held up by a faulty description of the invention. Meantime, the second of the three, Jacob Haish, filed his application. Thus there began a long legal entanglement, lasting many years and costing a small fortune in lawyers’ fees.

At that time the slaughter of the

buffalo herds was in full swing on the prairies, and settlers were pushing out in all directions into the new farmlands in their covered waggons. But they badly needed some kind of cattleproof fence to protect their crops. Some people suggested prickly hedges. “Nothing but thorn hedges,” it was said, “will avail against cattle and hogs.” Then the new barbed-wire fencing came on the market. At first, the farmers did not know what it was, but as soon as its uses were realised they bought it in thousands of tons. One Texas merchant recalls that in the early ’eighties he was ordering the new fencing by the carload. A little later it was arriving in train loads. The new industry quickly developed into one of the most spectacular forms of American big business, huge factories springing up along the edge of the prairie regions almost overnight. At first farmers complained that

j their cattle damaged themselves badly i by ruining full tilt against .the wire, I often tearing themselves to pieces on ! the ferocious-looking barbs. It was I not uncommon for horses to cut a foot or a leg almost off and become worthless. But both horses and cattle soon learned to keep well away from the wire, and farmers ceased to fear losses from their cattle breaking away or wi’d cattle breaking in. The long lines of barbed wire which soon crisscrossed the prairies sounded the knell of the open range, with its herds of semi-wild Texas Longhorns. The scrubby little Texas Longhorn, in fact, began to disappear completely with the coming of the barbed wire. Up till then no rancher had bothered about the breed of his cattle, but with the new wire it became possible to isolate herds, and thus to introduce blooded stock. “Barked wire and windmills,” writes one American historian, “made the settlement of the west possible.”