Barbed Wire - Reviel Netz

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become an international iron magnate.) Part of the central plaza next to San Fernando Cathedral was surrounded by barbed wire fences, and dozens of fierce-looking longhorn bulls were packed into this space. Here is the view to have greeted you, stepping out of the cathedral: the animals deliberately frightened and provoked; they charge against the fence and are repulsed by the sheer pain of sharp metal tearing flesh; they are wounded, and their wounds exacerbate their rage; further charges, further pain, and instinctive withdrawal; finally, resignation. The spectacle was indeed symbolic: it showed how, without the slightest touch by humans, the fiercest, and at that point least domesticated, bovine animals could be made to respect a definition of boundary: the bulls learned to avoid the fence. Barbed wire could succeed as a tool of surveillance and education.

      It became clear that cheap, flexible, and effective means were available to control the movement of cows, even without the need for human intervention. Sales skyrocketed—from 5 tons in 1874, the first year of production, to 300 tons in the following year, surpassing 10,000 tons by 1878 and 100,000 tons by 1883.40 Of course, the artificial prices that the manufacturers tried to keep did not hold. Even in 1880, actual prices paid were about half those mentioned in Washburn and Moen’s advertisement quoted earlier.41 By 1885 the price was halved again, and by 1897 it was more than halved again. At that time, the original patents began to expire, driving prices down even further. This made the invention of new patents an attractive business, and new technological advances made the technology more economic and effective. Most important, it was realized that steel, while more expensive to produce per ton, could resist animal power with much lighter strands, so that overall the price per mile would be lower with steel than with iron.42 Steel barbed wire became more and more common during the late years of the century. (Its greater power would be significant during the next century, when barbed wire was to meet humans rather than cows.)

      Instead of being a prohibitive element of cost, fences now became a cheap, labor-efficient resource, and so fencing could be extended not only in space but also in its intended uses. It is probably true that barbed wire was invented in Illinois with the farmer in mind, to protect his fields from animals; but almost immediately, barbed wire was used by owners of cows. Just as they were struggling with the diminishing resources of grass and water, they were now saved by the growing resources of iron and capital. The central fact was that as the economy gradually made its upturn from the financial panic of 1873, capital began to pour into the West, driving more and more cattle there, attempting to acquire more and more land. From 1876 onward, more than 200,000 cattle were moved annually north from Texas to form the basis of new ranches.43 Hundreds of companies formed, mainly on the Atlantic seaboard and in Great Britain, attracted to what was perceived as a bonanza.44 The usual logic of concentration of capital applied: as pointed out in a government report at the peak of this process, “generally it is found that the average cost per head of the management of large herds is much less than that of small herds. The tendency in the range cattle business of late years has therefore been toward a reduction in the number of herds, and generally toward the consolidation of the business in the hands of individuals, corporations, and associations.”45 Larger herds require larger space, and the larger a space is, the smaller the ratio of unit of perimeter to unit of area. This, then, was a further crucial element of economy: fencing became cheaper, paradoxically, on the immense units of space used by large herds. It also became more necessary as the same spiral of overuse continued to force fiercer competition for resources. The result was that lines of fences were set to define territories on which companies grazed their cows—whether those companies had legal title to that land or not. In 1885 it was reported that almost 4.5 million acres had been illegally fenced in this way.46 Illegal as well as legal fencing led to wire cutting, typically as owners of smaller herds entered spaces controlled by owners of larger herds, to use their grass and water and, frequently, to steal their cows. Warfare surrounding wire began here: from Texas to Montana, big firms owned by Atlantic capitalists fought against adventurers who thought they could still make big money on violence alone. But this was not the Texas of the 1830s or even of the 1860s. Gangs of hired guns were employed by the big firms and provided with lists of small-time rangers to be killed.47 The big-ranch business was busy, in short, driving out the range business (and the small-ranch business), much as the cow business had earlier driven out the bison business. The comparison is meaningful: in a sense, cows were driven off the land just as surely as the bison had been. The only difference was that whereas the bison were killed, the cows were imprisoned, in an Archipelago Ranch, so to speak, strewn across the plains.

      To illegally fenced land, one should add several million acres of legally fenced grazing lands (especially in Texas, where the legislation was more favorable to large landholding). A notable example was the XIT Ranch in the Texas Panhandle, named after the ten (X) counties through which the ranch extended; by 1885, it had 50,000 cattle fenced inside 476,000 acres. This may be compared with the size of the territory owned in the West through the Homestead Act by 1884—just over 16 million acres.48 In short, then, about a decade after the introduction of barbed wire, it was already used to surround cows as much as, and even more than, it was used to surround farmlands. All of this, it should be stressed, had never been envisioned by Rose, who had thought in terms of the age-old confrontation between a single farmer and a single animal. The mass scale of it all came out of the West itself and, in this way, re-created the tool beyond the imagination of its inventors. It could now be used to redefine space itself.

      A striking example of the new manipulation of space made possible by this new technology was drift fences. Faced with a bad turn in the climate, what cows remained on the range would instinctively turn south—to compete there for diminishing resources. Texans (and Oklahomans) therefore looked for ways to prevent the motion of cows from north to south, in particular since the same kinds of climatic conditions that made such prevention desirable also made it difficult for humans to stay on the open range and to stop the animals in person. Beginning in 1881 or 1882, therefore, a new type of fence was gradually built: a long line of fortification against the North, as it were—built by many individual landowners, with little coordination, but effectively constructing, ultimately, a barrier across the entire Texan Panhandle. Those fences worked; cows, even those that were not yet fenced in, could be relied upon to stay in the North and not to compete for southern grazing land. No cow was now free from having its motion limited by barbed wire, and the basic geography of the land was now redefined. The climax of this development came in the severe winters of 1885–1886 and 1886–1887. Heavy blizzards drove cows in many tens of thousands southward, but just like the bulls of San Antonio, they could not pass through the barbed wire; weakened by the storm, they now were wounded and frustrated. Even in their concentrations of hundreds upon hundreds, they could neither break through the barrier or generate enough warmth between them to survive. Trapped like that, they died, perhaps as many as two-thirds of the cows in the open field, dying of starvation and of cold. Not all victims, of course, reached as far south as the drift fences, but those that did—the ones who had the most chance to survive—were perhaps those that suffered the most.49 Such images—piles of the dead, huddled together, desperately crushed against barbed fences—are eerily reminiscent of twentieth-century images (I will return to such historical continuities later in the book).

      In short, barbed wire was a success. It could stop animals, no matter how many, no matter how desperate. At first it was not clear that the static violence of barbs alone could make wires sufficiently effective, so manufacturers erred on the side of caution, supplying sharp and large barbs. These barbs met semiferal animals, accustomed to free roaming. Crashing against the wire—as they did at Gates’s display at San Antonio—cattle would inevitably get seriously gouged. Open wounds ensued, which in the warm, humid summers easily lead to screwworm infestation. The screwworm fly was an endemic part of the southern plains cow economy. Its life depended on the wounds of large, warm-blooded animals. In those wounds the female would lay its eggs. When they emerged, the worms could literally eat the animal alive. All of this was extremely disagreeable to the cow owners: “A particularly disgusting and sickening job was when cows or calves got screwworms in their mouth or gums. . . . [This sometimes happened when] [t]he cow or calf—if they could reach the wound—would try to lick the worms out of the lesion. . . . You couldn’t use any medicine—just remove the worms and hope you got them all. It sure wasn’t a job

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