The buffalo herds had roamed the continent for millennia, an unbroken sea numbering in the tens of millions. In a generation, they shrank to fewer than a thousand animals. A systematic hunting campaign was mostly to blame—we’ve seen the photographs of giant piles of skulls. For the surviving creatures, their doom was sealed by the wire that cut the plains into a grid. Native Americans called it the Devil’s Rope.

For nomadic Plains tribes and later cowboys alike, the Great Plains seemed infinite, with no sense of ownership of water and grasses. That all changed in the 1880s and 90s, as barbed wire was increasingly used to demarcate a piece of land as my land, not your land. The wire itself came from an Illinois farmer, Joseph Glidden, who patented it in 1874. It was cheap, light, easy to manufacture, and—for cattle—convincing. Little by little, the wide open spaces became less wide, less open, and less spacious.

Initially there was resistance. Armed groups in Texas with names like the Owls, the Javelinas, and the Blue Devils would ride out at night with pliers, trying to nip the grid back into open range. But there was no going back to the old system, which had relied on sparse settlement. Between 1870 and 1890, millions of acres claimed under Abraham Lincoln’s Homestead Act (1862) were enclosed by barbed wire. Sometimes a thing only appears to be infinite.

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Links:

• Good essay on barbed wire's later use in war and internment - Dick Wittenberg, de Correspondent, February 5, 2016

  
  

• Fence Cutting Wars - Wikipedia

  
  

• Joseph Glidden's Patent Application for Barbed Wire (1874) – The National Archives

  
  

• “Don’t Fence Me In” by Cole Porter - Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters (1945)

This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.

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