“A lot of the fencing technology and improvements have always developed in Australia and in New Zealand,” Rugh says. While conventional Class I barbed wire lasts seven to 10 years and the Class III galvanized products on the market can keep up to 20 or 30 years, the zinc/aluminum-coated cables could last on the order of 50 years, at least according to salt spray tests designed to see how these products stand up to the elements.ĭespite its evolution in the American west, the biggest innovations in barbed wire are coming from other shores. And they’ve begun to transfer that to ag wire,” Rugh says. “That’s been used in utility wires, stranded cable, and things like that. The best barbed wire is now coated in a mixture that’s 95 percent aluminium and 5 percent zinc. Then, in the early 2000s, Rugh says, the industry turned its focus to new methods for galvanizing the steel, the better to ward off rust. Photo: Department of Transportation National Archives and Records Administration Wire rods were used for the production of spiked fencing. (Like cattle, they struggled to see the thin wire lines before they were wrapped up in it.) Trapped, they died of hunger or thirst, or succumbed from infection as their barbed wounds festered. The effect on wildlife was quick and catastrophic: In a review article for the The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Wayne Gard described “leathery longhorns … crazed by thirst.” Native Americans called barbed wire “devil’s rope”, because it ensnared wild buffalo. By 1885, the entire Texas panhandle was already fenced, according to the Texas State Historical Association, creating a patchwork of privately-owned lands, each wrapped in a barbed wire bow. But barbed wire restricted cattle’s access to streams and rivers. As cowboys drove their cattle to sale, the herd could crisscross the land, drinking water and grazing as they went. Previously, the design podcast 99 Percent Invisible explains, the “law of open range” prevailed out west. Mass-production sent homesteaders on a fencing spree. National Archives and Records Administration But Lucien Smith is credited with making the first barbed wire prototypes, which he called “thorny wire.” Barbed wire production took off in the early 1900s once machines allowed it to be made at scale. The contraptions varied widely, from lines alternating spikes and wooden boards, to sheets of wood studded with spikes. Patent Office processed more than 200 different patents for various types of “spiked fencing” between 18. But there was one major problem: “hen a wire fence was placed between a 1,000-pound Texas longhorn and a patch of lush green pasture, it proved to be something of a pushover,” writes George Pendel in his Atlas Obscura article on the barbed wire mecca of La Crosse, Kansas. With too few trees to build wooden fences, and walls of prickly vegetation too slow to grow, some enterprising settlers began tinkering with wire. One of the most practical challenges these families faced was drawing boundaries-keeping people, crops, and cattle in (or out). As they worked their way west, they sought to clear the land of its human and non-human inhabitants, and exert control over the dirt that remained. But white settlers, unleashed on the landscape by Abraham Lincoln’s Homestead of Act of 1862, which gave each citizen the right to claim 160 acres of public land, certainly treated it that way. The evidence is clear, from the Mesa Verde Dwellings in Colorado to the millions of indigenous people still living in the southwest today. Native Americans have lived on the land for at least 15,000 years. The American frontier was never actually empty.
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