Along the long list of inventions that changed the world, one item you don’t often find (but probably should), is barbed wire. When settlers came to the west in the mid-to-late 1800’s, they were faced with an unprecedented sight: the open, treeless plains of a vast prairie, where you would be hard-pressed to find anything different about one plot of land to the next. There were no stones to build walls and no trees to build fences, so, the settlers had to find something else to contain their livestock and differentiate their lands. Some planted hedgerows, living walls made of the harsh prairie brush. Most, though, just allowed their cattle to roam. Both solutions had their own issues.
Barbed wire had been around in one form or another for since the early 1800’s, but no version had yet found commercial success. By 1874, several different companies were in the laters stages of development for their various models of barbed wire. In that year alone, six people filled patents for their designs. These inventors were trying to corner a big, new market: Texas. Texans, however, were reluctant, they were quite used to the days of the open plains; “don’t fence me in” became their rallying cry.
The man who finally sold Texas on barbed wire was named John Warne Gates, a salesman hired by one of the many people to file patents for barbed wire. According to the stories, Gates arrived in San Antonio in 1876, just 21 years old. An affable youth, he quickly made friend with the farmers and cattlemen but found few buyers. At least, until opportunity knocked on his door. This opportunity came in the form of Ol’ Jim, a local bull who “could go through anything.”
The idea struck young Gates while he was eating dinner in a chili parlor. The diners were being entertained by a medicine-show performer named ‘Doc’ Lighthall, who was demonstrating his favorite nostrums in the plaza outside the restaurant. “We’ll do like Doc Lighthall,” Gates suddenly exclaimed. “Get the wildest damn cattle in Texas-corral ’em here with barbed wire and then let ’em try to get out. Ain’t a cowboy livin’ won’t go for that!” Days later, using Ol’ Jim and a corral outside of the local diner, Gates changed the course of history.
Barbed wire singlehandedly ended an entire era. The open west faded into the past, and this new fence ushered in the age of ranches. The history of Texas and of the American West will be forever marked by the prongs of a barbed wire fence. “There’s something primitive about a name like ‘barbed wire,’ historian Walter Prescott Webb once remarked, “something suggestive of the savagery and lack of refinement, something harmonious with the relentless hardness of the Plains.”