Читать книгу Barbed Wire - Reviel Netz - Страница 12

All those land grants—to the homestead, to the state colleges, to the railroad—were so many Louisiana Purchases. When you got there, there was not much to it. America evolved through the experience of the Atlantic, the Gulf, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi. Farmers built their life based on the expectations of copious rainfall and its attendant vegetation. Now they got to plains that evolved through the experience of aridity—mostly less than sixteen inches of rain per year. (Boston has over forty inches; New Orleans has over sixty.) Who would live there? Grass, bovines, wolves and other predators, humans foremost among those other predators. Grass could survive on little, unpredictable precipitation; bovines could survive on grass. Wolves and humans could then survive on bovines.¹⁵

From the point of view of the individual cattle ranger, that was just fine. The West may have been won by the North, but the immediate gain was made, once again, by Texas Southerners. As we have seen, the immediate aftermath of the killing of the bison was the herding north, from Texas, of the longhorn cow. In one respect already, this was part of capitalist America—the cow was to be killed in Chicago or further east. But in other ways, the practices of the range were simply transmitted north.

This explains the continuity with the bison-hunting practices described in this chapter’s first section. In other words, the West now had a range, not ranch, business. Do not be confused. In contemporary agriculture—which tends to be, strictly speaking, a ranch business—the terms “range” or “open range” came to have the more narrow meaning of any animal raising that does not involve strict imprisonment inside a building. In the original sense, the distinction between “range” and “ranch” was different. A ranch is an enclosed piece of land; the range is space, unlimited. Originally, Texas cows were fed off the land and moved through it, all throughout the plains—just as the bison did. Control over parceled units of land—the essence of the land grants—was at first out of tune with the actual economy. The economic value of cows resided in their self-reliant properties—they found their own nourishment, and this meant, especially in the difficult conditions of the Great Plains, that they had to operate in open space. The profitability of animals was, at this stage, partly a result of animals acting independently, exercising their powers. A ranger has the animal not merely to be killed eventually but also to do the work for him: the ranger does not look for food and water for the cow; instead, it is the cow herself who seeks those resources. The range industry makes its profits by combining the killing of animals with their forced labor. (This, we should note, was hard labor, under very harsh conditions.) To reduce the motion of cows, then, is to reduce their labor and thus to take away from the owner’s sources of profit. The truth was, there were so few resources on the plains that settling anywhere in particular, at first, made little sense. Better to move on with your cows, finding grass and water along the way. As the Indians were being consigned to their reservations, Texans were taking up a quasi-nomadic form of existence. Life was endless motion, and human survival was impossible without the horse.

Nor, indeed, would there be any compelling reason for an owner of cows to fence them so as to gain control over them. Not only did cows manage to survive on their own; they could also be relatively easily collected for marketing by small numbers of humans on horseback. Within the arid plains, river valleys—7 percent of the land—were the only space that mattered. The promise of an open plain actually reduced to the reality of branching rivers, on which, historically, life depended. Of course, cows might wander off, but one did not need constantly to inspect each of them individually. Control could be maintained in other ways: the river would determine the areas where cows could roam. They were boxed by the climate and geography of the plains. This way, herds would be assigned separate spaces along the banks of rivers. For practical purposes, a river’s bank does not have its space open in all directions. Inland, away from the river, thirst blocks the motion of cows; the river itself blocks motion on the other direction. The rectangle along the riverbank has therefore only its two short edges open. All you need is to patrol these two edges.

Most important, you rely on the practices of the cow itself. This is the principle of domestication: study the habits of an animal and use them against it. The cows could become free from humans, but they were the captives of their habits. They were conditioned to protect themselves against predators by forming into close herds. Their gregarious habits are precisely what humans exploit. Cows just will not disperse. Had some herd realized in 1866 what it was up against, it could have made the rational choice and dispersed in all directions. No amount of cowboy skill would have been able to collect all the cows, and those that were left on the range would have had, at least, a sporting chance against the occasional wolf. But the cows never realized this; they kept going together, assuming that this was—as it had been thousands of years earlier—in their best interest.

Hence moving cows over long distances is a fairly simple task. The mounted humans who controlled the herds—frightening them all the way up to Chicago—kept an eye on them not so much to prevent them from running away but rather to prevent other predators from taking away the prize. Control over the cow itself was easy; this, after all, is why the animal was domesticated in the first place. No need for fencing, then, as far as the cow itself was concerned.

The threat of other humans was a special problem, of course, but once again, the division of land was not necessary for this purpose either. The goal for this type of economy was to establish control not over land directly but over the cows on it. Instead of marking the land, it was more rational to mark the cows. Thus, to guard against theft, owners branded their cows—an ancient practice applied systematically in the West.

For humans, of course, symbols are more than just practical tools; they embody culture. Branding was, and still is, a major component of the culture of the West. Ranches, for the last century, have often been named after their brands; pride is taken in mastering this symbolic system that defines human control over space and over animals. Ranchers will show off their ability to recognize the many symbols invented. The ritual is still central to ranching life: tying the animals’ legs tightly together; setting a fire; carefully heating the branding iron (large, so as to make an articulate, clearly visible mark); then applying the iron until—and well after—the flesh of the animal literally burns. As put by Arnold and Hale (western authors writing in 1940), “There is an acrid odor, strong, repulsive . . . [the animal] will go BAWR-R-R-R, its eyes will bulge alarmingly, its mouth will slaver, and its nose will snort.” (At this stage, typically, a bull will be castrated, and in many cases, a cut will be made in the ear as a further symbolic mark.)

A complicated ritual: as the same authors note, “[the inventor of branding] could hardly have suspected how much fun and interest would eventually center around cattle-branding.”¹⁶ The entire practice is usefully compared with the Indian correlate. Indians marked bison by tail tying; that is, the tails of killed bison were tied to make a claim to their carcass. Crucially, we see that for the Indians, the bison became property only after its killing. It was only then that the bison made the passage from nature to human society. The cow, on the other hand, was a property—indeed, a commodity—even while alive. It would be branded early in its life.

In the special case of calves born free, branding was the moment when a cow passed from nature to culture. A feral calf caught on the Texas plains, unbranded and technically called a “maverick,” would be branded and thus made a commodity. Once again, a comparison is called for: we are reminded of the practice of branding runaway slaves, as punishment and as a practical measure of making sure that slaves—that particular kind of commodity—would not revert into their natural, free state. In short, in the late 1860s, as Texans finally desisted from the branding of slaves, they applied themselves with ever greater enthusiasm to the branding of cows. Sometimes whole herds would be collected through “mavericking” (the technical term for hunting and branding wild calves). Such herds would gain their marketable value by being herded north, as far as Chicago. This was a fortune that required, as investment, nothing more than motion and violence.

Violence, of course, was everywhere in the West. Central control did not yet extend across the land as a whole but was still limited to the network of military garrisons. Beyond that, power was wielded by small, mounted bands, ready to kill: the same kind of people who had fought for Texan slavery against Mexico, and then against Indians, or against each other in the Civil War. The habits of violence were endemic to the land. The combination of violence and motion, after all, is what made the West so cinematic.

But the West was even more interesting than that. Its myth was based not merely on violence and motion in the raw but on another, more subtle encounter: that between violence and motion, on the one hand, and civilization, on the other. This myth is fully based on reality: the North had won a war designed to make the West into an extension of its prosperity based on the prudence of farmers. It had also won this war through the experience of violence and lawlessness. Hence the liminal character of the West.

Consider, for example, James Butler Hickok, at one of the mythmaking moments of the West. The year was 1871, and Wild Bill, as Hickok was popularly called, was employed by the city of Abilene, Kansas, to act as its marshal. Abilene had been made practically overnight by the Illinois cattle trade when, in 1867, the rail terminus to Chicago opened there. The economy was booming: the cattle needed pens, attracting settled farmers; the cattle drivers looked for gambling and sex, attracting an altogether different kind of population. This led to the division of the city, neatly marked by the railroad tracks, between law and lawlessness. On one side was a midwestern small town transplanted further west; on the other side was the demimonde of a border town. Wild Bill was hired to prevent any spillover across the tracks. He was considered successful, but he was also deeply resented by the Texan herdsmen, particularly because of his past (born in Illinois, his adult life was divided between fighting Indians and fighting Southerners). Toward the end of the cow season, on October 5, he was passing the Alamo Saloon when a shot was fired, narrowly missing him. The Texan Philip Coe, pistol in hand, explained that “he shot a stray dog,” and then fired again at Wild Bill, who immediately shot Coe twice in the stomach—as well as fatally shooting a bystander who came to help. This turned out to be Wild Bill’s friend Michael Williams. Grief-stricken, Wild Bill set out to chase the Texans from town; a marked man, he lived now in constant fear for his life. This is the stuff western myth is made of; but consider the denouement of the combat. Abilene decided that it had had enough, and it could from now on live on marketing the growing agricultural produce of the county. The Texan trade was asked to move to other rail termini, and Wild Bill’s contract ended.¹⁷

Here, then, is the historical development. The economic value of the plains was, to start with, marginal. At first they attracted primarily cow owners. However, the very act of pushing the cows into the plains raised their value, even if only a little. This rise in value justified a certain amount of Northern investment, such as the extension of the railroad or the settlement of new towns. This investment, in turn, raised the value of the land even further, so that an economy based purely on cows on the open range was no longer justified. The cow ecology would have to adjust to a much more competitive use of the land. And Texas, after all, did lose the war. The extermination of the bison made the Great Plains into a vacuum that Texas got sucked into—to get entangled in the web centered in Chicago.

Competitive use of the land was marked not only in the North-South confrontation of the saloon cities but also among the Texan herd itself. There were more and more cows now in an area devastated by the transition from the bison, and further reduced by the encroaching agriculture on its most fertile lands. To remain competitive, you had to secure the grass for yourself, and the cattle industry moved into buying and claiming land—fraudulently claiming homesteads or (especially in Texas itself, whose landholding system was not influenced by the Homestead Act) directly leasing vast estates from the state.¹⁸ As the 1860s turned into the 1870s, control over cows had to be supplemented by control over the land itself. Where the cows would go was now something to be fixed. Farmers, as well as the railroad, needed to make sure cows would keep off their lands; cow owners needed to secure land to which their cows, and no others, could get access. All those cows, all this motion: it now somehow had to be delimited.

That, in itself, was nothing new. Ever since domestication, the control of animals on agricultural land had always been a complicated operation—especially considering that animals were in fact always forced to provide the main source of muscle power on the farm and as a result were part of agricultural production itself. Modern capitalism insisted on this discovery: that private ownership of the land could lead to intensive investment and thus to much-higher profits. The enclosed field, kept for the use of a single owner, was one of the hallmarks of capitalism in Britain and therefore also later in the United States.¹⁹ Such fields could have been defined symbolically but more often were fenced by some combination of various materials easily available in northern Europe and in northeast America: stone, hedges, and—especially in rain-rich Atlantic America—wood.²⁰ With the expansion of agricultural land in America, the capital represented by fencing grew immensely; an often-quoted report by the Department of Agriculture in 1871 put the total value of fences at over 1.7 billion, and the annual cost at about 200 million, so that “for every dollar invested in live stock, another dollar is required for the construction of defenses to resist their attacks on farm production.”²¹ The purpose of such reports was to suggest a transformation in the use of fences: instead of keeping animals out of fields, they should be used to keep animals inside given boundaries, so that agricultural fields could make do with more symbolic fencing. Here was the trouble, then: such symbols would not do with animals, and no police force would buttress such a symbolic definition of space to make it effective to prevent animals’ motion. They must be stopped by force; but where would the money come from to stop those herds of animals in this vast new land of the West?

The West had all those animals, and it did not have the means to stop them. The traditional materials of fencing were scarce, the most traditional of them—wood—nearly absent. Even the earth, a dusty, crumbling land—ideal for the grass—did not produce the right sort of stones. And while hedges could and were grown, they had their own limitations. As George Basalla, a historian of technology, notes for Osage oranges (the most prominent hedges of the American West in the 1860s and 1870s), “They were slow to develop, could not be moved easily, cast shadows on adjoining crops, usurped valuable growing space, and provided a shelter for weeds, vermin and insects.”²² In other words, hedges were inappropriate for the special colonization process going on in the American West, in which vast stretches of land were brought under control during a brief span of time, and the entire process was to be achieved with maximum flexibility and profit. This was colonization driven not by the life cycles of growing populations but by the expectations of capitalist investment. The three to four years it took an Osage orange to grow (as well as its element of waste) now became a major drawback. Four years, in the life of the plains, could be an eternity—the time it took, for instance, for Abilene to become a center for the cow industry and then to get out of that industry altogether. Geography was shifting daily. Something had to be found, quickly, to control the cows.

Fencing materials had to be imported, and the growing rail network—the essential infrastructure for the entire growth of agriculture in the West—transported those materials. Wood was shipped to the West in vast quantities; after all, American houses were built of wood in the West, just as they were in the East, and the railroad itself consumed timber.²³ But the vastness of the spaces involved made such shipping doubly unprofitable for wooden fences—both because of the vastness of spaces to be enclosed by such fences and because of the vastness of the space to be traversed by railroads put in place to carry such loads.

Thus a new technology for fencing was made a necessity—as stressed by the literature on the invention of barbed wire. But notice that the necessity was made by people, not given by nature. It did not derive from sheer geography—the presence of this space, the absence of those woods. It derived from the way in which America sprang upon the West, to enmesh it, almost in an instant, into its economy.

But let us return to the problem as it was perceived by individual Americans. They confronted animals; they were trying to control them. Such a task could be conceived as a kind of education: how to get an animal to do as you wish? This is essentially how the task was perceived in 1873 by Henry Rose, a farmer in the village of Waterman Station, Illinois. Trying to control a “breachy” cow, as he referred to her, he conceived of the following plan. He attached a wooden board, studded with sharp pieces of wire, right next to her head. Thus the cow, he reasoned, would be cured of her mischievous tendency to pass through loose fences. Now whenever she tried to squeeze herself through a limited space, pushing against barriers, she would cause herself considerable pain.²⁴ Of course, the idea of education through pain was familiar. Children at the time, after all, would regularly have their bare feet lashed with hickory sticks for failing to remember the multiplication table.²⁵ Children needed to learn arithmetic, and animals needed to learn fences. There are even specific precedents for Rose’s experiment: for instance, we may compare it to the triangular yokes with which hogs were collared in seventeenth-century Massachusetts.²⁶ These yokes were intended to prevent hogs physically from crossing through fences, rather than to make pain ensue from such attempts; but essentially Rose’s idea was an extension of the idea of the collar and similar attachments to the bodies of animals. The wooden board served as a tool for constant surveillance and punishment, even in the absence of the human. After a while, it occurred to Rose that the fence itself could teach its own respect, serve as its own surveyor; instead of the sharp wire being attached to the cow’s head, it could be attached to boards of wood on the fence itself. The experiment made, Rose was satisfied: the cow learned not to approach the fence. Other Americans made similar trials during the same period. Adrian Latta, for instance, attached sharp spikes to the bottom of his family’s fences (he himself was only ten years old at the time, 1861) to prevent hogs from crossing underneath. He noted that “the hogs got through a few times after the barbs were put in. However, the barbs had the desired effect as the owner saw his hogs were getting terribly marked and kept them at home.”²⁷ So instead of education, Latta’s aim was sheer violence—aimed directly at hogs, indirectly at humans. If Latta’s inspiration was perhaps nothing more than juvenile sadism, William D. Hunt took as an inspiration the venerable idea of the spur. This ancient invention consists of a roughly cut piece of metal that, thrust against the flesh of the animal, goads it to abrupt reaction. Hunt’s patent, issued in 1867, positioned spur wheels on wire. The animal, pushing against the wire, would be wounded, though real injury would be prevented as the spur wheel turned under the animal’s thrust. This, in retrospect, was a mistake: Hunt’s spur wheels were, so to speak, too lenient, so that animals were not ultimately deterred by them. The same went for Michael Kelly’s patent in 1868: cut nails thrust into wire. Once again, the nails would simply rotate on their wire when pushed against by the animals. Still, Kelly was sufficiently concerned about the injury this might cause to animals that he called for tarred rope to be strung along the fence so that animals could see it in the dark and not get accidentally injured.²⁸ The peculiar experience of Henry Rose was meaningful: by starting from a corrective collar, he was prepared to the fundamental idea that, by causing pain, the fence could create the habit of its own avoidance. The genius of the new technology was that—once again—the cow’s habits and skills were enlisted against her. Rose’s fence acted not on the cow’s skin alone but also on her memory and judgment, and these were ultimately used for her control. No need for the farmer to constrain his violence, then; make the cow feel the pain, and she will do the rest. Ultimately this was how hedges functioned—and the Osage orange, in particular, was protected by sharp, strong, long barbs, in retrospect highly suggestive of barbed wire.²⁹ Rose patented his idea and took it to be displayed in a farm exhibition in De Kalb, Illinois, near his hometown.

Notice that, with Rose’s invention, iron barbs supplemented wood and did not replace it. However—as we have seen with some alternative inventions—others were already experimenting with materials. In the mid-nineteenth century, organic components gave way rapidly to their metallic counterparts. Iron production was exploding, and the material was searching for applications. In 1852, Samuel Fox invented the use of wire ribs for the frames of umbrellas—a huge British industry—replacing whalebone; the same was happening in the (generally similar) industry of corsets. Staying in the same domestic setting, we may take the production of strings for musical instruments; here, once again, wire became cheap enough around midcentury to begin to replace the guts of sheep. With the mass production of steel wire at mid-century, the piano began to be mass-produced as well—a major development in European culture. Umbrellas, corsets, and pianos were all important industries. Closer to home, though, for the interests of American farmers, was the production of rope, revolutionized in the 1840s as hemp began to be substituted by iron. Iron strings had tremendous strength, and most important, machines could be produced to automatically strand such strings into a braided rope.³⁰ This immediately suggests an idea: if the linear strings can be twisted together to construct stronger ropes, attached linearly, they can also be netted together, on a planar pattern—a fence made of wire. These, of course, are a familiar feature of our own contemporary landscape: fences made of woven lattices of wire, once again an invention of the 1840s and the 1850s. Butts and Johnson from Boston, for instance, advertised their “patent wire fencing” in 1856 “for enclosing railroads, canals, fields, cattle pastures, cemeteries, gardens, heneries, and for ornamental garden work, grape and rose trellises, etc.”³¹ Whatever were the real hopes of Butts and Johnson, such lattices did not fence in cattle: these structures are rather delicate and are made even more vulnerable by the contraction and expansion of iron under changes in temperature. Even determined humans can, with patience, run down such fences; they are no obstacle at all for herds of cows.³²

It is here, finally, that barbed wire comes in. One of the visitors to the De Kalb fair, Joseph E Glidden, formed the following idea: instead of attaching Rose’s barbs to wood, they could be coiled around one of the strands in a double-stranded wire. The double-stranded structure, as well as the coil of the barb itself, would keep the barb in place. In short, unlike previous inventors, and emboldened by Rose’s idea, Glidden decided to make the barb fixed so as to resist the cow in its approach and to inflict real pain. Further, Glidden’s main technical idea—stranding two wires and a series of barbs between them—came from the experience of stranding wires together to form ropes, where the crucial fact was that machines already existed for the operation. No special new ingenuity was required: standard practices could be extended to achieve the mass production of barbed wire. And this is how barbed wire was born. In a sense, it was a natural idea, the confluence of all that went into the West: violence and the need to control space, iron, mass production. At any rate, a number of visitors to Rose’s exhibition at De Kalb went away with the idea of attaching barbs to iron fences instead of wooden boards. Glidden’s original patent was quickly joined, apparently independently, by five other barbed wire patents, and most began production almost immediately.³³ Already in 1876, half the rights in one of the main patents were bought by Washburn and Moen, a Massachusetts-based iron and steel company, and in this way barbed wire reached the mainstream of manufacturing industry.³⁴ It was an extension of existing technologies, and so, although it had been invented on the prairie, it was soon taken up by the mass producers of steel and iron.

Washburn and Moen knew what they were doing. Barbed wire was an instant success. In the spring of 1875, the first commercial leaflet produced by the fledgling Glidden company claimed that the fence had been tested already by more than a thousand farmers—hardly a hyperbole, as the statistics available from later in the decade would indicate. Some of the selling points Glidden made were especially interesting:

It is the cheapest and most durable fence made.

It takes less posts than any other fence.

It can be put for _ the labor of any other fence.

Cattle, mule and horses will not rub against and break it down.

The wind has no effect upon it and prairie fires will not burn it up.

Stock will not jump over or crawl through it.

Two major claims emerge. First, the technology had the advantage of violence, so that it more effectively protected the space it enclosed. Indeed, not only was it a kind of fence that protected the inside it surrounded—but the fence protected itself as well. Second, the technology had the advantage of iron. The material was more resistant to natural forces. Combining the two, the power of violence and the power of iron, led to the major advantage of the technology at that stage. Lighter materials were required now to construct a fence, hence less labor, hence ultimately the fence’s competitive pricing.³⁵

Here is how Washburn and Moen were to state the case in 1880, in one of their early pamphlets. Taking forty rods of three-row fences as the unit of comparison (about one hundred meters of fenced length), we have the following:

WOODEN BOARD FENCE	BARBED WIRE FENCE
1,000 feet pine fencing	15.00	136 lbs barbed wire	14.96
80 posts	16.00	40 posts	8.00
15 lbs nails	.60	2 lbs staples	.20
Labor	2.50	Labor	.50
Total	34.10	Total	23.6636

The beauty of this pricing scheme is obvious: the main component, the one on which Washburn and Moen make a profit—barbed wire itself—is priced artificially high, just below the price of the main alternative piece of hardware, pine. The entire barbed wire fence is made competitive only because barbed wire, especially owing to its lightness, is cheaper to erect: fewer posts and nails are required, and much less labor. Notice, however, that posts are required—and were usually made of wood. This is an important aspect concerning the growth of barbed wire: it did not replace wood. That is, barbed wire did not at all result in a reduction of the importation of wood to the West. It did not, after all, replace existing wooden fences: instead, barbed wire fences were erected where no fences had been erected before (and none, probably, would have been erected otherwise). Thus barbed wire actually led to a growth in demand for timber. As the West was becoming capital intensive, the North was being deforested.³⁷ Barbed wire represents therefore not the replacement of wood by iron but rather a more effective combination of the two. It uses wood for its capability to sustain weight, and iron for its capability to take on precise, strong forms. In this, barbed wire resembles the two other typical technologies of the period, the railroad and the telegraph line, all consisting of repeated bases of wood, set perpendicularly to support long lines of custom-made metals. (The telegraph, another huge wire-based industry, used copper rather than iron.) Short posts of wood, repeated at regular intervals, supply these objects with a solid hold on the surface of the Earth; metal lines, attached continuously, make them stretch without a hitch to an indefinite length. In combination, such objects can accomplish a task, defined along immensely long lines, and in this way they reshape space—railroads and telegraph lines by connecting distant points, and barbed wire by defining lines of limit. This is the material context in which the growth of barbed wire should be placed.

The spread of such lines determines the transformation of space. From 9,000 miles to 30,000 miles of tracks: this was the growth of the American railroad during the 1850s, the period during which northeastern America was forever reshaped by train.³⁸ By 1880—a mere six years after its first patents—something like 50,000 miles of length were fenced by barbed wire.³⁹ We are therefore justified in comparing the revolution of barbed wire with the revolution of railroads; both transformed space almost instantaneously. The difference lies in the intended species—and is also the difference between lines as connectors and lines as dividers. While the purpose of trains was to make motion possible, for humans (as well as for their commodities), the purpose of barbed wire was to prevent motion, for animals.

The key to the entire success of this technology was, of course, its ability to stop cows. We have looked at how manufacturers priced (or at least attempted to price) their barbed wire, but whereas prices could be fixed on paper, animals had to be stopped in the real world, and humans had to be shown that. This was indeed the marketing strategy employed by the distributors of barbed wire. Let us look at an event that acquired an emblematic significance in the literature on barbed wire: the exhibition in San Antonio in 1876. Three years earlier, the farmer Henry Rose had displayed the fruit of his farm experiment on his cow. Now the salesman John Gates offered a far more striking spectacle. (Gates, at this point, was a mere agent for barbed wire manufacturers, but he was destined—as we will see in the next section—to 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 for anyone with a ‘queasy’ stomach.”⁵⁰ The owner’s concern was not just aesthetic. Besides the loss of value owing to the death or severe illness of cows, screwworms were a severe drag on the cow economy in two ways: they demanded skilled labor, and (since birth invariably led to wounds) they made it undesirable to allow birth during the summer, thus curtailing the natural growth in the number of marketable cows.⁵¹ The plains were rapidly moving away from the simple nature-turned-into-profit of the mavericking days. Barbed wire created the conditions for a new type of cattle industry; simultaneously, it was a constant source of loss to it. Thus we should not be surprised that, among some farmers, barbed wire was unpopular. Farmers in the late 1870 were surrounded by barbs they had not asked for, causing damages they could not control. Now, an interesting feature of barbed wire is its symmetry. While it is possible in principle to have barbs arranged so that they point in just one direction, it is far simpler to have them double pointed, so that the wire can be made “blindly,” without figuring how the barbs precisely fit. In other words, the topology does not distinguish “inside” from “outside”—violence is projected in both ways. In a very real way, barbed wire is contagious: by enclosing a space, it is thereby automatically present in all areas bordering on that space. Imagine that you are a farmer, used to controlling your animals without barbed wire, now finding yourself adjacent to it. This could happen anywhere, especially since almost from the beginning, the railroad had used barbed wire to prevent animals from straying onto the tracks and causing damage to the trains.⁵² Take, for instance, Mr. Palmer, a representative of Jericho to Vermont’s General Assembly, who in 1880 drafted a bill to limit the use of barbed wire. He focused on the injuries caused to horse and cattle by railroad barbed fences and concluded that “the public sentiment of the community was against its use in these three cases: along highways; between adjoining landowners without mutual consent; and between railroads and pastures without the consent of the farmer.”⁵³ Bills to prohibit the use of barbed wire were put forth in several states, always defeated in the West but, for brief periods, made law in some eastern states. Mr. Palmer actually succeeded (as did some of his colleagues in Connecticut and Maine), but by the end of 1880s, no state made barbed wire illegal any longer; the plains had reached the North.

Some compromise had to be made between the conflicting interests. In fact, following the first years of violent encounters between animal and iron, a new relationship was gradually established. To some extent, barbs became less sharp (less “vicious,” to use the technical term). It is instructive to compare the declared objectives of barbed wire patents between their introduction and their later accommodation to farmers’ needs. In 1876, Parker Wineman of Illinois boasted of his barbs that they “will be sure to penetrate the skin and give pain”;⁵⁴ five years later (i.e., immediately after barbed wire began to be politically contested), Joseph H. Connelly of Pennsylvania stated that his particular invention “will resist force and turn stock without entangling or otherwise injuring them.”⁵⁵ One such invention is typically praised in a Washburn and Moen leaflet: “the barbs are short and lance shaped, so that there is NO DANGER OF INJURY TO STOCK. . . . They will prick and scratch but NEVER TEAR THE SKIN. . . . It is well known that the sensation of pain is at the surface of the skin, hence the smart or prick . . . is all that is required. NO WOUNDS ARE MADE, consequently NO LOSS OF CATTLE in the southwest from putrefying sores, in which flies deposit their eggs.”⁵⁶

As humans learned more about animal pain, animals learned more about human violence. Animals learned to avoid barbed wire, and sometimes they were deliberately taught. A commercial leaflet encouraging the use of barbed wire advises the farmer “to lead [young horses] to the fence and let them prick their noses by contact with it . . . they will let it thoroughly alone thereafter.”⁵⁷ This expresses the special interest humans always had in the physical fitness of horse, whereas cows were generally expected to pick up such knowledge through sheer experience. Their knowledge was apparently transmitted between generations, by the experience, for example, of calves following their mothers (one should remember that the cow economy of the nineteenth century still did allow calves to grow up following their mothers). To close this circle of mutual knowledge, finally, the stage was reached where manufacturers, exploiting the knowledge gained by animals, produced more conspicuous barbs, now functioning not only as instruments of direct violence but also as a more indirect instrument of intimidation (in the technical language, barbs became more “obvious”). This transition was essentially complete by the end of the 1880s, when the success of barbed wire as a tool for the education of cows can be considered complete. Simultaneously, more and more cows were fenced in, rather than fenced out, partly because of the general trend to establish landholding, and partly to “protect” the cows. The topology was now inverted, just as it had previously been for the Indians. Instead of fences preventing the motion of cows from outside a closed line to its inside (protecting the property of farmers), fences now prevented the motion of cows from inside a closed line to its outside (imprisoning cows inside ranches). Fenced inside, cows could be taken care of in the case of screwworm infestation, and winter catastrophes could not return in such harshness—so that, to a certain extent, cows were fenced in to protect them from fences.⁵⁸ Cows and plains were transformed, so that barbed wire became both natural and necessary.

With the gained perspective of nearly a decade of barbed wire use, Washburn and Moen adopted an almost historiographical tone in their commercial leaflet of 1883, already quoted briefly. The analysis offered is especially sharp and acute, and it is worthy of lengthy quotation as a summary of the early development of barbed wire:

The fence of plain wire was far from satisfactory. . . . It had no terrors for trespassing animals. . . . [S]omething else seemed to be needed to realize the perfect fence, and this came in its own time, in Barb Fence.

Barb wire was invented by a farmer, to meet farmer needs [it should be understood that Washburn and Moen, having won the ranch business, were now busy introducing barbed wire into cultivated areas, hence the stress on the “farmer needs”], in 1873, at first a crude working out of the parent idea; the making of fence wire repellent by borrowing from nature the principle of the sharp pricking thorn, thus appealing to the sense of pain and danger that resides in the skin of the farm animal.

The principle which was first sharply challenged as cruel, has, on the contrary, been found to be humane, for these accidents of the old style were common [a litany of non-barbed-wire fence complaints follows]. . . . [T]he accidents from barb wire have been mainly of a trivial character [in a brilliant rhetorical move, following the description of accidents involving traditional fences, the author is now able to refer to wounds caused by barbed wire as “accidents”—even though, of course, the causing of wounds is the essential function of barbed wire], which, in such cases, have been warnings, salutary in their effect, and have educated the beasts in the new law of respecting fences.

This, then, was the basic function of barbed wire: a form of education—of manipulating animals—through violence. From a broader perspective, we may conceive the manipulation, or transformation, as follows. As mentioned earlier, cows brought to America by the Spanish multiplied immensely on the loose, so that a new breed of semiferal cows was created on the margins of Spanish settlement, especially in Texas. This breed was gradually re-domesticated by Anglo-Americans, until faced with the need to use those animals in the conquest of the West, the process of re-domestication had to proceed much more quickly. Barbed wire served to retame, by a shock, an entire breed, partly through its immediate impact, and partly through its indirect biological effects. Fenced cows could be bred in a more controlled way. Ranches, defined in space, became also defined in stock (and gradually, as a rule, limited in numbers).⁵⁹ Breeding generally took the form of the introduction of bulls from eastern states—a docile and fat breed.⁶⁰ Backed by eastern investors, eastern owners came to hold more and more of the ranches, so that eastern cow-handling practices gradually became dominant.⁶¹ Eastern capital, eastern iron, eastern semen: all were pouring into the West to turn it into a new, artificial land for the use of the East.

All of this, let us remember, was based on a simple fact about Texan cows—indeed, about most animals. Therein lies our misfortune: our skins, just a little beneath the surface, are endowed with special nerves activated by pressure rising above rather low thresholds. You can use those nerves against us. By cutting through the boundary of our skins, you can act to protect the boundaries of your property, your prison, your border. Iron, for instance, is a useful tool. It is harder than flesh; pressed against it, iron will first push the flesh inward and then (particularly if the iron’s surface, like that of a barb, is sharp) cut through the skin to impact on the nerves. The nerves send a report to the brain, and there the report undergoes some process—we do not know quite what—that leads to something else—we cannot explain quite what. This is what we call pain, and apparently it is something truly universal, cutting across species, places, and times. A useful tool of globalization, then.