BARBED WIRE. By the 1870s westward expansion of the agricultural frontier across the Great Plains had been halted by the lack of adequate fencing material to protect crops from cattle. Texas substitutes for the stone and wood fences common in the East included ditches, mud fences, and thorny hedges, the most popular being those of Osage orange or bois d'arc. Bois d'arc is native to Texas and Arkansas, and export of its seed was an early enterprise in Texas. Hedges of it were claimed to be "pig tight, horse high, and bull strong." Experiments with varieties of thorn hedges and smooth wire failed to solve the problems of plains ranchers and farmers, however, and so their features were combined into barbed wire fences.

On November 24, 1874, Joseph F. Glidden of DeKalb, Illinois, was granted a patent for fencing material consisting of barbs wrapped around a single strand of wire and held in place by twisting that strand around another. Known as the "Winner," this was the most commercially successful of the hundreds of eventual barbed wire designs. Another DeKalb inventor, Jacob Haish, who had applied for a patent on a similar "S barb" design earlier in 1874, undertook a protracted legal battle that failed to halt the progress of the Glidden design. In partnership with Isaac L. Ellwood, Glidden sold his interests, which included other barbed wire patents, to the Massachusetts wire manufacturer Washburn and Moen in May 1876. Ellwood remained an active partner in the new organization as sole agent and distributor for the South and West. Washburn and Moen, eventually absorbed by United States Steel Corporation, had acquired all major barbed wire patents, except that of Haish, by 1876, thus achieving a near-monopoly on this important product.

Henry Bradley Sanborn traveled to Texas in 1875 as representative of Glidden and Ellwood's Barbed Fence Company. Though he sold the first barbed wire in the state, he failed to exploit the large potential market. In 1878 John Warne (Bet-a-Million) Gates conducted a famous demonstration on the Military Plaza in San Antonio in which a fence of Glidden's "Winner" wire restrained a herd of longhorn cattle. Gates reportedly touted his product as "light as air, stronger than whiskey, and cheap as dirt." Sales grew quickly thereafter, and barbed wire permanently changed land uses and land values in Texas.

Charles Goodnight, a pioneer of the open plains, fenced along the Palo Duro Canyon, accepting the need for clear title to grazing rights and hence the eventual end of the open range. Enclosure of the open range upon which the early cattle industry had been based resulted in the fence-cutting conflicts of the early 1880s. More controlled livestock breeding was made possible by the enclosure of herds, thus virtually eliminating the demand for the longhorn cattle, which were most suited to the open range. The wire simultaneously contributed to the end of the long cattle drives and Indian raids. Barbed wire, still an essential tool in the livestock industry, is today a popular collector's item. The official depository of the papers of the Texas Barbed Wire Collectors Association is the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Robert T. Clifton, Barbs, Prongs, Points, Prickers, and Stickers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970). Henry D. and Frances T. McCallum, The Wire That Fenced the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965). Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (Boston: Ginn, 1931).

Frances T. McCallum and James Mulkey Owens

LONGHORN CATTLE. The Texas longhorn is a hybrid breed resulting from a random mixing of Spanish retinto (criollo) stock and English cattle that Anglo-American frontiersmen brought to Texas from southern and midwestern states in the 1820s and 1830s. "A few old-timers," J. Frank Dobie wrote, "contend that both the horns and bodies of the Texas cattle were derived from importations from the States out of Longhorn Herefords of England," but he was convinced that the Texas longhorn was largely Spanish. Spanish cattle had roamed in Texas probably before the eighteenth century. The old-timers were probably right. Some cattlemen observed that not only the horns and bodies, but also the colors of many Texas longhorns resembled the English Bakewell stock brought from the Ohio valley and Kentucky. Criollo cattle are of solid color ranging from Jersey tan to cherry red. Black animals are few and brindles rare. Spanish and Anglo cattle mixed on a small scale in the 1830s and after, but by the Civil War the half-wild Texas longhorns emerged as a recognizable type. They behaved like Spanish stock but had an appreciable amount of British blood. Old steers (four years old and older) had extremely long horns, and the large number of these animals in postwar trail herds produced the popular misconception that all Texas cattle had unusually long horns. In the 1880s, when younger cattle with improved blood were trailed north, the average horn spread was less than four feet.

In the 1850s Texas longhorns were trailed to markets in New Orleans and California. They developed an immunity to Texas fever, which they carried with them and passed on to herds on the way. In 1861 Missouri and the eastern counties of Kansas banned Texas stock, and during the second half of the nineteenth century many states attempted to enact restrictive laws in an effort to fight the fever. After the Civil War, however, millions of Texas longhorns were driven to market. Herds were driven to Indian and military reservations in New Mexico and Arizona, and in 1867 Illinois cattle dealer Joseph G. McCoy arranged to ship cattle from Abilene, Kansas, to the Union Stockyards in Chicago. Over the next twenty years contractors drove five to ten million cattle out of Texas, commerce that helped revive the state's economy. Longhorns, with their long legs and hard hoofs, were ideal trail cattle; they even gained weight on the way to market.

After the buffalo herds were slaughtered and the Plains Indians confined in the late 1870s, private and syndicate ranches spread northward to the open range and free grass on the Great Plains. Texas longhorns, accompanied by Texas cowboys, stocked most of the new ranches; the trailing era made the cowboy a universal folk hero. The "Big Die-up" of 1886-87, together with the rapid spread of barbed wire fences, brought an abrupt end to the open-range cattle boom and with it the dominance of the longhorn. Fencing made possible controlled breeding, and with the end of free grass it was economically advisable to raise cattle that developed faster than longhorns. By this time ranchers had begun crossing longhorns with shorthorn Durhams and later with Herefords, thus producing excellent beef animals. Longhorns were bred almost out of existence; by the 1920s only a few small herds remained.

In 1927 the Texas longhorn was saved from probable extinction by Will C. Barnes and other Forest Service men, when they collected a small herd of breeding stock in South Texas for the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma. A few years later J. Frank Dobie, with the help of former range inspector Graves Peeler and financial support from oilman Sid W. Richardson, gathered small herds for Texas state parks. After the wildlife-refuge herd had increased to several hundred, the Forest Service held annual sales of surplus animals. Cowmen at first purchased them as curiosities, then rediscovered the longhorn's longevity, resistance to disease, fertility, ease of calving, and ability to thrive on marginal pastures. Its growing popularity in beef herds was spurred by a diet-conscious population's desire for lean beef.

In 1964 Charles Schreiner III of the YO Ranch took the lead in organizing the Texas Longhorn Breeders Association of America, which maintains a registry in order to perpetuate the breed in a pure state. Since then the number of longhorns and their use in cross-breeding have steadily increased, and their future appears secure. In the 1990s the official state Texas longhorn herd was kept at Fort Griffin State Historical Park and was owned and managed by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Smaller longhorn herds were located at Possum Kingdom State Recreation Area, Palo Duro Canyon State Scenic Park, Abilene State Park, Dinosaur Valley State Park, and Copper Breaks State Park.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Will C. Barnes, "Wichita Forest Will Be Lair of L

CATTLE RUSTLING. Cattle theft by Indians was a common hazard of early settlers in Texas. Though the Indians more often stole horses, when their food supply was short, they drove off and butchered beeves, dairy cows, and oxen. Sometimes they stole beyond their needs to avenge wrongs or to drive white settlers from their hunting grounds. Occasionally they started stampedes and killed cattle they could not drive off. In the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, Mexican rustlers gave much trouble along the border. In claims made against the Mexican government, it was asserted that from 1859 through 1872 Mexican bandits stole 145,298 cattle from various South Texas ranches. The depredations of Indian and Mexican rustlers, however, fell far short of those perpetrated by white renegades. In fact, ranchmen in Mexico often were victimized by Texas thieves who swam large herds of "wet stock" across the Rio Grande by night and trailed them to Kansas markets. Other rustlers stampeded herds on the northward trails and drove off as many cattle as they could, using six-shooters to defend themselves if pursued. Many preyed on herds that grazed on the western ranges, especially where canyons or high brush afforded hiding places.

Most rustlers of the open-range era were cowboys who had drifted into dubious practices. They knew the cattle country and were adept at roping, branding, and trailing. One needed only to buy a few cows, register a brand, and begin branding strays. Many cowboys' herds increased so rapidly that some ranchmen refused to hire any hand who had stock of his own. The altering of brands was a frequent practice among rustlers. Instead of the stamp iron used by most cattlemen, the rustler used a running iron-a straight rod with a curve at the heated end. When this was outlawed, he sometimes used a piece of heavy wire that he could bend into any shape and carry in his pocket.

More common was the theft of large unbranded calves. When a ranchman neglected to brand some of his calves before they were weaned, it was easy for the rustler to cut a pasture fence, drive the calves to his corral, and stamp his own brand upon them. Often he was not content with this but would return to take also the smaller calves, not yet weaned. This was more ticklish procedure, since Longhorn cows and calves had a strong instinct for returning to each other, even when separated by miles. Such reunions had to be prevented, for if a ranchman found a calf with a rustler's brand nursing from one of his cows, there likely would be trouble. Before branding unweaned calves, often the rustler kept them penned until they quit bawling and learned to eat grass. Other measures used to keep them from getting back to their mothers and to hasten weaning were to cut the muscles supporting the calf's eyelids and thus make it temporarily blind, to apply a hot iron between the toes to make the calf's feet too sore for walking, or, in uncommon cases, to split the calf's tongue to prevent suckling. The rustler might also kill the mother to make the calf a genuine orphan.

With county seats far apart, grand juries disinclined to indict, and trial juries reluctant to convict, early cattlemen often had to take law enforcement into their own hands in dealing with rustlers. Following the transition from the open range to fenced ranches, rustling gradually was lessened by efforts of local officers, the Texas Rangers, and inspectors of cattlemen's associations, who checked brands as cattle were sold at livestock markets. Rustling was not entirely stamped out, however, and in the 1930s it broke out in a new form. Thieves equipped with fast trucks stole cattle at night, butchered them in nearby thickets, and sold the meat the next day in markets perhaps several hundred miles away. The extent of this rustling and the fact that the thieves often crossed state lines led Congress in 1941 to pass the McCarran Act, which provided a maximum penalty of a $5,000 fine and five years in prison for transporting across state lines stolen cattle or meat from such cattle. This measure, however, did not prevent the sale of stolen meat in black markets during World War II.

BLACK COWBOYS. Black cowboys have been part of Texas history since the early nineteenth century, when they first worked on ranches throughout the state. A good many of the first black cowboys were born into slavery but later found a better life on the open range, where they experienced less open discrimination than in the city. After the Civil War many were employed as horsebreakers and for other tasks, but few of them became ranch foremen or managers. Some black cowboys took up careers as rodeo performers or were hired as federal peace officers in Indian Territory. Others ultimately owned their own farms and ranches, while a few who followed the lure of the Wild West became gunfighters and outlaws. Significant numbers of African Americans went on the great cattle drives originating in the Southwest in the late 1800s. Black cowboys predominated in ranching sections of the Coastal Plain between the Sabine and Guadalupe rivers.

A number of them achieved enviable reputations. Bose Ikard, a top hand and drover for rancher Charles Goodnight, also served him as his chief detective and banker. Daniel W. (80 John) Wallace started riding the cattle trails in his adolescence and ultimately worked for cattlemen Winfield Scott and Gus O'Keefe. He put his accumulated savings toward the purchase of a ranch near Loraine, where he acquired more than 1,200 acres and 500 to 600 cattle. He was a member of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association for more than thirty years. William Pickett made his name as one of the most outstanding Wild West rodeo performers in the country and is credited with originating the modern event known as bulldogging. He was inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in 1971.

Black cowboys have continued to work in the ranching industry throughout the twentieth century, and African Americans who inherited family-owned ranches have attempted to bring public recognition to the contributions of their ancestors. Mollie Stevenson, a fourth-generation owner of the Taylor-Stevenson Ranch near Houston, founded the American Cowboy Museum to honor black, Indian, and Mexican-American cowboys. Weekend rodeos featuring black cowboys began in the late 1940s and continue to be popular. These contests owe their existence to the Negro Cowboys Rodeo Association, formed in 1947 by a group of East Texas black businessmen-ranchers and cowboys.
 

©2007 K. Torp
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