Late in 1876, so the story goes, a young man named John Warne Gates built a wire-fence pen in the military plaza in the middle of San Antonio, Texas. He rounded up some of the toughest and wildest longhorns in all of Texas—or that’s how he described them. Others say that the cattle were a docile bunch. And there are those who wonder whether this particular story is true at all. But never mind.1
John Warne Gates—a man who later won the nickname “Bet-A-Million Gates”—began to take bets with onlookers as to whether these powerful, ornery longhorns could break through the fragile-seeming wire. They couldn’t.
Even when Gates’s sidekick, a Mexican cowboy, charged at the cattle, howling Spanish curses and waving a burning brand in each hand, the wire held. Bet-A-Million Gates wasn’t so worried about winning his wagers. He had a bigger game to play: he was selling a new kind of fence, and the orders soon came rolling in.
An advertisement from 1875 touted this fence as “The Greatest Discovery of the Age,” patented by J. F. Glidden of DeKalb, Illinois. John Warne Gates described it more poetically: “Lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust.”2 We simply call it barbed wire.
To call barbed wire the greatest discovery of the age might seem hyperbolic, even making allowances for the fact that the advertisers didn’t know that Alexander Graham Bell was just about to be awarded a patent for the telephone. But while modern minds naturally think of the telephone as transformative, barbed wire wreaked huge changes on the American West, and much more quickly.
Joseph Glidden’s design for barbed wire wasn’t the first, but it was the best. Glidden’s design is recognizably modern: it is the same as the barbed wire you can see on farmland today. The wicked barb is twisted around a strand of smooth wire; then a second strand of smooth wire is twisted together with the first to stop the barbs from sliding around.3 Farmers snapped it up.
There was a reason that American farmers were so hungry for barbed wire. A few years earlier, in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Homestead Act. It specified that any honest citizen—including women and freed slaves—could lay claim to up to 160 acres of land in America’s western territories. All they had to do was build a home there and work the land for five years. The idea was that the Homestead Act would both improve the land and improve the American citizens, creating free and virtuous hardworking landowners with a strong stake in the future of the nation.4
It sounds simple. But the prairie was a vast and uncharted expanse of tall, tough grasses, a land suitable for nomads, not settlers. It had long been the territory of Native Americans. After Europeans arrived and pushed west, the cowboys roamed free, herding cattle over the boundless plains.
But settlers needed fences, not least to keep those free-roaming cattle from trampling their crops. And there wasn’t a lot of wood—certainly none to spare for fencing in mile after mile of what was often called the “Great American Desert.”5 Farmers tried growing thornbush hedges, but they were slow-growing and inflexible. Smooth-wire fences didn’t work either—the cattle simply pushed through them.
The lack of fencing was much lamented. The U.S. Department of Agriculture conducted a study in 1870 and concluded that until one of those technologies worked, it would be impossible to settle the American West.6 The American West, in turn, seethed with potential solutions: at the time, it was the source of more proposals for new fencing technologies than the rest of the world put together.7 And the idea that emerged in triumph from this intellectual ferment? Barbed wire.
Barbed wire changed what the Homestead Act could not. Until barbed wire was developed, the prairie was an unbounded space, more like an ocean than a stretch of arable land. Private ownership of land wasn’t common because it wasn’t feasible.
So barbed wire spread because it solved one of the biggest problems the settlers faced. But it also sparked ferocious disagreements. And it’s not hard to see why. The homesteading farmers were trying to stake out their property—property that had once been the territory of various Native American tribes. And twenty-five years after the Homestead Act came the Dawes Act, which forcibly assigned land to Native American families and gave the rest to white farmers. The philosopher Olivier Razac comments that as well as freeing up land for settler cultivation, the Dawes Act “helped destroy the foundations of Indian society.” No wonder those tribes called barbed wire “the devil’s rope.”
The old-time cowboys also lived on the principle that cattle could graze freely across the plains—this was the law of the open range. The cowboys hated the wire: Cattle would get nasty wounds and infections. When the blizzards came, the cattle would try to head south; sometimes they got stuck against the wire and died in the thousands.
Other cowmen adopted barbed wire, using it to fence off private ranches. And while the attraction of the barbed wire was that it could enforce legal boundaries, many of the fences were illegal, too—attempts to commandeer common land for private purposes.
When the barbed-wire fences started to go up across the West, fights started to break out.8 In the “fence-cutting wars,” masked gangs with names like the Blue Devils and the Javelinas cut the wires and left death threats warning the fence owners not to rebuild. There were shoot-outs, and even a few deaths. Eventually the authorities clamped down. The fence-cutting wars ended; the barbed wire remained. There were winners and there were losers.
“It makes me sick,” said one trail driver in 1883, “when I think of onions and Irish potatoes growing where mustang ponies should be exercising and where four-year-old steers should be getting ripe for market.”9 And if the cowboys were outraged, the Native Americans were suffering far worse.
These ferocious arguments on the frontier reflected an old philosophical debate. The English seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke—a great influence on the Founding Fathers of the United States—puzzled over the problem of how anybody might legally come to own land. Once upon a time, nobody owned anything; land was a gift of nature or of God. But Locke’s world was full of privately owned land, whether the owner was the King himself or a simple yeoman. How had nature’s bounty become privately owned? Was that inevitably the result of a guy with a bunch of goons grabbing whatever he could? If so, all civilization was built on violent theft. That wasn’t a welcome conclusion to Locke—or to his wealthy patrons.
Locke argued that we all own our own labor. And if you mix your labor with the land that nature provides—for instance, by plowing the soil—then you’ve blended something you definitely own with something that nobody owns. By working the land, he said, you’ve come to own it.
This wasn’t a purely theoretical argument. Locke was actively engaged in the debate over Europe’s colonization of America. Political scientist Barbara Arneil, an expert on Locke, writes that “the question, ‘How was private property created by the first men?’ is for . . . Locke the same question as, ‘Who has just title to appropriate the lands of America now?’”10 And to make his argument, Locke also had to make the claim that the land was abundant and unclaimed—that is, that because the indigenous tribes hadn’t “improved” the land, they had no right to it.
Not every European philosopher bought this line of argument. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an eighteenth-century philosopher, protested the evils of enclosure. In his “Discourse on Inequality” he lamented, “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘This is mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him.” This man, said Rousseau, “was the real founder of civil society.”
Rousseau did not intend that as a compliment. But complimentary or not, it’s true that modern economies are built on private property—on the legal fact that most things have an owner, usually a person or a corporation. Modern economies are also built on the idea that private property is a good thing, because private property gives people an incentive to invest and improve in what they own—whether that’s a patch of land in the American Midwest, or an apartment in Kolkata, India, or even a piece of intellectual property such as the rights to Mickey Mouse. It’s a powerful argument—and it was ruthlessly deployed by those who wanted to argue that Native Americans didn’t really have a right to their own territory, because they weren’t actively developing it.
But legal facts are abstract. To get the benefits of owning something, you also have to be able to assert control over it.* Barbed wire is still widely used to fence off land across the world. And in many other spheres of the economy, the battle to own in practice what you own in theory continues to rage.
One example is digital rights management, or DRM. DRM systems are attempts to erect a kind of virtual barbed wire around digital property such as a movie or a song, to prevent people from copying it illegally. Musicians may have copyright on their music, but—as David Bowie kindly explained to us—copyright is a weak defense against file-sharing software.
Nobody has invented virtual barbed wire that can fence off songs as effectively as physical barbed wire fenced off land, but it hasn’t stopped them from trying. And the “fence-cutting wars” of the digital economy are no less impassioned today than they were in the Wild West: digital rights campaigners battle the likes of Disney, Netflix, and Google, while hackers and pirates make short work of the digital barbed wire.11 When it comes to protecting property in any economic system, the stakes are very high.
The rewards for success can be high, too. Small wonder that the barbed-wire barons—Bet-A-Million Gates, Joseph Glidden, and several others—became rich. The year that Glidden secured his barbed-wire patent, thirty-two miles of wire were produced. Six years later, in 1880, the factory in DeKalb turned out 263,000 miles of wire, enough to circle the world ten times over.12