Barbed Wire History

Counter-insurgency and a history of global violence

In 2006, Harvard historian Caroline Elkins published her PhD thesis to a lot of academic acclaim, as well as to a fair share of sullen criticism. Her book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, was a damning indictment of Britain’s counter-insurgency strategies in East Africa and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in the year in which it was published. The Pulitzer is an award that usually goes to journalists, but academics have been regularly honoured for their work by the foundation. What was surprising in Elkin’s case, was the subject of her book and the fact that she managed to retrieve some historical insights into a contemporary debate that is becoming one-sided. Following World War II, former colonial powers found their authority being challenged by natives in Africa and Asia. In Asia, the British authorities found themselves engaged in low intensity wars in Palestine and Malaya, while the French floundered in Vietnam and the Dutch in Indonesia. In Africa too, European colonial authorities were faced with rebellious tribes in every corner of the continent. The post-war world was not ready for continuing with a disastrous political status quo, especially since the ascendant powers – the United States of America and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – were already drawing in the world into polarised spheres. In this new dispensation, the idea of land and peoples in Africa and Asia being governed from distant European capitals and by a small, white bureaucracy was deemed unsustainable and untenable. However, the old colonisers were not going to leave the tropics quietly. They had plantations, mining concessions, acres of forests and most importantly, a vast army of native labour that they still had to exploit. So, they dug in and wrote up a theory of warfare so brutal that the world still has to recover from it today. Colonial administrators and military personnel had picked up a few lessons from the Chinese revolution, which had inspired many left-leaning armed insurrections in Malaya, Philippines, Indonesia and French Indo-China. They knew, for example that guerrillas had to survive among the masses as “fish survived in water”. Hence, they devised ingenious and brutal methods to deny the guerrilla their water. “Groupings” and “mass internment” became common strategies for conducting low-intensity wars.

ag on the forefront: Barbed Wire Shaped Western America

Still, the lush prairie was ideal for grazing cattle, and new developments with steel plows made the prairie soils ripe for growing crops — a dichotomy that would rumble across the Plains in violent confrontations between ranchers and farmers for years. Barbed wire would play a part in that turmoil, and its use eventually would be found to protect crops and to make intensive animal agriculture economically possible in the vast Plains.

The first U.S. patent for barbed wire was issued to Lucien B. Smith of Kent, Ohio, in 1867, but the barbed wire we know today became popular in 1874 when Joseph Glidden, DeKalb, Ill., perfected it and received patents on his version. At that time, Glidden, Jacob Haish, Frances Washburn and Isaac Ellwood were known as the "Big Four" in the development and marketing of the specialized wire. By 1874, Glidden and Ellwood were through fighting one another for various patent rights and joined forces to form the Barb Fence Co. in DeKalb.

The real boost for the new technology — which had just recently begun to spark the imagination of cattlemen — came in 1876 when an associate of Ellwood, John Warner Gates, fenced off Military Plaza (the area in front of the Alamo in San Antonio) and penned cattle there successfully. That first "demonstration project" convinced the crowd of barbed wire's ability to restrain cattle, and within a few hours Gates had become relatively wealthy in the lobby of the nearby Menger Hotel, taking orders for the wire for Ellwood's Illinois company.

Not long afterward, however, Gates parted company with Ellwood and started his own unlicensed and highly successful barbed-wire manufacturing business in Texas. Finally, as the industry began to consolidate with more than 150 manufacturers making wire for the demand the Old West was creating, Ellwood and Gates buried the hatchet and created the American Steel and Wire Co. That firm would later become part of U.S. Steel Corp., which held a monopoly in the market into the 20th century.

Because barbed wire was an economical way of enclosing large tracts of land, it became popular with cattle and land companies dependant upon grazing the millions of acres of the Great Plains, both north and south. By the 1880s, enough competition existed in the Plains that northern cattle migrating away from blizzards became a problem for southern ranchers, and all cattle were a problem to farmers trying to grow crops. In 1885 southern ranches had fenced their northern borders to prevent migrating herds, and extreme weather killed up to 75% of the migratory cattle at the fence line in what is known as the "Big Die Up.