Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's guest producer Dave Coustan over there, and um, this is short stuff, So get up, get e up, literally, because we're gonna go back to the Old West, the root and two. In Old West, we're jumping in the old way back machine. We're going to eighteen seventy six, like Back to the Future three. That's right. The movie I only saw once. That's all you need. Uh. Some people love those. I didn't like
the sequels, but we don't have time for that. I never saw the second one. Okay, go you skipped you did one in three? Yeah? How interesting? Yeah, I like odd numbers. Uh. So it's eighteen seventy six. And there we're in San Antonio, Texas. Yep, there's no basement in the Alamo. There's not. And the Alamo is quite tiny, actually it really is. It's like the Mona Lisa of buildings, that's right, or the Josh and Chuck of podcasters. People don't know. We're only two ft tall. So, uh. We're
looking upon a scene. We're at a ranch and there's a man over there named John Warren Gates, and he is they call him bet a million Gates, And we have just thrown some money down on a bet of whether or not this little wire pin he has can hold in these bulls and cows and horses and these crazy longhorn steers. And my money is on no way, Gates, no way, that little wire is going to hold these
animals in. Yeah. And I mean we put a significant amount of money down because we just printed it ourselves, because it's eighteen seventies six in the Old West, and you can do that right, hundred semolians. But I bet against him as well, Chuck. And the reason why is because it's just a little a little couple of things of wire with some barbs on it, and these are
some angry steers. And what's more, he has a gaucho assistant wearing in Spanish at these um these cows and uh, trying to get them riled up and buy goodness, we just lost our bet, you know. But it was quite a party, and we're hammered and we're gonna go back to our canvas tent and sweat I ate the worm. So here's the deal. That story may or not be not true. May or be not true. Mayor be not true your mayor. That's right. I'm glad we leave stuff like this in. Yeah, that's what makes this us so. Uh,
we don't know if that's all true or not. It's a great story, that's for sure. But what is super true is that bed a million Gates was trying to drum up some early press for this new fence made by a man named Joseph Glidden that uh, the Native Americans called, well, some people called the thorny fences. The Native Americans called it what the devil's rope because they
didn't like it. But we just call it barbed wire. Yep, barbed wire and um, and so Joseph Glyndon didn't invent that stuff, although he did have a patent on what we When you look at barbed wire, what you're looking at is the variety that Joseph Glinden came up with, But there are plenty of people who came up with their own version prior to him. And I was looking at like this list of them with pictures. Some of those are just vicious looks like that. Um, they're basically
like cut up razor blades stuck in wire. I mean, just horrible stuff. But what Glinton did was he took a barb and he twisted it around a wire, and then he added a second wire, just a plain wire to twisted around the first wire to hold the barb in place, keep it from sliding. But even more important than that, because it's pretty simple, and somebody probably would have come up with that sooner or later, was he patented it, and he invented a method of um producing it,
mass producing it. And brother, did he mass produce it? Yeah, I mean before he he very brilliantly decided to keep those barbs in place, which was the key. Those cows would just go up and hoof of them over to the side and slip right on through and sneak out to the skating rink because they are cows are well known as being among the smartest animals. Yes, and their hoofs are you know, they can do very fine detailed work,
like an abacus work. That's right, So I believe before my dumb jokes, you were saying how much he was pumping this wire out by eight his factory into cab, Illinois. We're turning out two hundred and sixty three thousand miles of wire. Yes, and chuck, that is enough to circle the Earth ten times over max. That's a trillion big max stacked and yeah, and this was a big deal. It wasn't just like, oh, he invented He invented some stuff and it helped keep some cows in and now
we all use it and it's pretty neat. Like this changed the face of the American West, along with other stuff, but it had had a big impact on the foundation and settling of the American West. Yeah, I mean at least as much as like the locomotive, the telegraph. Um Like, it was an enormous invention, especially for something so simple
barbed wire. It's extremely simple. But up to this point, the Native Americans had been um living nomadic existences, hunting, buffalo um, just basically moving around the Great Plains and the prairie for basically fifteen thousand years. Uh, Like European ancestry whites had showed up, but the first ones that showed up basically said, Hey, I think this is I
think you guys are onto something. I'm gonna embrace this kind of free range stuff and I'm bringing cattle and sheep and all sorts of other animals but I'm not gonna I'm just gonna let them just graze warever and just move them around as the weather permits. And that worked okay. But when barbed wire came along, all of a sudden, these open, enormous, vast expanses suddenly became closed off.
And what used to just be common property that belonged to everyone and no one, suddenly huge slices of it were being um fenced off, literally, and that changed tens of thousands of years of tradition in ten years maybe less. Yeah, And here's the thing. It's not like this was the first fence. In the West. There were you know, they could build wood fences, but in the Prairie States they didn't have a ton of lumber. Uh, there weren't trees everywhere.
Wooden fences are super expensive, rock and stone walls like are you kidding me to do for a whole farm? Super expensive and also scarce. But what barbed wire did is it democratized it and made it super cheap or relatively cheap, I guess, compared to the other things, and easy and fast to say this is my area and you're not coming in, and these cows aren't getting out. Yeah, and we'll we'll talk about how that changed the nuts
and bolts of it. Right after this, so chuck. When people started putting up these fences, not everybody was on board with this. The Native Americans didn't like it, like you said, They called the barbed wire devil rope the old timey cowboys. Um, they didn't like it because they embraced free range practices and all of a sudden, they're cattle were getting caught up in this stuff. Because part of the problem with barbed wires not only did it keep stuff in, it kept stuff out, and so you
could get tangled up in it either way. And the cattle that were used to just kind of roaming around free range will get caught in this stuff and would die of starvation infections. Um, they just get stuck in the fence. It would never move again for the rest of their lives, the rest of their short lives. Well, yeah, and consider the Homestead Act. President Abraham Lincoln signed this in eighteen sixty two that said, hey, are you an honest citizen of the US. You can be a freed slave,
you can be a woman. You can go claim up to a hundred and sixty acres of land out there in the west. Just build a house, work that land for five years. So all of a sudden, there's a lot of people you talked about, the Native Americans ranging around. Imagine your tribe, riding your horses to where you want to go, and all of a sudden you're like, well, here's a hundred and sixty acre fence that I now
have to drive around right. Drive, yeah, yeah, you just a cattle drive okay, drive your horse right, all right. I sounded like a city slicker there for a second. But in the same way, you accidentally stumbled into the proper termin knowledge. And that's right. But you know, like we said, these European cowboys, the Native Americans, they're used to this free range, and all of a sudden, these homesteading farmers, a lot of whom were European. They were
staking their claim to property. Uh, sometimes legally, sometimes illegally, right, But the result was the same. Man, if you put up these fences, whether that was your land or it was actually like common land, um, you were claiming it as your own. And if you had a gun and a rifle and some hired hands, you could defend that land that was really common property. But you claimed for your own and so the for all intents and purposes,
it was your land now. And this had an extensive domino effect where the free range cowboys and Native Americans UM lost that common grazing area. It got smaller and smaller. And so as the grazing land became more and more concentrated, there are more and more people, UM whose herds were eating off of less and less land, and so it no longer became a viable existence free range. And then if you were a smaller landowner, you would have your
land encroached on by these larger landowners. Probably some guys would show up with a gun and be like czar heard now. And so all of this UM. The the upshot of all this is that the people who had the most land ended up taking over even more land, and just a handful of people got the American West concentrated into their hands. That's right. So, which is kind of the history of America in a lot of ways. It's still going on today. I mean, think about when
like Home Depot or Lows shows up in town. The hardware store goes out of business, and the people who used to work there now work at Lows. Or home depot. So there were plenty of disputes. This was the Old West. Plenty of them involved this fights and guns. But there were actual gangs. There was gangs called the Blue Devils or the have Alina's, and they were called fence cutting wars.
They would go in and the dead of night or maybe in broad daylight, even if they were brazen and well armed, and they would cut these wires and they would leave messages and threats saying don't rebuild the stuff. There were shootouts, there were people that were killed in these fence cutting wars. Authorities eventually stepped in were like, you know, the West, it needs to be a little less wild, uh. And those wars ended, but the barbed
wire endured. It did. And I mean, you know, when you think of the barbed wire, you think of the Old West, but you also nowadays think of you know, barb barbed wire stretching from Switzerland to the English Channel in World War One, or wire uh uh um barbed wire around um prisons. UM W. H. Olden wrote a poem about it. He said that um barbed wire proclaims that you are kept out or kept in, and when you resist, it ripped you other barriers weather, crumble, grow, moss.
Wire merely rusts and keeps its sting, which reading which doesn't doesn't really it doesn't rhyme, but it's still pretty good. Yeah, I mean the military has been using it since Teddy Roosevelt used it. Certainly world War One, it was used as a weapon. And uh, yeah, any any prison movie you're ever gonna see, you're gonna see a formidable coiled strip of razor wire around the top of those fences. It's like an extra silent character in most movies, right,
especially You've got mail. Oh that was from the last episode. Right. Uh, If you want to know more about barbed wire, we'll just start walking and fella, you're bound to wander into it sooner or later. Just brings some antibiotics because you're going to get an infection. And since I said that, that's the end of the episode, and since it's a short stuff, that means that short stuff it's over. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio's How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M