Distinctly Montana Magazine

w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m 55 by JOSEPH SHELTON H ISTORY IS MADE IN SMALL MOMENTS. Sometimes it starts with the sound of laughter. In the summer of 1874, a man named Henry Rose was demonstrating his invention to a crowd at the county fair in DeKalb, Illinois. Rose had a problem that was familiar to many who had livestock. Cattle would press their foreheads against the wire of a fence until they'd dug up the stakes and escaped. Rose had what he thought was an ingenious solution: a board studded with prongs you would attach to the cow's head. The side of the board with sharp points would rest against the cow's skin, and if it started to push, it would stick itself. In the years since, Rose's invention gained refinements. No longer a thorned helmet, it became a board you hung at fore- head height along the board or wire of your existing fence. Though many throughout the West had similar needs, and poor Rose wasn't the first to come up with a hare-brained solution, his invention was received derisively by at least three attendees that day: Jacob Haish, Isaac Elwood, and Joseph Glidden. Laughing openly, one of them commented that it would have been so much easier just to put the spiky points on the wire itself? Months later, all three had filed patents for some version of a barbed wire. A mere decade later, variants of barbed wire were being manufactured by no less than a hundred Ameri- can companies. Homesteaders, eager to keep their livestock penned in, adopted barbed wire quickly—especially on the prairie, where wood and stone were too scarce to serve as building materials. The basic principle was the same across many variations: a wire twisted into barbs and then another wire twisted on each side of a barb to keep them from moving. Some had big- ger or smaller barbs, more or less tensile strength, sharper or duller edges. But Joseph Glidden's basic design would prove to be the most used. Barbed wire was a complex symbol from the beginning. It enclosed and protected small ranchers and farmers, who regarded their acreage as their own private piece of a vast land of opportunity. But barbed wire also meant the dividing up of the open range to the cattlemen and cowboys who had grown used to driving their herds, not to mention watering and feeding them, wherever they pleased. To many Native Americans, the wire represented the limits of the reserva- tions onto which they were relocated. And, a few decades later, the razor-wire-lined trenches of the Great War would blacken an already complicated legacy. But today, to the working Montanans all across the state who buy it by the bale, it means what it always has: it keeps the cattle in and the critters out. BARBED WIRE ON THE RANGE BARBED WIRE ON THE RANGE

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