Barbed Wire. Reviel Netz

was not just aesthetic. Besides the loss of value owing to the death or severe illness of cows, screwworms were a severe drag on the cow economy in two ways: they demanded skilled labor, and (since birth invariably led to wounds) they made it undesirable to allow birth during the summer, thus curtailing the natural growth in the number of marketable cows.⁵¹ The plains were rapidly moving away from the simple nature-turned-into-profit of the mavericking days. Barbed wire created the conditions for a new type of cattle industry; simultaneously, it was a constant source of loss to it. Thus we should not be surprised that, among some farmers, barbed wire was unpopular. Farmers in the late 1870 were surrounded by barbs they had not asked for, causing damages they could not control. Now, an interesting feature of barbed wire is its symmetry. While it is possible in principle to have barbs arranged so that they point in just one direction, it is far simpler to have them double pointed, so that the wire can be made “blindly,” without figuring how the barbs precisely fit. In other words, the topology does not distinguish “inside” from “outside”—violence is projected in both ways. In a very real way, barbed wire is contagious: by enclosing a space, it is thereby automatically present in all areas bordering on that space. Imagine that you are a farmer, used to controlling your animals without barbed wire, now finding yourself adjacent to it. This could happen anywhere, especially since almost from the beginning, the railroad had used barbed wire to prevent animals from straying onto the tracks and causing damage to the trains.⁵² Take, for instance, Mr. Palmer, a representative of Jericho to Vermont’s General Assembly, who in 1880 drafted a bill to limit the use of barbed wire. He focused on the injuries caused to horse and cattle by railroad barbed fences and concluded that “the public sentiment of the community was against its use in these three cases: along highways; between adjoining landowners without mutual consent; and between railroads and pastures without the consent of the farmer.”⁵³ Bills to prohibit the use of barbed wire were put forth in several states, always defeated in the West but, for brief periods, made law in some eastern states. Mr. Palmer actually succeeded (as did some of his colleagues in Connecticut and Maine), but by the end of 1880s, no state made barbed wire illegal any longer; the plains had reached the North.

      Some compromise had to be made between the conflicting interests. In fact, following the first years of violent encounters between animal and iron, a new relationship was gradually established. To some extent, barbs became less sharp (less “vicious,” to use the technical term). It is instructive to compare the declared objectives of barbed wire patents between their introduction and their later accommodation to farmers’ needs. In 1876, Parker Wineman of Illinois boasted of his barbs that they “will be sure to penetrate the skin and give pain”;⁵⁴ five years later (i.e., immediately after barbed wire began to be politically contested), Joseph H. Connelly of Pennsylvania stated that his particular invention “will resist force and turn stock without entangling or otherwise injuring them.”⁵⁵ One such invention is typically praised in a Washburn and Moen leaflet: “the barbs are short and lance shaped, so that there is NO DANGER OF INJURY TO STOCK. . . . They will prick and scratch but NEVER TEAR THE SKIN. . . . It is well known that the sensation of pain is at the surface of the skin, hence the smart or prick . . . is all that is required. NO WOUNDS ARE MADE, consequently NO LOSS OF CATTLE in the southwest from putrefying sores, in which flies deposit their eggs.”⁵⁶

      As humans learned more about animal pain, animals learned more about human violence. Animals learned to avoid barbed wire, and sometimes they were deliberately taught. A commercial leaflet encouraging the use of barbed wire advises the farmer “to lead [young horses] to the fence and let them prick their noses by contact with it . . . they will let it thoroughly alone thereafter.”⁵⁷ This expresses the special interest humans always had in the physical fitness of horse, whereas cows were generally expected to pick up such knowledge through sheer experience. Their knowledge was apparently transmitted between generations, by the experience, for example, of calves following their mothers (one should remember that the cow economy of the nineteenth century still did allow calves to grow up following their mothers). To close this circle of mutual knowledge, finally, the stage was reached where manufacturers, exploiting the knowledge gained by animals, produced more conspicuous barbs, now functioning not only as instruments of direct violence but also as a more indirect instrument of intimidation (in the technical language, barbs became more “obvious”). This transition was essentially complete by the end of the 1880s, when the success of barbed wire as a tool for the education of cows can be considered complete. Simultaneously, more and more cows were fenced in, rather than fenced out, partly because of the general trend to establish landholding, and partly to “protect” the cows. The topology was now inverted, just as it had previously been for the Indians. Instead of fences preventing the motion of cows from outside a closed line to its inside (protecting the property of farmers), fences now prevented the motion of cows from inside a closed line to its outside (imprisoning cows inside ranches). Fenced inside, cows could be taken care of in the case of screwworm infestation, and winter catastrophes could not return in such harshness—so that, to a certain extent, cows were fenced in to protect them from fences.⁵⁸ Cows and plains were transformed, so that barbed wire became both natural and necessary.

      With the gained perspective of nearly a decade of barbed wire use, Washburn and Moen adopted an almost historiographical tone in their commercial leaflet of 1883, already quoted briefly. The analysis offered is especially sharp and acute, and it is worthy of lengthy quotation as a summary of the early development of barbed wire:

      The fence of plain wire was far from satisfactory. . . . It had no terrors for trespassing animals. . . . [S]omething else seemed to be needed to realize the perfect fence, and this came in its own time, in Barb Fence.

      Barb wire was invented by a farmer, to meet farmer needs [it should be understood that Washburn and Moen, having won the ranch business, were now busy introducing barbed wire into cultivated areas, hence the stress on the “farmer needs”], in 1873, at first a crude working out of the parent idea; the making of fence wire repellent by borrowing from nature the principle of the sharp pricking thorn, thus appealing to the sense of pain and danger that resides in the skin of the farm animal.

      The principle which was first sharply challenged as cruel, has, on the contrary, been found to be humane, for these accidents of the old style were common [a litany of non-barbed-wire fence complaints follows]. . . . [T]he accidents from barb wire have been mainly of a trivial character [in a brilliant rhetorical move, following the description of accidents involving traditional fences, the author is now able to refer to wounds caused by barbed wire as “accidents”—even though, of course, the causing of wounds is the essential function of barbed wire], which, in such cases, have been warnings, salutary in their effect, and have educated the beasts in the new law of respecting fences.

      This, then, was the basic function of barbed wire: a form of education—of manipulating animals—through violence. From a broader perspective, we may conceive the manipulation, or transformation, as follows. As mentioned earlier, cows brought to America by the Spanish multiplied immensely on the loose, so that a new breed of semiferal cows was created on the margins of Spanish settlement, especially in Texas. This breed was gradually re-domesticated by Anglo-Americans, until faced with the need to use those animals in the conquest of the West, the process of re-domestication had to proceed much more quickly. Barbed wire served to retame, by a shock, an entire breed, partly through its immediate impact, and partly through its indirect biological effects. Fenced cows could be bred in a more controlled way. Ranches, defined in space, became also defined in stock (and gradually, as a rule, limited in numbers).⁵⁹ Breeding generally took the form of the introduction of bulls from eastern states—a docile and fat breed.⁶⁰ Backed by eastern investors, eastern owners came to hold more and more of the ranches, so that eastern cow-handling practices gradually became dominant.⁶¹ Eastern capital, eastern iron, eastern semen: all were pouring into the West to turn it into a new, artificial land for the use of the East.

      All of this, let us remember, was based on a simple fact about Texan cows—indeed, about most animals. Therein lies our misfortune: our skins, just a little beneath the surface, are endowed with special nerves activated by pressure rising above rather low thresholds. You can use those nerves against us. By cutting through the boundary of our skins, you can act to protect the boundaries of your property,