Barbed-Wire Warfare 453Act (1877) allowed anyone to obtain 640 acres in the
arid states for $1.25 an acre provided the owner irri-
gated part of it within three years. Since the original
claimant could transfer the holding, the ranchers set
their cowboys and other hands to filing claims, which
were then signed over to them. Over 2.6 million acres
were taken up under the act, and according to the best
estimate, 95 percent of the claims were fraudulent—
no sincere effort was made to irrigate the land.
Second, overcrowding became a problem that
led to serious conflicts, even killings, because no one
had uncontestable title to the land. The leading
ranchers banded together in cattlemen’s associations
to deal with overcrowding and with such problems as
quarantine regulations, water rights, and thievery. In
most cases these associations devised effective and
sensible rules, but their functions would better have
been performed by the government, as suchmatters
usually are.
To keep other ranchers’ cattle from those sections
of the public domain they considered their own, the
associations and many individuals began to fence huge
areas. This was possible only because of the invention
in 1874 of barbed wire by Joseph F. Glidden, an
Illinois farmer. By the 1880s thousands of miles of the
new fencing had been strung across the plains, often
across roads and in a few cases around entire commu-
nities. “Barbed-wire wars” resulted, fought by rancher
against rancher, cattleman against sheepman, herder
against farmer. The associations tried to police their
fences and to punish anyone who cut their wire.
Posted signs gave dire warnings to trespassers. “The
Son of a Bitch who opens this fence had better look
out for his scalp,” one such sign announced, another
fine statement of the philosophy of the age.
By stringing so much wire the cattlemen were
unwittingly destroying their own way of doing busi-
ness. On a truly open range, cattle could fend for
themselves, instinctively finding water during
droughts, drifting safely downwind before blizzards.
Barbed wire prevented their free movement. During
winter storms these slender strands became as lethal
as high-tension wires: the drifting cattle piled up
against them and died by the thousands.
The boom times were ending. Overproduction
was driving down the price of beef; expenses were
on the rise; many sections of the range were badly
overgrazed. The dry summer of 1886 left the stock
in such poor condition as winter approached that
theRocky Mountain Husbandmanurged its readers
to sell their cattle despite the prevailing low prices
rather than “endanger the whole herd by having the
range overstocked.”
Some ranchers took this advice; those who did
not made a fatal error. Winter that year arrived earlyCommission. “That accounts for my ranch being
where it is. The next water from me in one direction is
23 miles; now no man can have a ranch between these
two places. I have control of the grass, the same as
though I owned it.” By having his cowhands take out
homestead claims along watercourses in his region, a
rancher could greatly expand the area he dominated.
In the late 1870s one Colorado cattle baron con-
trolled an area roughly the size of Connecticut and
Rhode Island even though he owned only 105 small
parcels that totaled about 15,500 acres.
With the demand for meat rising and transporta-
tion cheap, princely fortunes could be made in a few
years. Capitalists from the East and from Europe began
to pour funds into the business. Eastern “dudes” like
Theodore Roosevelt, a young New York assemblyman
who sank over $50,000 in his Elkhorn Ranch in the
Dakota Territory in 1883, bought up cattle as a sort of
profitable hobby. (Roosevelt, clad in buckskin and bear-
ing a small armory of rifles and six-shooters, made quite
a splash in Dakota, but not as a rancher.) Soon large
outfits such as the Nebraska Land and Cattle Company,
controlled by British investors, and the Union Cattle
Company of Wyoming, a $3 million corporation, dom-
inated the business, just as large companies had taken
over most of the important gold and silver mines.
Unlike other exploiters of the West’s resources, cat-
tle ranchers did not at first injure or reduce any public
resource. Grass eaten by their stock annually renewed
itself; droppings from the animals enriched the soil.
Furthermore, ranchers poached on the public domain
because there was no reasonable way for them to obtain
legal possession of the large areas necessary to raise cat-
tle on the plains. Federal land laws made no allowance
for the special conditions of the semiarid West.
A system to take account for those conditions was
soon devised by Major John Wesley Powell, later the
director of the United States Geological Survey. His
Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United
States(1879) suggested that western lands be divided
into three classes: irrigable lands, timber lands, and
“pasturage” lands. On the pasturage lands the “farm
unit” ought to be at least 2,560 acres (four sections),
Powell urged. Groups of these units should be orga-
nized into “pasturage districts” in which the ranchers
“should have the right to make their own regulations
for the division of lands, the use of the water... and
for the pasturage of lands in common or in severalty.”
Barbed-Wire Warfare
Congress refused to change the land laws in any basic
way, and this had two harmful effects. First, it encour-
aged fraud: Those who could not get title to enough
land honestly turned to subterfuge. The Desert Land