Blue Highways: A Journey into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

THAT a handcrank coffee mill helped kill off the Old West has not been widely appreciated. For five thousand miles I’d driven between fences, but along New Mexico 81, for the first time, there was none. At last I’d come to open range, a thing disappearing faster than the condor. In 1874, an Illinoisan, Joseph Glidden, received the first patent for a barbed fencing wire he made on a converted coffee mill. Ranchers called the stuff “the Devil’s hatband,” but they saw their economic future in it: the new fence gave means to control breeding and thereby upgrade stock, and it allowed a single well to water an entire herd. Before barbed wire, the West had few long fences because there wasn’t wood enough to build them, and cattle trampled wooden fences anyway. No alternative to open range and cowhands existed. But a barbed wire fence was cheap to buy, erect, and maintain over the big acreages required in the West, and cattle shied from it once they ran against it. In the 1870s some animals cut themselves to death on it, and one rancher said that at first he could hardly drive a cow between two posts. But Glidden’s invention offered something even more important: a means of staking property claims, particularly on plats belonging nominally to the federal government. Ranchers fenced claims to establish ownership, and entire towns ended up encircled or cut off from access to public land. Neighbors tore out each other’s fences, and President Cleveland ordered the Army to take down il...