First big fencing job was on the Laureles

Before barbed wire — what cowboys called Texas silk — Mifflin Kenedy built a 36-mile fence of pine boards and cypress posts. Kenedy’s fence stretched across a peninsula, from the Oso to Laureles Creek, which closed the Laureles Ranch in 1868. Capt. Andrew Anderson recalled that when the fence was being built, he hauled “a million feet of lumber” to the Laureles aboard the schooner Flour Bluff. Isom H. Thomas, caporal of Laureles, said Kenedy took a lively interest as the fence went up. “He would look down a long line and if he saw the slightest deviation from a straight line, the kink had to be straightened out before he would pass it.” A year later, Kenedy’s friend and former partner Richard King began to fence King Ranch. Like Kenedy, he used planks and cypress posts treated with creosote. Within three years, by 1874, King had 70,000 acres fenced. The Coleman, Mathis and Fulton Pasture Co. began fencing in 1871. One fence was north of Fulton and one stretched from Puerto Bay to Corpus Christi Bay. After a bad drought and severe winter in 1873, ranchers in South Texas lost thousands of head of cattle. They starved and froze to death, helped along by their weakened condition. Mifflin Kenedy, with his grass protected on the fenced-in Laureles, didn’t lose a single head. Other cattlemen took notice. The following year, patents for barbed wire and a machine for making it were granted to Joseph Farwell Glidden of De Kalb, Ill. Barbed-wire fences soon stretched across the land. But not in South Texas. Ranchers distrusted anything from the North; barbed wire had another strike against it, being invented by an Illinois farmer. They also feared the “thorny wire” would wound cattle and give entry to the deadly screw worm. So barbed wire was slow to catch on in South Texas...Caller-Times