When hell broke loose in Texas

Barbed wire came to Texas in the late 1870s. Though barbed wire was much cheaper than heart-of-pine planks, some cattlemen would have nothing to do with it. Gradually, though, it caught on and fences that were “horse-high, bull-proof and hog-tight” spread across the land. Barbed wire intensified conflicts between ranchers and farmers, cattlemen and sheepmen, free-range men and enclosed-pasture men, small stockmen and big ranchers. They began to cut each others’ fences. Prowlers in gunnysack hoods roamed at night snipping wire. Ranchhands rode the fence lines on guard for fence-cutters. The result was the Fence-Cutting War. Walter Prescott Webb called it a social upheaval. Like the machine-breaking uprising in England half a century before, it was partly a revolt against change. There were real injustices: Some fences closed what had been public right-of-ways, as with S.G. Miller’s fence that closed the Corpus Christi to Gussettville road, and some shut off access to communal watering holes, before the coming of windmills and artesian wells. The conflict became bloody. A headline in a Chicago paper said, “Hell breaks loose in Texas.” Texas Rangers were sent to quell the violence. Ranger Ira Aten, ordered to track down wire-cutters, said he upped his life insurance and oiled his six-shooter. Rangers hated the duty. They had to infiltrate gangs of known cutters, to get inside information, and then stake out lonely stretches of fences at night, concealed in the shadows, waiting for armed cutters to show up and start snipping...Caller-Times