(photo with permission from Darius Norvilas)
Don’t Fence Me In: the Texas Fence-Cutter War
By Kathleen Rice Adams
“I’m Going
to Leave Old Texas Now” (The Cowman's Lament)
I’m going to
leave old Texas now.
They’ve got
no use for the long-horn cow.
They’ve
plowed and fenced my cattle range,
And the
people there are all so strange.
I’ll take my
horse and I’ll take my rope,
And hit the
trail upon a lope.
Say adios to
the Alamo,
And turn my
head toward Mexico.
The hard,
hard ground shall be my bed
And my
saddle seat shall hold my head.
When I waken
from my dreams
I’ll eat my
bread and my sardines.
When I die,
please bury me
In a narrow
grave just six by three.
I’ll tell
Saint Peter that I know
A cowboy’s
soul ain’t white as snow.
Yet in that
far-off cattle land
He sometimes
acted like a man.
(Texas folksong, source obscure)
In
the late 1860s and early 1870s, Texas saw a massive influx of former
Confederates dispossessed by the Civil War and seeking a place to start over.
Texas seemed like a good spot: The state offered plenty of open range and brimmed
with feral cattle called longhorns. Many a man with nothing more than guts and
grit built a fortune and a legacy by shagging longhorns from deep scrub and driving
the tough, stubborn, nasty-tempered critters north to the railheads in Kansas
and Nebraska. Others pushed herds to Montana and Wyoming to begin new lives where
the West was even wilder.
Between
1866 and 1890, cowboys drove an estimated twelve million longhorns and one
million horses north. A crew of twelve to twenty men could push a herd of 2,000
to 3,000 beeves about ten to fifteen miles a day, reaching Kansas railheads in
three to four months.
The
development of barbed wire in the mid-1870s—along with an incursion of sheepmen
and farmers—put a crimp in the cattle drives by crisscrossing Texas’s wide-open
spaces with miles and miles and miles
of fence. To protect themselves and their herds from the yahoos who would use
Texas range for something besides Texas cattle, wealthy ranchers strung wire
around the land they owned or leased, often extending their fences across
public land, as well. What once had been open range across which cowboys drove enormous
herds of beef on the hoof became parceled off, causing no end of frustration
and unfriendly behavior.
Fence-cutting
began almost as soon as the first wire went up. Small confrontations over “the
Devil’s rope” happened frequently, with wire-nipping taking place in more than
half of Texas counties.
In 1883,
the conflict turned deadly. Instead of merely cutting fences that got in the
way during trail drives, bands of armed cowboy vigilantes calling themselves
names like Owls, Javelinas, and Blue Devils destroyed fences simply because the
fences existed. Fence-cutting raids usually occurred at night, and often the
vigilantes left messages warning the fence’s owner not to rebuild. Some went so
far as to leave coffins nailed to fenceposts or on ranchers’ porches. During
one sortie, vigilantes cut nineteen miles of fence, piled the wire on a stack
of cedar posts, and lit a $6,000 fire.
In
response, cattlemen hired armed men to guard their wire…with predictable
results. Clashes became more violent, more frequent, and bloodier. In 1883
alone, at least three men were killed in Brown County, a hotspot of
fence-cutting activity, during what came to be known as the Texas Fence-Cutter
War.
The bloodiest
period of the Fence-Cutter War lasted for only about a year, but in that period
damages from fence-cutting and range fires totaled an estimated $20 million—$1
million in Brown County alone.
Although
politicians stayed well away from the hot-button issue for about a decade, in
early 1884 the Texas legislature declared fence-cutting a felony punishable by
a prison term of one to five years. The following year, the U.S. Congress
outlawed stringing fence across public land. Together, the new laws ended the
worst of the clashes, although the occasional fracas broke out in the far
western portion of Texas into the early part of the 20th Century.
The
Texas Rangers were assigned to stop several fence-cutting outbreaks, and being
the Texas Rangers, they proved remarkably effective…with one notable exception.
In February 1885, Texas Ranger Ben Warren was shot and killed outside
Sweetwater, Texas, while trying to serve a warrant for three suspected
fence-cutters. Two of the three were convicted of Warren’s murder and sentenced
to life in prison.
In
1888, a brief resurgence of fence-cutting violence erupted in Navarro County,
prompting famed Texas Ranger Ira Aten to place dynamite charges at intervals
along one fence line. Aten’s method was a mite too extreme for the Texas
Adjutant General, who ordered the dynamite removed. The mere rumor of the
explosive’s presence brought fence-cutting to a rapid halt in the area, though.
In
my debut novel Prodigal Gun, a
barbed-wire fence touches off a war in the Texas Hill Country, bringing an
infamous gunman to Texas for the first time since he left to fight for the
Confederacy sixteen years earlier.
To celebrate the book’s release,
I’ll give an e-copy in the winner’s choice of formats to one person who
comments today!
Prodigal Gun
A dangerous man. A desperate woman. A love
no war could kill.
Widowed
rancher Jessie Caine buried her heart with the childhood sweetheart Yankees
killed on a distant battlefield. Sixteen years later, as a Texas range war
looms and hired guns arrive to pursue a wealthy carpetbagger’s agenda, Jessie
discovers the only man she ever loved isn’t dead.
At least
not yet.
Embittered
by a brother’s betrayal, notorious gunman Calhoun is a dangerous man, come home
to do an unsavory job. A bushwhacker’s bullet nearly takes his life on Jessie’s
land, trapping him in a standoff between the past he tried to bury and the infamy
he never will. One taste of the only woman he ever loved puts more than his
life and her ranch in the crossfire.
With a
price on his head, a debt to a wealthy employer around his neck, and a defiant
woman tugging at his heart, Calhoun’s guns may not be enough to keep him from
the grave. Caught between his enemies and hers, Jessie faces an agonizing
choice: Which of her dreams will die?
LINKS:
Paperback
will be available Thursday, Nov. 20
Kathleen Rice Adams
A
Texan to the bone, Kathleen Rice Adams spends her days chasing news stories and
her nights and weekends shooting it out with Wild West desperados. Leave the
upstanding, law-abiding heroes to other folks…even Kathleen’s good guys wear
black hats.
Visit
Kathleen on the web at:
