[Cattle barons carved up Texas with barbed wire in the late 19th
century, separating poor farmers and landless cowboys from vital
resources for their struggling cattle herds. So the cowboys formed
fence-cutting gangs to preserve the open range.]
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WHEN TEXAS COWBOYS FOUGHT PRIVATE PROPERTY  
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David Griscom
October 4, 2022
Jacobin
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_ Cattle barons carved up Texas with barbed wire in the late 19th
century, separating poor farmers and landless cowboys from vital
resources for their struggling cattle herds. So the cowboys formed
fence-cutting gangs to preserve the open range. _

An 1886 illustration of a cowboy and cow camp., Library of Congress
via Wikimedia Commons

 

When barbed wire arrived in the late 1800s, it fundamentally changed
the Texas landscape. The famous rancher Charles Goodnight
once recounted
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run-in with the Pueblo chief Standing Deer, who, returning to Taos,
New Mexico, from a trading trip with the Kiowa, became lost and ended
up on Goodnight’s land. When Goodnight asked Standing Deer how he
got lost, considering Standing Deer had “lived in this country all
[his life],” Standing Deer replied, “Si, señor! Pero alambre!
alambre! alambre! todas partes!” (“But wire! wire! wire!
everywhere!”)

Native Americans called barbed wire the “devil’s rope.” Poor
farmers and cowboys called it the “devil’s hatband.” They all
recognized it as a tool of dispossession.

The wire was meant to protect the grazing land of wealthy ranchers. As
their cattle herds flourished, others collapsed. In the cattle
industry, a two-tiered system was developing: landed cattle barons
enjoyed protected access to the best water sources and grazing land,
while poor farmers and often-landless cowboys struggled to navigate
the newly partitioned terrain. Herds cut off from water by the new
fencing died of dehydration. The earliest forms of barbed wire had
brutally sharp barbs, and in bad conditions cattle could get snagged
on wire and die by the thousands.

Poor farmers and cowboys had long relied on the “open range,” the
idea that the land belonged to all. When barbed wire closed that open
range, they fought back.

Enclosure and the End of the Open Range

After the American Civil War, European and Northern capital flooded
into Texas, causing rampant speculation on land and railroads. Outside
capitalists and corporations, along with a handful of local planters
and big ranch families, accumulated large tracts across the state.
While economic conditions were dire for freed African Americans, poor
whites, and many Tejanos (Mexican-descended Texans), a powerful new
class was rising in Texas.

Between 1880 and 1883 alone, the price of cattle per head soared
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$7 to $25. As the price of land skyrocketed too, the wealthy landed
classes sought to protect their lucrative investments. To keep poor
farmers and unlanded cowboys from tapping into their resources, they
turned to a new technology: barbed wire.

Cattle barons put up barbed wire in a frenzy. They cordoned off the
best water sources and did not hesitate to fence over public land and
roads. Adding to the outrage of poor farmers and cowboys, the cattle
barons often continued to use public grazing land until the grasses
were depleted, after which they would retreat to their enclosures.

The enclosure of the land was driving the open range toward
extinction. Small farmers, cowboys, and a few of the more established
Texan cattlemen were furious at the encroachment by foreign
capitalists and corporations, and believed
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Texas Legislature would be quick to act to defend the open range. But
time marched on, and no intervention came.

Beleaguered cowboys first started cutting fences out of a need to
access roads and water, or move cattle to market. But as the fencing
continued to proliferate and the cattle barons became more brazen,
fence cutting took on a vigilante character.

The Fence Cutting Wars

Poor farmers and cowboys organized themselves into fence-cutting
gangs, with colorful names like the Owls, the Javelinas, the Blue
Devils, and the Knights of the Knippers. Under the cover of night,
they set to work cutting down fences. They did not stop at fences that
enclosed public land — the fence cutters aimed to rid the state
entirely of the devil’s rope. As fence cutting became more common,
cattle barons hired armed thugs to shoot at the fence cutters, and the
fence cutters armed themselves in response. Thus began the Texas Fence
Cutting Wars.

Fence cutting was simultaneously an act of survival and an act of
protest. Near Waco, a rancher who had enclosed a water tank had his
fences cut and grazing land burned. The fence cutters left a note:

You are ordered not to fence in the Jones tank, as it is a public tank
and is the only water there for stock on this range. Until people can
have time to build tanks and catch water, this should not be fenced.
No good man will undertake to watch this fence, for the Owls will
catch him. There is no more grass on this range than the stock can eat
this year.

The fence-cutting movement was wildly popular with poor and
working-class Texans. The Texas Greenback Party, a precursor to the
populist People’s Party, encouraged fence cutting, framing it as a
fight against monopoly power and warning that the fencing was an
attempt to “convert farmers and small stockmen into serfs.” This
prediction would turn out to be largely correct, not only in Texas but
across the Southwest. The transformation of small farmers into tenant
farmers would fuel the great populist agrarian movement to come.

Texas was engulfed in class conflict. Fence-cutting gangs popped up
across the state, and over half the counties in Texas saw some form of
the practice. Newspapers either supported or decried the act, but all
recognized it as a populist movement against the enclosure of the
land. As the Galveston Daily News wrote:

Fence-cutting never would have become so great and destructive if it
had not met with such popular sentiment. . . . It found its way into
the fireside of every home, and the grievances of the lawless element
of the communistic fence-cutters was held up in glowing colours.

Though the fence cutters themselves were well-organized in the
practical sense, the political side of the movement was not. Their
lack of representatives allowed newspapermen and politicians to
project their beliefs onto the fence cutters. For example, this note
posted in Coleman County merged the fight against monopoly power with
racial hatred and resentment of the progressive policies of
Reconstruction, a conflation for which there is otherwise no evidence:

Down with monopolies, they can’t exist in Texas and especially in
Coleman County; away with your foreign capitalists; the range and soil
of Texas belong to the heroes of the South; no monopolies and don’t
tax us to school the n*****; Give us homes as God intended, and not
gates to churches and towns and schools and above all give us water
for our stock.

Eventually, a good number of the fence cutters would be recruited into
the growing Texas socialist movement of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, which sought to merge the demands of rural
dispossessed farmers with those of the industrial proletariat. But
this work only began in earnest once the fence cutters had been
thoroughly crushed.

“These Hell Hounds of Texas”

The Texas Fence Cutting Wars caused estimated losses upward
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million. Eventually, the cries of the landed elite in Texas were
answered by the state: in 1884, a special session of the Texas
Legislature was called to deal with the crisis. The debate was heated,
with one legislator calling the fence cutters “the rag-tag and
bob-tail ruffians, these hell hounds of Texas.”

There was little doubt that fence cutting would be criminalized, but
what was to be done about ranchers who were fencing over public roads
and lands? Here the Texas Legislature stood with the rich, making
fence cutting a felony punishable by two to five years in prison,
while for the cattle barons who encroached on public land,
the punishment
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misdemeanor and a small fine of $10 to $100.

While the new laws lowered the temperature, they did not end fence
cutting in Texas. That would take enforcement by the Texas Rangers,
who seemed to take perverse pleasure in hunting the fence cutters. In
one telling example
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Texas Rangers, Ira Aten and Jim King, embedded themselves with poor
farmers in Navarro County, working with them during the day. At night,
King would entertain them with his fiddle, while Aten purchased
dynamite and set out to make bombs to place around fences in the area
— essentially making fence cutting punishable by death.

When his superiors in Austin heard of his plans, Aten was ordered to
return immediately, but the damage was done: the fear of death slowed
fence cutting in the area for a while. While fence cutting did not
completely go away, and would return particularly during periods of
drought, increased enforcement by the Texas Rangers and the sheer
scale of enclosure in Texas meant it would never rise again to its
1880s peak.

The fence cutters lost, but their devastation and the problems that
came out of the enclosure remained. The veterans of the Fence Cutting
Wars were eventually won over by another form of direct action:
politics. The Farmers’ Alliance, the People’s Party, and the Texas
Socialist Party would count many fence cutters among their ranks.

Texas has a rich history of working-class politics, from the fence
cutters to the abolitionist German communes
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Central Texas. Through all the dark chapters in Texas’s history,
there were brave people who sacrificed to build a more just world. We
should remember them as we make our own history today.

_DAVID GRISCOM is a writer and Texan based in Austin and the cohost of
the podcast Left Reckoning
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_Subscribe to JACOBIN [[link removed]] today, get four
beautiful editions a year, and help us build a real, socialist
alternative to billionaire media._

* cowboys
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* Fences
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* cattle
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* water rights
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* Indigenous Rights
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* private property
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* land ownership
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* class
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* texas
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