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Short Stuff: Barbed Wire · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh Clark,
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's guest producer Dave Coustan
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: over there, and um, this is short stuff, So get up,
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: get e up, literally, because we're gonna go back to
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: the Old West, the root and two. In Old West,
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: we're jumping in the old way back machine. We're going
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: to eighteen seventy six, like Back to the Future three.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: That's right. The movie I only saw once. That's all
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: you need. Uh. Some people love those. I didn't like
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: the sequels, but we don't have time for that. I
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: never saw the second one. Okay, go you skipped you
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: did one in three? Yeah? How interesting? Yeah, I like
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: odd numbers. Uh. So it's eighteen seventy six. And there
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: we're in San Antonio, Texas. Yep, there's no basement in
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: the Alamo. There's not. And the Alamo is quite tiny,
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: actually it really is. It's like the Mona Lisa of buildings,
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: that's right, or the Josh and Chuck of podcasters. People
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: don't know. We're only two ft tall. So, uh. We're
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: looking upon a scene. We're at a ranch and there's
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: a man over there named John Warren Gates, and he
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: is they call him bet a million Gates, And we
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: have just thrown some money down on a bet of
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: whether or not this little wire pin he has can
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: hold in these bulls and cows and horses and these
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: crazy longhorn steers. And my money is on no way, Gates,
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: no way, that little wire is going to hold these
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  Speaker 1: animals in. Yeah. And I mean we put a significant
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: amount of money down because we just printed it ourselves,
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: because it's eighteen seventies six in the Old West, and
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: you can do that right, hundred semolians. But I bet
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: against him as well, Chuck. And the reason why is
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: because it's just a little a little couple of things
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: of wire with some barbs on it, and these are
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: some angry steers. And what's more, he has a gaucho
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: assistant wearing in Spanish at these um these cows and uh,
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: trying to get them riled up and buy goodness, we
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: just lost our bet, you know. But it was quite
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: a party, and we're hammered and we're gonna go back
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: to our canvas tent and sweat I ate the worm.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: So here's the deal. That story may or not be
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: not true. May or be not true. Mayor be not
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: true your mayor. That's right. I'm glad we leave stuff
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: like this in. Yeah, that's what makes this us so. Uh,
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: we don't know if that's all true or not. It's
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: a great story, that's for sure. But what is super
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: true is that bed a million Gates was trying to
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: drum up some early press for this new fence made
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: by a man named Joseph Glidden that uh, the Native
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: Americans called, well, some people called the thorny fences. The
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: Native Americans called it what the devil's rope because they
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: didn't like it. But we just call it barbed wire. Yep,
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: barbed wire and um, and so Joseph Glyndon didn't invent
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: that stuff, although he did have a patent on what
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: we When you look at barbed wire, what you're looking
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: at is the variety that Joseph Glinden came up with,
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: But there are plenty of people who came up with
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: their own version prior to him. And I was looking
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: at like this list of them with pictures. Some of
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: those are just vicious looks like that. Um, they're basically
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: like cut up razor blades stuck in wire. I mean,
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: just horrible stuff. But what Glinton did was he took
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: a barb and he twisted it around a wire, and
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: then he added a second wire, just a plain wire
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  Speaker 1: to twisted around the first wire to hold the barb
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  Speaker 1: in place, keep it from sliding. But even more important
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: than that, because it's pretty simple, and somebody probably would
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: have come up with that sooner or later, was he
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  Speaker 1: patented it, and he invented a method of um producing it,
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  Speaker 1: mass producing it. And brother, did he mass produce it? Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: I mean before he he very brilliantly decided to keep
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: those barbs in place, which was the key. Those cows
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: would just go up and hoof of them over to
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: the side and slip right on through and sneak out
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: to the skating rink because they are cows are well
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  Speaker 1: known as being among the smartest animals. Yes, and their
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  Speaker 1: hoofs are you know, they can do very fine detailed work,
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  Speaker 1: like an abacus work. That's right, So I believe before
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  Speaker 1: my dumb jokes, you were saying how much he was
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: pumping this wire out by eight his factory into cab, Illinois.
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  Speaker 1: We're turning out two hundred and sixty three thousand miles
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  Speaker 1: of wire. Yes, and chuck, that is enough to circle
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  Speaker 1: the Earth ten times over max. That's a trillion big
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  Speaker 1: max stacked and yeah, and this was a big deal.
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  Speaker 1: It wasn't just like, oh, he invented He invented some
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: stuff and it helped keep some cows in and now
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: we all use it and it's pretty neat. Like this
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: changed the face of the American West, along with other stuff,
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: but it had had a big impact on the foundation
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: and settling of the American West. Yeah, I mean at
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: least as much as like the locomotive, the telegraph. Um Like,
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: it was an enormous invention, especially for something so simple
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  Speaker 1: barbed wire. It's extremely simple. But up to this point,
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  Speaker 1: the Native Americans had been um living nomadic existences, hunting,
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: buffalo um, just basically moving around the Great Plains and
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: the prairie for basically fifteen thousand years. Uh, Like European
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  Speaker 1: ancestry whites had showed up, but the first ones that
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: showed up basically said, Hey, I think this is I
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: think you guys are onto something. I'm gonna embrace this
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  Speaker 1: kind of free range stuff and I'm bringing cattle and
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: sheep and all sorts of other animals but I'm not
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  Speaker 1: gonna I'm just gonna let them just graze warever and
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: just move them around as the weather permits. And that
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  Speaker 1: worked okay. But when barbed wire came along, all of
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  Speaker 1: a sudden, these open, enormous, vast expanses suddenly became closed off.
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  Speaker 1: And what used to just be common property that belonged
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  Speaker 1: to everyone and no one, suddenly huge slices of it
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  Speaker 1: were being um fenced off, literally, and that changed tens
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: of thousands of years of tradition in ten years maybe less. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: And here's the thing. It's not like this was the
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: first fence. In the West. There were you know, they
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: could build wood fences, but in the Prairie States they
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: didn't have a ton of lumber. Uh, there weren't trees everywhere.
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  Speaker 1: Wooden fences are super expensive, rock and stone walls like
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: are you kidding me to do for a whole farm?
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  Speaker 1: Super expensive and also scarce. But what barbed wire did
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: is it democratized it and made it super cheap or
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: relatively cheap, I guess, compared to the other things, and
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: easy and fast to say this is my area and
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: you're not coming in, and these cows aren't getting out. Yeah,
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: and we'll we'll talk about how that changed the nuts
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: and bolts of it. Right after this, so chuck. When
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: people started putting up these fences, not everybody was on
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: board with this. The Native Americans didn't like it, like
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: you said, They called the barbed wire devil rope the
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: old timey cowboys. Um, they didn't like it because they
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: embraced free range practices and all of a sudden, they're
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: cattle were getting caught up in this stuff. Because part
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: of the problem with barbed wires not only did it
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: keep stuff in, it kept stuff out, and so you
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: could get tangled up in it either way. And the
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: cattle that were used to just kind of roaming around
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  Speaker 1: free range will get caught in this stuff and would
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: die of starvation infections. Um, they just get stuck in
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: the fence. It would never move again for the rest
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: of their lives, the rest of their short lives. Well, yeah,
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: and consider the Homestead Act. President Abraham Lincoln signed this
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: in eighteen sixty two that said, hey, are you an
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: honest citizen of the US. You can be a freed slave,
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  Speaker 1: you can be a woman. You can go claim up
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  Speaker 1: to a hundred and sixty acres of land out there
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  Speaker 1: in the west. Just build a house, work that land
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: for five years. So all of a sudden, there's a
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  Speaker 1: lot of people you talked about, the Native Americans ranging around.
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  Speaker 1: Imagine your tribe, riding your horses to where you want
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  Speaker 1: to go, and all of a sudden you're like, well,
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  Speaker 1: here's a hundred and sixty acre fence that I now
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: have to drive around right. Drive, yeah, yeah, you just
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: a cattle drive okay, drive your horse right, all right.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: I sounded like a city slicker there for a second.
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  Speaker 1: But in the same way, you accidentally stumbled into the
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: proper termin knowledge. And that's right. But you know, like
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: we said, these European cowboys, the Native Americans, they're used
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: to this free range, and all of a sudden, these
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: homesteading farmers, a lot of whom were European. They were
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: staking their claim to property. Uh, sometimes legally, sometimes illegally, right,
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  Speaker 1: But the result was the same. Man, if you put
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  Speaker 1: up these fences, whether that was your land or it
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  Speaker 1: was actually like common land, um, you were claiming it
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  Speaker 1: as your own. And if you had a gun and
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  Speaker 1: a rifle and some hired hands, you could defend that
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  Speaker 1: land that was really common property. But you claimed for
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: your own and so the for all intents and purposes,
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  Speaker 1: it was your land now. And this had an extensive
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  Speaker 1: domino effect where the free range cowboys and Native Americans
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  Speaker 1: UM lost that common grazing area. It got smaller and smaller.
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  Speaker 1: And so as the grazing land became more and more concentrated,
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  Speaker 1: there are more and more people, UM whose herds were
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  Speaker 1: eating off of less and less land, and so it
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  Speaker 1: no longer became a viable existence free range. And then
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: if you were a smaller landowner, you would have your
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: land encroached on by these larger landowners. Probably some guys
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: would show up with a gun and be like czar
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: heard now. And so all of this UM. The the
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: upshot of all this is that the people who had
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: the most land ended up taking over even more land,
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  Speaker 1: and just a handful of people got the American West
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: concentrated into their hands. That's right. So, which is kind
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: of the history of America in a lot of ways.
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  Speaker 1: It's still going on today. I mean, think about when
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: like Home Depot or Lows shows up in town. The
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: hardware store goes out of business, and the people who
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: used to work there now work at Lows. Or home depot.
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: So there were plenty of disputes. This was the Old West.
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  Speaker 1: Plenty of them involved this fights and guns. But there
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: were actual gangs. There was gangs called the Blue Devils
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: or the have Alina's, and they were called fence cutting wars.
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  Speaker 1: They would go in and the dead of night or
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  Speaker 1: maybe in broad daylight, even if they were brazen and
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: well armed, and they would cut these wires and they
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: would leave messages and threats saying don't rebuild the stuff.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: There were shootouts, there were people that were killed in
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: these fence cutting wars. Authorities eventually stepped in were like,
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: you know, the West, it needs to be a little
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: less wild, uh. And those wars ended, but the barbed
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: wire endured. It did. And I mean, you know, when
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: you think of the barbed wire, you think of the
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: Old West, but you also nowadays think of you know,
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: barb barbed wire stretching from Switzerland to the English Channel
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: in World War One, or wire uh uh um barbed
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: wire around um prisons. UM W. H. Olden wrote a
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: poem about it. He said that um barbed wire proclaims
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: that you are kept out or kept in, and when
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: you resist, it ripped you other barriers weather, crumble, grow, moss.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: Wire merely rusts and keeps its sting, which reading which
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: doesn't doesn't really it doesn't rhyme, but it's still pretty good. Yeah,
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: I mean the military has been using it since Teddy
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: Roosevelt used it. Certainly world War One, it was used
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: as a weapon. And uh, yeah, any any prison movie
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  Speaker 1: you're ever gonna see, you're gonna see a formidable coiled
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: strip of razor wire around the top of those fences.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: It's like an extra silent character in most movies, right,
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: especially You've got mail. Oh that was from the last episode. Right. Uh,
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: If you want to know more about barbed wire, we'll
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: just start walking and fella, you're bound to wander into
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: it sooner or later. Just brings some antibiotics because you're
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: going to get an infection. And since I said that,
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: that's the end of the episode, and since it's a
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: short stuff, that means that short stuff it's over. Stuff
• 12:50
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• 12:52
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