Barbed Wire: The Fence That Changed the West

Before the mid-1800s, much of the American West was a vast expanse of open plains. Native tribes followed buffalo herds unimpeded for hundreds of miles, cowboys ran cattle wherever water and grass led them, and the cattleman�s Law of the Open Range ruled. All this changed when settlers pouring into the West under the Homestead Act of 1862 brought with them the Eastern farmer�s concept of fencing in farms. With the invention and mass production of barbed wire in the 1870s, it soon became pos...