Howdy and welcome to Wise About Texas, the Texas History podcast.

I'm your host, Ken Wise, and thank you very much for tuning in today for some Texas history.

Well, if you've spent any time in Texas, especially out in the country, you've run into

barbed wire, probably, literally. In fact, I'm not sure you can be a Texan before you get

stabbed trying to grab the wrong section of a barbed wire fence, and you darn sure can't call

yourself a Texan until you ruin that new work shirt or punch a hole in those wranglers trying to cross a fence.

In fact, I've hit one of those milestones of age where this early dove season, I walked an extra

hundred yards to a gate rather than try to cross a barbed wire fence. And by the way, that fence was

fairly new and very well built in my defense

so I had to go walk to the gate to get the bird because I wasn't willing to bleed for it

but there's a reason that there's so much barbed wire in Texas it's because it works

it keeps livestock in keeps trespassers out but it really is a fairly new invention. So let's take a look at how

the devil's rope came to be and get wise about Texas. We've all heard the phrase good fences

make good neighbors, and no doubt that's true.

And in some cases, that's especially true.

And to start any discussion about a fence, you've got to talk about a little bit about property law.

The United States adopted English property law, and therefore Texas has English property law and the essence of that property law

is exclusive use. In other words, the right to keep people out of your land. You have the right to

use your land however you want to use it. Well, how do you enforce that? You enforce it with a

fence. Now, there's an interesting twist to that because the fences, the barbed wire fences

that we're going to talk about served two primary purposes when it was invented. One was to protect crops from invading livestock,

and the other was to keep livestock in their designated area and out of public spaces or the

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