Welcome to the Engines of Texan. Episode 6, the Iron Horse. I'm Brandon C.

21-year-old John Warren Gates came to San Antonio for the first time in 1876, when San Antonio had already been the center of the region's ranching culture for 150 years.

But San Antonio's stockmen in 1876 were still open-range stockmen, rounding up their cattle when they could, but otherwise leaving them turned out in the general vicinity of their ranches when they couldn't.

Losses to theft, appropriation, and honest just wandering off were probably pretty high

because fences were unheard of because fences were expensive.

Split rail and dry stacked stone fences were time-consuming to deploy and expensive to maintain.

And in the land of the South Texas scrub brush, most landowners were lucky to even have a corral.

But when John Gates rode into San Antonio in 1876, he brought with him an innovation that would transform the Texas landscape.

He brought with him a spool of drawn wire the Texas landscape. He brought with him a

spool of drawn wire, of twin wires actually, intertwined with each other and with little barbs woven

in between. This invention was in Gates's words, quote, light as air, stronger than whiskey, and

cheap as dirt, end quote. And Gates set out to prove it.

Gates went out into Military Plaza, which was empty at the time,

and strung up several strands of this barbed wire between trees or posts or some buildings or something.

It's unclear to me what he anchored them to,

only that the wire was nearly invisible to the growing crowd of onlookers,

other than the sunlight glinting off the little barbs every few inches.

Gates then led a herd of famously ornery Texas Longhorn cattle into his makeshift corral,

closed them in, and then started getting them worked up.

He and a helper whooped and hollered and slapped the ground with their handkerchiefs

as the puzzled longhorns tried to move away.

Only the longhorns started to realize that they couldn't escape.

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