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WarsEarlyDayCausedFencingBy JESSIE N. YARBROUGH Chairman, Coke CountyHistorical Survey CommitteeThe advent of barb wire had a tremendous impact on ranching activities in the area that was to become Coke County as well as in all West Texas.In about 1881, the first barb wire fence in the area was built. Up to this time the range in the Colorado-Concho area had been free, open range.Also, up to this time cattlemen considered that they owned their ranges by right of discovery or by locating at some watering place. It seems that cattlemen had respected each other’s 1‘range rights” until barb wire changed the picture.Realizing that “range rights” gave them only dubious claims to ownership, cattlemen began to purchase some land. The price of land was extremely cheap. Some ranchers bought huge tracts of land. Some others purchased tracts (some small and some larger) and then fenced in large tracts of free land with the purchased land. This was done to hold on to the land which they had held through “range rights until they could establish better claims — either by purchase or until a cowboy could ‘file on it, live it out, and prove up on it and then sell it to him.’* (Many trades were made in the Westwas known as “The Colorado and Concho Stock Association.”»Hot tempers in both the opposing factions flared to the point that they rivaled the heat of the brand-runner’s iron. Men became desperate. Pandemonium, in the literal senae of the word, broke out in the area that is now Coke County, a part of the area then known as the Countrys of the Conchos and the Colorado.Men organized wire-cutting mobs. It has been said that “politics make strange bed-fellows. That could be said of the wire-cutting mobs, which were sometimes composed of cattlemen who arere opposed to fencing, cowboys who hated barb wire fences,brand runners, “rustlers,” maverick hunters, just plain adventurers, and what-have-you.Several “old-timers” in interviews with this writer said that it was a common occurrence for a man to build a fence all day and find the wire cut to pieces and the posts pulled out of the ground when he returned to his work the next morning.Some farmers who attempted to fence their land or a water hole on their land had fences destroyed. L. B. Harris had forty miles of fence cut between every other post. The Odom family, who ranched in the area surrounding old Port Chadboume, had fences cut.Sweetwater.Mrs. Jack Miles, now deceased, told this writer that some men went to the Harris Ranch where her husband was foreman for many years. It was a very cold day, and her husband asked the men to have dinner with them. Soon after noon the men left. A-bout two o’clock in the afternoon, Jack decided to ride out into the pasture. “Jack rode right up on those men cutting fence while my good dinner was still warm in their stomachs,” she said.The Warren killing just about put a stop to fence cutting in the area. Only sporadic instances erf wire cutting occurred in the area after Ben Warren was killed. It is said, but this writer cannot vouch for the truth of it, that Ben Warren had posed as a wire cutter in order to “get the goods” on the mob that had been destroying fences in the Fort Chadboume area.An epoch-making result of fencing with barb wire: Barb wire brought the era of the Trail Driver and the Cattle Trails to a close. It was no longer possible to trail oattle to Northern cattle markets after the land was fenced; however this resulted in increased interest in railroads.JUNIOR BAND CHAIRS TOLD FOR FIRST SIX WEEKSBand director Russell Fuller
Newspaper Details
Bronte Enterprise
Bronte, Texas, US
Thu, Oct 12, 1967
Page 2
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TX, USA 13 Dec 2019
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