Devil's Rope
On this day in 1874, barbed wire was patented, a seemingly insignificant event that dramatically changed the frontier.
An Illinois farmer, J.F. Glidden, invented it to keep wild animals off his private land. This inexpensive form of fencing appeared at the same time pioneers were settling the Great Plains. After farmers and ranchers erected thousands of miles of barbed wire fences, buffalo could no longer roam the prairies, and Indians could not hunt the few buffalo that remained. Free range ranchers and many concerned activists called barbed wire the "devil's rope" and called unsuccessfully for its removal. By the 1930s, poor agricultural practices combined with drought and high winds to create the disastrous Dust Bowl. In today's painting, barbed wire figures prominently.
In Dust Bowl, Oklahoma artist Alexandre Hogue shows the desolation that caused thousands of Midwestern families to abandon their farms in the 1930s. Several years of drought, combined with overgrazing and poor farming practices, had parched the earth throughout the Great Plains states. When unusually strong windstorms hit the area in the early 1930s, millions of tons of topsoil were blown away, and choking clouds of dust darkened the skies.
Source: Virginia Mecklenburg. Scenes of American Life: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).
Pictured: Alexandre Hogue, 1898–1994, Dust Bowl, 1933, oil, 24 x 33 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of International Business Machines Corporation.
On this day in 1874, barbed wire was patented, a seemingly insignificant event that dramatically changed the frontier.
An Illinois farmer, J.F. Glidden, invented it to keep wild animals off his private land. This inexpensive form of fencing appeared at the same time pioneers were settling the Great Plains. After farmers and ranchers erected thousands of miles of barbed wire fences, buffalo could no longer roam the prairies, and Indians could not hunt the few buffalo that remained. Free range ranchers and many concerned activists called barbed wire the "devil's rope" and called unsuccessfully for its removal. By the 1930s, poor agricultural practices combined with drought and high winds to create the disastrous Dust Bowl. In today's painting, barbed wire figures prominently.