darling, what is going on?

Number 4!

Midna’s Theme/Midna’s Desperate Hour from Twilight Princess was voted as the 4th most popular track from the LoZ series in my give away event!

Download this song

Ubisoft, remastering a 3 year old game instead:

Wrecking of fences was reported from more than half the Texas counties and was most common in a belt extending north and south through the center of the state, the ranchman’s frontier of 1883. Much of the cutting was done at night by armed bands who called themselves such names as Owls, Javelinas, or Blue Devils. Often those who destroyed fences left warnings against rebuilding, but these were usually disregarded. In some instances, pastures of the fencers were burned. Some owners defended their property, and at least three men were killed in clashes between fence cutters and ranchmen.

Source

Their sources: Hans Peter Nielsen Gammel, comp., Laws of Texas, 1822–1897 (10 vols., Austin: Gammel, 1898). Wayne Gard, “The Fence-Cutters,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 51 (July 1947). Roy D. Holt, “The Introduction of Barbed Wire into Texas and the Fence Cutting War,” West Texas Historical Association Year Book 6 (1930). Henry D. McCallum, “Barbed Wire in Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 61 (October 1957). Henry D. and Frances T. McCallum, The Wire That Fenced the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965). Vertical Files, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin (Barbed Wire).

Apparently this went on for at least a decade.

Originally people tried fencing methods like Osage orange hedgerows. The use of hedgerows has been used since the Neolithic age. They were used for windbreaks, to make misc boundaries, etc., but that was back in Britain. In the US, people started to use Osage orange trees/shrubs, because they’re thorny and tough SOBs native to the US, originating in Texas. Fun fact: when my dad used to make bows, he liked to use Osage orange wood, because it was especially strong while also staying bending. It was apparently named for the Osage people because even tho it was out of their usual territory (today’s Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma) they would travel out of their way to collect the wood.

But despite all the pros of Osage hedgerows, they took several years to grow, had to be grown properly to avoid gaps, and they were immovable and actually a PITA to get rid of.

So: barbed wire. AKA ‘the devil’s rope’. Cattle would break through smooth wire, but not this shit. Barbed wire enabled people to break up land that was otherwise a huge fucking plain (the Great Plains) where there were basically no trees and no natural structures to block off territory. You had rivers, basically. And a lot of grass.

Apparently there were a lot of different barbed wire design ideas.

What won out was a design by Joseph Glidden:

Patented Nov. 24, 1874.

Cattlemen were pissed not just because the vast open range was their livelihood and they needed to be able to move their cattle to graze and water them, but also because sometimes it would maim cattle, which they were not super happy about. There were some designs meant to make barbed wire more visible to cattle that obviously haven’t stuck around:

So, fence cutting wars. I found info for my first pic!

‘Settlers taking the law in their own hands cutting 15 miles of the Brichton (?) ranch fence in 1885. Copyright S. D. Butcher (?)’

Not sure what the last bit is, I wanna say it’s Kearney Nebraska? Charles agrees with my eyes. This is Kearney in 1888:

It was named for Fort Kearny (the 2nd e got added as a repeated typo apparently), where I’ve been a few times. The town was settled in 1871, when a couple filed a homestead claim (Source).

The big red spot is Kearney, located right on the Platte River, and right in the middle of the vast Open Range that was the Great Plains. Bonus fun fact: just about 45 minutes to the left of that red dot is Elm Creek, and the holding facility where I picked up my mustang.

‘The devil’s rope’ didn’t just spell an end to the open range, it was another harbinger of of doom for the buffalo population and the indigenous people that depended on them and whose overall way of life was intrinsically tied to the concept of the open range.

Also from the article

By the end of the century, the west was covered in “the devil’s rope,” And shortly thereafter, Europe would also be covered in it, but in a very different context. In World War I, barbed wire would become infamous in trench warfare; in World War II, barbed wire became the emblem of concentration camps.

Fun! But barbed wire fences also served to run telephone lines in rural communities, so farmers got to adopt the telephone early on.