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Joe Glidden died 105 years ago, and
millions of cowboys in New Mexico would celebrate if they knew why,
and if there were really millions of cowboys in New Mexico, which
there aren’t.
Now while you’re parsing that sentence, let me explain that Joe
Glidden was a farmer in Illinois and his wife, his daughter and his
two sons all died before Joe was 38. In a fit of despondence, he
invented barbed wire. In 1874, in another fit of despondence, the
United States let him patent the darned stuff.
Depression is a terrible thing. Why else would a lonely farmer take
a perfectly good coffee grinder and teach it to wrap sharp points
around a piece of harmless, smooth wire, turning it into the bane of
every rancher’s and cowboy’s existence? So it was that, since 1874,
the West got fenced, and cowboys got torn up, and bluejeans had to
be made stiffer, and cowboys had to find wives so their shirts could
get mended, and some doctor had to invent tetanus shots.
So what happened to Joe Glidden after
he came up with barbed wire? Well, he remarried, was elected sheriff
of his county, became one of the richest men in the United States,
and eventually owned a 250,000-acre ranch in Texas, a hotel, a bank
and a newspaper.
Ain’t no justice in this world.
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The late Cleofes Ortiz, who was
declared an official state treasure here in New Mexico, used to play
old-time fiddle music for school children all over the state. This
maestro of Starvation Peak always used to wait for the inevitable
question to arise when one of the sharp-eyed kids would notice he
was missing the end of one of his fingers. His eyes would twinkle
and he’d tell the kids, “When I was a kid, we were too poor to buy
violin strings, so I had to use barbed wire.” [Text from file received from
Slim Randles]
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